I think overlay might be better cuz I wanna keep the gold bits and only change the white bits
Give me a try, need to ZIP file
help.zip (1005.7 KB)
Why *.ZIP - forum makes all colors black when they are transparent.
Add me on discord, my username is rosariadev
Discord is sanctioned in my country.
(Also, ZIP is added to previous message)
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Wait wtf, how did you do that? It works
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I inverted colors alpha channel, preserving their original colors.
Honestly it’s pain to work with images like this, when 90% of it is just invisible.
It would make more sense if inverted alpha scheme used - what visible in editors - visible in roblox too.
So, basically… keep all my colours, and then make the ones I want to change transparent? I’m guessing the image stores that data somehow?
YesNot a bit, vise versa - what you want to change you need to keep visible, what you want to not change - make transparent.
As I said, MOST of image editors for the sake of good memory management decide to vanish such transparent pixels colors, with some exceptions.
Pixels use 4 channels: Red, Green, Blue, Alpha.
3 Likes
Wahoo! This is a super useful feature and I’m glad we finally have it!
Can we have support for more texture types such as ARM?
ARM textures combine occlusion, roughness and metallic into one texture which reduces memory usage, requires less texture samplers and is also beneficial since we need to upload less images to use it.
Generally, I think it would be extremely useful if we could put lots of information into a single image and then choose what each R, G, B and A channel represents.
It’s a functionality that would be extremely useful, I keep textures combined on my computer but always have to manually separate all color channels before uploading which is extra work + I can’t use the best optimizations because everything is a separate texture that possibly needs it’s own sampler and memory.
Please give us an update on the timeline for Emissive textures in SurfaceAppearance/MaterialVariant
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Much longer than 2 months. Too busy releasing AI slop features because roblox has no idea what we want nor do they really care.
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Also, if considering Emission maps, please make them a new image slot rather than reusing the alpha, as we need emissions at the same time as transparency.
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This is how roblox handles PBR materials internally, actually! It takes all of the textures you provide and crams them into the RGBA channels of a smaller number of textures. It’s also probably why this feature was put into the ColorMap alpha channel and why we haven’t gotten a separate emission map yet - with the current state of things they’d have to add an entire additional texture to every single SurfaceAppearance/MaterialVariant’s TextureMap to fit the new channel(s) in.
2 Likes
This is a step in the right direction. It’s understandable why height maps and other important maps are not implemented (texture atlas packing and reducing memory usage) but it’s very frustrating having to find less-efficient and significantly less performant alternatives to replicate the rest of the maps. It would be really nice if atlas packing was a toggleable game setting that if toggled off, would allow the use of all the other texture maps.
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It is a pretty cool optimization!
I just wish we could do more of these things ourselves too.
I already have ARM textures on my computer and to upload them I have to split them first, upload (and have them be moderated) separately only for the game engine to then put it back together again.
Plus I though the additional option of being able to choose what channel is used for what property is nice in case you have textures that don’t follow the typical Occlusion > Roughness > Metallic format.
Roblox doesn’t use ambient occlusion textures if I remember so the red channel and alpha channel are both effectively empty/unused and if I had more low-level access then I could use those channels for something else like a tint mask or emission.
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Any plans to make it so for each new build we start or project we can have access to previous custom materials that we have made?
Im currently building a project, working on 2 separate maps interchanging between to keep my mind from getting too bored or tired of working on the same thing over and over. The two maps/builds are part of the same project so materials carry over.
Currently that I know of there is no way to just access any custom materials without reimporting and making new variants again.
Also if so please allow it to be done WITHOUT needed to publish the place its self to roblox I like to keep most of my builds etc saved only locally on my PC.
If there is a way please let me know, it would help a lot.
When opening that post I was expecting to see a long needed feature…
Just to get disappointed with an awful implementation that basicaly kills any useful usecases for me personaly.
First of all, as many pointed above, this feature is much more needed for custom materials rather than surfaceappereances, and it should be super obvious why? (Spoiler alert: they get recolored way more often!!!), so there goes roughly half of the use cases this feature would flurish in.
Now, another thing this feature is needed for is vegetation. Currently, its tricky to create tweakable textures for the trees. You either need to make branch part of the texture very dark, or just to deal with the fact that your branches get recolored with the rest of the trees. Maybe you could also dublicate the leafmesh and setup 2 different textures, yet that would cause performance drawbacks, so this is where you would think that this new Tint"Mask" would come and save the day…
…But no, it won’t help you because of the way its implemented kills any possibility of transparency difference on the texture. Unlike Transparency mode, or overlay mode (which requiers meshpart itself have a slight transparency), the new Tint"Mask" mode just won’t let you have it at all, no matter how transparent meshpart itself is, it won’t hide the transparent areas of the color map.
Maybe for materials such implementation would have been ok. Obviously, a way better approach is to add a seperate tintmap rather than to resort to such unorthodox ways, tho it still would work, since they don’t really requiere transparency in the first place. But when it comes to meshes, its just absolutely horrible and unproffesional. If roblox really looks upon creating a powerful game creational software, it does a really bad job at it with approaches like that. I understand that top priority of roblox is optimisation, but that shouldn’t be used as an excuse to neglect small, yet very important features and details, since its far not the first case of a very good feature being trashed with poor implementation, (e.g: lack of more grass/foliage variety control which makes it impossible to place it on other materials; lack of randomized texture offset on materials, which makes builds with custom tiled materials, like bricks, have unnatural and repetetive patterns).
My personal speculation is that this feature is not made with an intent to improve developer experience, but as a part of some layered clothing update that is yet to come.
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who thought making this a alpha mode was a good idea ?? just make it its own property, also give us emission maps already !!!
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