Want to improve the quality of your graphics AND improve performance as well?

VertexForge computes the mesh maps you'd normally bake to textures (AO, curvature, thickness, gradients, noise and more) and writes them straight into your static mesh's RGBA vertex colors. Pick a map per channel, hit Bake, read the data back in any material.

Why? Because effects like gradient tints, moss or snow coverage, AO darkening and wind weights are usually built from shader math — noise nodes, world-position ramps, per-pixel masks, etc. which can get expensive fast. By baking them into vertex colours we basically get them for free with no additional runtime cost, great for games where performance is critical!

VertexForge does it in one click, on every LOD, the same way every time.

Why not Unreal's built-in vertex color bake?
Modeling Mode can bake vertex colors, but:

• a few map types — vs eight here, freely packed into RGBA

• LOD0 only — vs consistent colors on every LOD

• assets only — vs per-instance bakes on selected actors, world-aligned

• one mesh at a time — vs presets, folder batches and a CI commandlet

Bake maps

• Ambient Occlusion — cavity and contact darkening

• Curvature — convex or concave edge emphasis

• Thickness — inside-volume distance for subsurface masks

• Gradient — axis or radial ramp, optionally normalized to one material slot (leaves-only ramps)

• Directional — moss and snow on up-facing surfaces

• Sky Visibility — bent-normal openness to the sky

• Noise — Perlin, ridged, billow, Voronoi; world-aligned across modular kits, no seams

• Random Per Element — one value per grass blade or leaf card, with a min/max band

Per channel
Any map in any channel, each with its own material slot mask, invert, contrast and merge mode. The R/G/B/A checkboxes re-bake only what you changed — iterate one channel on a 4 million poly mesh without recomputing the rest.

Preview
Live viewport with channel isolation, heatmap, auto-range and a min/max/mean readout. Invert Channel flips baked colors instantly, no re-bake.

Instances & pipeline
Bake into the asset, or into per-instance override colors on selected actors (respects rotation and scale). Every bake stores its recipe on the mesh for one-click re-bakes; save presets, batch from the Content Browser.

Works with Nanite/Non-Nanite meshes!