Shader Baking in Unity
Bake a pretty - or computationally challenging - shader into a texture in Unity.
Check out this medium article for a more detailed explanation of the technique, and other related projects here.
Description
Texture baking is very common technique in computer graphics to transfer the details of your shader into a texture. This is useful if you're shader is computationally heavy, but produces a static result ( complex noises ). Many modeling applications have this functionality down. If you have a pipeline of transferring assets from Blender/Houdini/Maya, then you may want to do the texture baking there.
However, if you primarily work out of Unity, this repo is for you. With this technique, you can effectively save a custom shader's results that were manipulated in real-time, and use the generated texture in any another application with a default shader ( Sketchfab? etc. ) .
Usage
Open the Shader Baker scene in the Unity project, and press play. Press the 'M' Key to bake the current shader values into a texture.
Pointers if you want to dig in and use this for your own projects:
Shaders/FractalNoiseUnwrap.shader - this shader is a duplicate of the one you want to bake, except with the vertex shader modified to render the vertices in UV space.
Shaders/Dilate.shader - this shader is responsible for the dilation post processing of the output texture.
Scripts/ShaderBaker.cs - attach this script to the camera, it is responsible for rendering the mesh to a texture. It has public fields where you should place the object you want to bake, a material with the unwrapped version of the shader you want to bake (FractalNoiseUnwrap.shader in this case), and a material with the dilate shader (Dilate.shader). You should also set the backgroundColor property to be a color that is distinct from the colors in your shader.