Saving the texture of the MeshRenderer

[glass sedge]

Hey guy, I have a project about procedural generation. I am having problem with saving the color of the mesh in builded app. Here some general info. I have a Plane that have MeshFilter component (i have caculated normal,uv, vertices and triangles and able to save it as .obj so no problem here), and a MeshRenderer Component that use have a Material assign to it. The Material that i assign using a cumstom shader. And the shader logic mainly about set the o.Albedo value in the void surf(). So when the app running, the shader receive some stuff and set the o.Albedo of the Material and since the Material assign to the MeshRenderer, the Plane have color on it. What i want is a way to save the texture of the mesh. PLS Help i find help everywhere but doesn't get what i want or no reply.
If you want anymore info i will provide to you.

[fiery fjord]

if you are doing anything to the final pixel color on the shader to "save" that would require baking it, which is complex but doable, if you really, really need it, there is a way to do it without third party assets

in essence you have to first unwrap the mesh onto a uv plane, so you take all the vertices of each triangle and flatten them out by using their corresponding uv coordinates, then you take a picture of that with a camera

there is zero guarantee that the result will be anything close to what it looks in 3d because you will lose all the lighting information, but if its unlit and only color it will work

there are probably assets that bake

https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/total-baker-118159

yeah theres a lot of them

search for texture bake / material bake / shader bake

can check github as well

[glass sedge]

Thanks you for reply, i don't know much about baking but the method of capture it with a camera have been metion by some people. Since i have no choice so this is not a bad idea but how can i achive it? i using perlin noise to generate a height map and set it value to y value of the mesh.vertices so to flatten the mesh all i need to set it to 1 or 0 (i will give the pictue of the mesh). So how can i get the color of it with the method you mention above?

and i can't afford paid third party asset

[fiery fjord]

1. create a RenderTexture of desired resolution
2. create a camera, set its output to this render texture
3. position the camera perfectly above the plane
4. use Camera.Render() api to capture it into the render texture
5. save the rendertexture https://answers.unity.com/questions/37134/is-it-possible-to-save-rendertextures-into-png-fil.html

lol i feel like chatgpt

[glass sedge]

3. this step trouble me the most. My mesh have different size so how can i position the camera to fit the mesh perfectly ?

[fiery fjord]

math