Can you bake materials (not textures) in Blender?

Question

I have a question about materials in Blender. Can you bake them? I know you can bake textures but can you bake materials you get after combining multiple nodes in Blender?

Do I need to create a texture from material?

I've tried to bake materials but it doesn't work how texture baking works.

I'm using glass material and I want it to behave like a glass when I bake it but it does not.

This is the node setup without the image texture node with bake texture in it.

This is the result I get which is not good for me because I need it to behave like the material in the Blender (like a foggy glass)

I've been looking for answers for 2 days now and everybody is talking about baking textures from image textures which I know how to do but nobody is talking about node materials being baked.

If anybody knows how to fix this or if it is possible at all can you please share. If it is not possible does anyone knows how they do the glass in games? What material or texture they use in a game engine?

Answer 1

You cannot bake the "node tree" itself to use it directly in the shader node editor of another program like Unity, Unreal engine or Substance painter.

But you can bake the resulting maps (albedo, roughness, metallic, alpha value...) and then apply them in another software as if they were regular textures.

See : for texture baking How do I bake a texture using Cycles bake