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; generating a shader based on the compressed representation that is configured to be implemented with a rendering engine; and generating a set of shader data based on the compressed representation that includes a set of material characteristics for coloring pixels of the visual representation.