1. A method for generating a shader that is used by a rendering engine to render a visual representation of a computer model, the method comprising: receiving a set of surface data that describes a surface in view of various lighting conditions; compressing the set of surface data to generate a compressed representation of the set of surface data based on a selected compression algorithm; selecting a rendering engine; generating a shader based on the rendering engine, the selected compression algorithm, and the compressed representation of the set of surface data; and generating a set of shader data, via the shader, based on the compressed representation, wherein the shader data includes a set of material characteristics for coloring pixels of the visual representation.