[Full Release] New Base Materials available in production

to be clear, these materials look awesome, but one day I would love to see roblox allow developers to create their own materials and have them imported with meshes from blender, I feel this would help bring roblox studio closer to being more like other engines if at all.

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Canā€™t you already sort of do that with SurfaceAppearances?

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I didnā€™t even know that existed until now.
from the looks of it, it looks like robloxā€™s version of blender shading tab only more limited.
the wiki says it cannot be scripted and is too expensive to use during runtime.

in my other reply I was wanting materials/shaders to be imported from blender to roblox with everything intact and I feel there still may be some things that blender still is able to do that surface appearence cannot do. nevertheless Iā€™m impressed that we could have things like what the wiki pictures show in our games and I plan to check it out more when I have the chance.

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Why not classic texture? Why u donā€™t add mostly used texture as base material?

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You can also use MaterialVariants and change the PhysicalProperties on either the part or the material variant. Iā€™m not sure if changing the physical properties on material variants works yet but the property is there on the api page. Surface appearances work but if youā€™re going to be using a lot of them, material variants are better in my opinion since thereā€™s significantly less redundancy. I donā€™t think thereā€™s a way to make custom materials and I donā€™t think there ever will be, unless weā€™re able to edit or create the built in Enums.

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oh I see, it probably wouldnt be ideal for me as I would have added it to all the terrain in my open world which probably would crash roblox or hinder performance a ton.

I also realized that surfaceappearence doesnt seem to have subsurface scattering/emissions which I would have loved to use to create leaves on a tree that allow some light to penetrate through with a greenish color.

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You can recreate classic materials, thats why, in fact they are already available as custom Material Variants. Roblox added these partly so we have more available slots to add a larger variety of Material Variants, as well as having these available, instead of having rubber as a variant of plastic, it can be under rubber material instead. i would love to see more terrain types added in the future though.

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After discussions with the art team, it was reviewed as an intentional artistic choice, but weā€™ve received a lot of feedback about this one during the Studio Beta and on this thread again. Weā€™ll review once more on our end and Iā€™ll update with the decision from our Art Direction as soon as I have it.

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It is normal! We author base material textures with a chosen tint color (so not white) and we look into giving them an intentional depth and complexity in the coloring. When we then apply what we call our ā€œnormalizationā€ step to make the texture as white as possible, some of that coloring depth and complexity remains. Removing these shades would create some very bland looking materials when tinted, so this is an intentional trade-off weā€™re making to make base materials visually rich and interesting!

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Is it possible for this ā€œnormalizationā€ step to be published? It would be useful to create materials in the same style as the base materials that Roblox provides to keep the same style.

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It would be really nice if the extra detail color could be disabled or a per-part basis, and for material variants to support said detail colors.

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I think something to note - and this has likely been brought up multiple times in the past on other new material threads - is that Roblox developers prefer a lack of pre-baked color in base materials. It means the color they choose for their parts/objects always shows through, and for base materials that could be more ambiguous in what they look like, it allows a developerā€™s own artistic intent to show through in their world. Even if it seems ā€œblandā€, the blandness is part of what allows Roblox base materials to be such a Swiss army knife outside of their intended use cases.

On a positive note: loving the leather, cardboard, and rubber materials for my vehicle projects.

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Very cool stuff. Are there any plans in the future for more base materials? Also, some kind of ā€œofficialā€ and/or more easily browsable materialvariant selection system (sort of like how Fonts have a separate section in the Toolbox) would be very cool, especially since the current Toolbox navigation specifically for Materials is somewhat limiting

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Is it safe to use it and publish it into game now? literally last time I used them it was being smooth plastic on roblox after publishing it

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I know these colored areas are supported by a mask where the part color is intentionally not applied on the material. I really wish we could separately tint the material within these areas so we could have e.g. green ā€œrustā€ on copper pipes.

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i mean, i dont really see that much of a point to this. if you are confused about what is what just use the search feature? or better yet, use the dropdown menu in the properties menu with the part selected so you are automatically shown the names of each one.

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I was thinking it could be more like a texture pack like @PIayanad said and you could check the texture packs you want because not everybody needs a lot of textures and the dropdown menu would be really chaotic if there were over 100 materials.

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ah, i thought you were talking about just the base materials and not ones added through material service, my bad

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Why instead of adding new features to the engine. You just need to bring free materials to the studio. Why not add the emission texture that the whole community is already asking for?

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Yes yes YES! Use the materials!! I want to make more, too!

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