I’ve spent a decent amount of time today trying to figure out how to get those neat effects out of the force field material, and its starting to drive me mad how there are no tutorials or documentation about how to do this.
It’d be nice to get some documentation about this new material with ALL of its functionality.
in the meantime, could someone explain to me how to use it? I heard it has something to do with textures and the R-value of the color in the texture?
Can you show an example do what you mean? It’s kinda hard to say exactly what you are trying to aim for, what kinda if designs colors, and textures?
Stuff like this:
https://gfycat.com/edibleseveralgalapagosmockingbird
https://twitter.com/i/status/1128871826405380097
The first known effects I could think of was using the RGB, fading between red and green on textures. However, I do not understand what effects blue actually do if applied on the texture.
The most I was able to get out of the forcefield material was a cool glowy effect if you put it between a set of bricks. You also get some colour revealing depending on how you face your camera. Other than that, I have no idea how to work it either.
pretty sure they still have it marked as deprecated
I don’t think they are done working on it yet as it doesn’t work on meshparts
The twitter threads were right - the key is the R channel of the texture. I did some experimentation of my own after seeing CloneTrooper’s tweet and texture, and ended up with the following results.
I guess I’ll start at the beginning. Adding a specialmesh to a basepart, setting it’s material to forcefield and it’s texture to a valid id, creates a shimmering effect, based on the textures red channel. It does work on any texture, you just need to use a specialmesh with any meshid for the effect to work. That does include transferring the meshid from meshparts - you won’t get good collisions but it will look cool.
A color wheel is a handy visualization tool for the effect:
So a gradient from cyan to red gives you a linear motion from one to the other:
Throw the gradient behind some shapes, and you get patterns like the shimmer or hexagons:
https://i.gyazo.com/eaf1e435909af366ec21477d84ab675e.gif
One thing to note - 100% alpha does flash occasionally, so use black for non-illuminated portions of the texture as seen in the hexagon gif.
Ideas I had for other uses for the effect:
Now that this has been released, I think that some additional documentation should be added for this on the DevHub. I remember spending some time working with it when it originally came out and wasn’t able to figure it out 100%.
The brief description in the announcement post a while back wasn’t enough for me to grasp the full concept of how it works. For developers like myself that aren’t as experienced in this field, some examples and guides for achieving interesting effects would help tremendously.
Hey guys, sorry this got brushed under the rug. I’ve created a ticket for this request – we’ll try and get this prioritized.
I’m bumping up this thread instead of creating a new one. The documentation is still missing, and we shouldn’t have to dredge through three year old tweets (and who knows how much longer they’ll live on twitter for 
) to learn how best to use a common material to its full potential.
Hey everyone, this should be updated!
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