As a Roblox developer, it is currently hard to create avatar items that respond to lighting in a realistic way; this is particularly an issue with Rigid Accessories. A large contributing factor to this problem is one of the current Marketplace Requirements that dictate if you can upload a rigid accessory to the marketplace or not; currently, you can only upload accessories that use the Plastic material. The plastic material gives every accessory a shiny appearance, meaning it is difficult to create accessories that would have a more matte surface in the real world.
My request is that Roblox update the Marketplace Requirements (and therefore, the UGC validator in Studio) to allow an expanded selection of Materials to be utilized when uploading a rigid accessory to the Marketplace. A wider selection of Materials would allow creators to create items that interact more realistically with lighting across experiences (for example, fabric hats using the more matte Fabric material, or a metallic tin pot using the shiny Metal material).
One reason to expand the selection of Materials that can be used for UGC items is that SurfaceAppearance support for rigid accessories is seemingly on indefinite hold due to the additional strain that the additional texture sets could cause on low end devices. Allowing UGC creators to utilize a limited selection of additional Materials would allow creators to create more realistic items while minimizing the impact on performance, because accessories would be using a standardized set of materials already utilized in most experiences.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would be able to create higher quality avatar items that interact with light more realistically. I feel that the entire UGC Marketplace ecosystem would benefit from the increase in quality of accessories that can be created, and as a creator, I would be really excited with all of the new possibilities for accessories that could be created using the new set of allowed Materials.
Seeing the difference between the plastic and fabric hat in the first image just made me realize something we’ve been missing for a long time. However, there’s one glaring issue that come’s to mind:
Unfortunately, this means that static accessories with materials other than plastic or smoothplastic (which are basically universal across both versions) will look different depending on the place. This can mean huge changes in colors, response to lighting and more which might suck for UGC creators.
The MaterialService property they are referring to is a property that globally affects how materials look across all parts of an experience. This isn’t just the case of there needing to be two versions of the accessory but rather that there’d need to be a workaround implemented to allow old/new materials to only impact certain parts.
I will say that Glass, Forcefield, and Neon (possibly maybe even CrackedLava?) should probably still be off-limits; they react very differently in certain situations:
Glass: Hides some game-elements behind it if it is made translucent. Some games may make use of translucent player characters so this is a possible scenario.
Forcefield: Renders as transparent with a pulsating pattern based on the texture.
Neon: Well- it’s neon and can be very bright if the textures are removed by a developer for some reason or another.
CrackedLava: Apparently, this material is emissive. I’m not sure if that could be abused, but I thought I’d point this out anyway.
Also, just to jump in and say that metallic accessories could also be a double-edged sword; it won’t work well in any game which changes EnvironmentSpecularScale from 1 (in a worst-case of EnvironmentSpecularScale == 0 it will render without being metallic at all) and will regularly shift in color depending on the environment and whether that environment is considered indoors or outdoors.
Definitely agree in restricting the allowed materials, especially to exclude the use of Forcefield and the other few you mentioned, and the concern with the possible discrepancies Metal materials can have between different experiences. Personally, the use case I see myself using most would be using more matte Materials like Fabric / Concrete when creating accessories.
Just to add a little something outside of the main body of my post, I wonder if it would be possible for Roblox to add a set of very low resolution Materials intended exclusively for use with UGC accessories that just include roughness and metalness maps. Essentially, they’d just be used to give your textured accessories a more matte or reflective look.
Yeah, this is something that didn’t exactly occur to me when writing up this feature request. In a previous reply, I mentioned the idea of Roblox creating a couple of new ultra low resolution materials exclusively intended for use with UGC accessories, perhaps this could be a decent solve for the discrepancies between the old and modern materials.
One solution I can think of is that Roblox adds two (or more) “hidden” materials in all places, such as:
UGC_Matte
UGC_Glossy
UGC_UltraGlossy etc.
So all existing static accessories will use plastic with no change, but future UGC has the option to pick one of the exclusive UGC materials that will appear universally in all games.
