Skip to content

Performance Guide: Managing Procedural Speed & Renders

Why are Procedural Materials Slowing Down My Viewport/Renders?

This guide explains the nature of procedural performance and the correct workflow for optimizing materials within the Sanctus ecosystem.

1. Understanding Procedural Performance

It is common to experience slowdowns with high-fidelity procedural materials. Here's why:

  • Real-Time Calculation: Unlike static PBR image textures (which are pre-calculated), procedural materials offer infinite resolution and total flexibility because Blender calculates the detail (wear, rust, wood grain, etc.) in real-time every single frame.
  • High Processing Cost: This real-time calculation is computationally expensive, especially on complex surfaces or when using high-detail settings, leading to slow viewport updates and extended render times.
  • The Trade-Off: The price of flexibility and infinite detail is the increased processing time required to generate that detail.

2. The Solution: Optimizing with Sanctus Bake

The key to achieving both speed and flexibility is to utilize the Sanctus Bake Addon once you have finalized your material's parameters.

Sanctus Bake

The Sanctus Bake Addon drastically improves render times and viewport performance by baking procedural materials to static PBR image textures.

What You Need:

The Sanctus Bake Addon is included with Sanctus Library (even the free version) and Sanctus Viz. Ensure you have one of these installed to access the tool.

The Efficient Workflow:

  1. Customize: Use the exposed parameters in your procedural material to achieve the exact look you need (adjust color, roughness, scale, etc.).
  2. Bake: Use the Sanctus Bake Addon to quickly convert the finalized procedural material into static, high-speed PBR image texture maps (Albedo, Roughness, Normal, etc.).
  3. Optimize: These new static image maps eliminate the real-time calculation cost.

Benefits of Baking:

  • Dramatically faster render times.
  • Significantly improved viewport performance.
  • A streamlined workflow that prevents the long wait times of standard Blender baking.

By baking your finished procedural materials, you get the final look and flexibility of procedural design with the speed of traditional PBR image textures.

Kroki