Excellent ! everybody is happy but me !;) The thread is about TEXTURES and the answers are about POLYGONS... If you 'bake an object to polygons'(useful when you have a boolean), as agiel said you get a single obj much easier to manage ... BUT the textures remain procedural (the different textures remain) so : that doesn't help if the flickering in the animation comes from the textures being too complex . To 'Bake the texture' that is, to transform them in a mapped texture (simpler to compute), you have to File/ export the object and check the needed options : create color map, create bump map etc...

on the pict attached, the left obj is a 'Baked to polygons' boolean diff (the two textures are still procedural), the right one is the same obj exported and reimported it has now a single mapped texture...

Now isn't it a fine way to make oneself popular ? :-)))