Dynamic Reflections are affecting emissive textures

Reproduction Steps
Open the place file and move your camera under one of the two parts labelled “Emissive”. You will then notice how it leaves an unusual glare effect on the ground and “stains” the surrounding bricks. If you move your camera under the part labelled “Not emissive”, you may notice how the glare effect as well as the stain effect stops.
EmissiveTextureBug.rbxl (36.1 KB)

Expected Behavior
Glare effect should not be occurring under a surface with emissive textures.

Actual Behavior
When the camera is under a surface with emissive textures, it creates a strange “glare” effect, and the indoor reflections from that particular area seem to “stain” nearby objects, even if you move far away.

This issue has been occurring in studio, and has also been confirmed by many players in-game. The glare effect happens 100% of the time, although the staining effect seems to be slightly less common. These can sometimes stop when the camera triggers another indoor reflection zone without emissive textures. Setting EnvironmentSpecularScale to 0 seems to prevent this issue from happening altogether, but that is not a viable solution.

This issue has been occuring since dynamic indoor reflections were introduced, although it was only apparent with Future lighting technology. As of 11/15/21, we have noticed that dynamic indoor reflections were enabled for ShadowMap and Voxel as well, thus resulting in the previously described issue.

Issue Area: Studio
Issue Type: Display
Impact: High
Frequency: Constantly
Date First Experienced: 2021-11-15 08:11:00 (-05:00)

10 Likes

I have been experiencing this issue in Palm Ridge, and its quite game breaking towards the roleplay aspect of our game due to indoor environments becoming unbearably bright. It also lingers on surrounding objects after leaving an indoor area with emissive textures.

Here are some examples of this bug being problematic in-game:

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/716021253248647259/910574755646681179/Roblox_2021-11-17_11-57-02.mp4
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/716021253248647259/910580331877388328/Roblox_2021-11-17_12-10-42.mp4

6 Likes

I think it’s working as expected, not a bug. If something in the world has brightness like that, everything should be super bright around it.
Also emissive texture is not an officially supported feature.

5 Likes

Yeah. Proper support for emissive textures is something we’d like to add at some point when we have more bandwidth. I would not recommend relying on boosting brightness like this - it may break some day due to a change in our implementation. Have you considered using Neon parts for these lights instead?

Your lights are several hundred times brighter than the sun. :slight_smile: Looking at these should really blind you, but currently we’re limited to a small bloom radius, so you can’t really tell. If you decrease Lighting.ExposureCompensation, you can get a sense of how overly-bright things are in your scene.

12 Likes

Super Skyward Towers has been suffering from the same problem. Lighting will at random go completely bright & white in our tower, despite there being no light sources to cause such lighting. Issue only started occurring when dynamic reflections went live.

4 Likes

I also cant see the beta feature switch button thing…you know what I mean. Is it released or what happend?

2 Likes

This is still a problem in Super Skyward Towers. Players are reporting this issue quite frequently, and I myself have ran into this issue.



5 Likes

I’ve seen reports of random black splotches from Jailbreak and I’ve had no idea what would cause it. Looks like this is it.

7 Likes

This is still occurring as of 3/21/22:




1 Like

This is expected behavior as mentioned above. Emissive textures are not supported and current methods to achieve them interact unpleasantly but correctly with existing systems.

You should probably push harder on feature requests around this rather than this bug report.

2 Likes

We’re not doing anything special though - the scene you see is just a regular tower using normal lighting features. It is most definitely a bug.

4 Likes

This is still an issue as of 6/17/22.
image

Not sure id this is related, but visually it seems similar. This is roblox material 2022 bug on mobile

2 Likes

New materials beta is not related to this issue. This seems to be caused by the reflection probe misbehaving when emissive textures are involved.

I’ve seen this strange glowing in my own experience when a friend played it on their iPhone, while my Android phone didn’t have the same bug. I think this visual glitch is iOS-specific.

1 Like

The fix is already rolled to newer mobile devices.

I know multiple devs that have been suffering from this issue since Indoor Dynamic Environment Maps Beta was released… over one year ago. The only hacky fix for this is turning EnvironmentalSpecularScale’s value to 0. This limits the entire Place’s potential for reflections, especially when using PBR materials. Whether its the reflection probe that needs to be changed, or official support of emissive textures, we need this to be looked at soon.

Beams and ParticleEmitters have had LightEmission, LightInfluence properties for years and Beams have a Brightness property. These are desperately needed for Decals and Textures so we can do emissive textures properly, without causing unexpected behavior.

2 Likes

I’ve been dealing with this issue aswell for awhile now. My game has a flashlight which uses an emissive texture as a light beam. And with no officially supported way to make bright textures i’m forced to move away from the future lighting unless this is fixed.