Now I’m sure some of you have been less than overwhelmed with those textures ROBLOX gave us for voxel terrain, and currently there is no option for a ROBLOX developer to change a texture like that. What I’m suggesting here is being able to customize/change those textures in a specific properties panel for that type of material. This would be quite useful in some cases for realism, where higher definition grass textures would be needed, or for a custom water/liquid texture. This would be similar to the current custom texture panel for parts. there are many other uses for these, too many to list.
Even just the ability to change the colours of it would be great, since the only way to kind of do it is to change the lighting which also messes with other stuff too.
while i’m all in for custom textures, i’d like to know how you want to pull that off. From my understanding water is a series of normal maps going through an animated loop.
Well, I’d probably suggest using the same format as the other things suggested, but for the properties panel on the water voxel, there could be multiple “layers” or maps that you can change, creating the water voxel itself, as you stated. Considering it probably uses multiple normal maps, it wouldn’t be too hard to get some decals or textureID’s entered to look like dirty water or some other liquid (molten lava). Now I’m not suggesting custom animations, just custom textures, so the animations wouldn’t be an open feature to change. Although I’m not sure if the textures would be affected at all by the animations or not.
I believe I suggested something like this to zeuxcg at RDC (well, specifically Lava), so the capability is there (I think) but the demand is fairly low
I still have a build zuexcg handed out that allows you to make custom terrain textures.I Never could get it to work though, I’d get as far as getting the map of textures compiled with the program you run along side it, but when it’d never load up into studio or break the rendering of the diffuse maps. I tried getting it to work again recently following the instructions as closely as possible and had the same results.:T
I think I mentioned this briefly in the smooth terrain roadmap poll - there are some technical issues that make it very hard/impossible currently to fetch terrain textures as assets. There is some amount of general texture work that blocks it (ability to download textures compressed in a platform-specific format - terrain textures are large in size but small in memory because they use it aggressively), and once that’s done we’ll have to figure out how to solve some of the terrain specific issues for this.
We will however be exploring color customization in the near term.