I used to use roblox terrain tools on a daily basis to create immersive maps, the most recent update with terrain tools has completely ruined my ability to create maps. When working with terrain against water, the experience is awful. Working inside water is awful and glitchy. If ignore water is turned on, water should not be eroded at all.
View videos below for more info.
Above is a clip of what happens when trying to use the smooth terrain tool while underwater. It creates blips of water, and when zoomed in the effect goes away. The terrain is hardly effected besides creating the glitchy effect.
Here is a clip of what happens when i simply try to fill a hole with water. I imagine this tool would ONLY fill in the empty space, but instead it turns the entire pond into a square.
Here’s a clip of what happens when trying to create a beach by eroding the terrain surrounded by water. My ignore water is selected and yet the water still morphs/deletes with the erode tool. This is such a horrible experience because now I have to go in, fill with water, and repeat until i get the desired look. This will force my work to take 2, 3x’s longer than it normally takes.
Another clip, this is what happens when i try to smooth the terrain around water to get a more smoothed slope into my beach. The water curves and dips against the terrain, even though ignore water is selected.
This causes my workflow with terrain tools to take much longer than usual
The previous terrain tools functioned much better with water
The process to fix eroded water causes water to be uneven, and is an extremely repetitive process
Working efficiently with terrain land and water is a broken experience
Will add onto if I find more broken/glitchy features
Because of the broken experience of tools, I cannot create a map for my game.
The past behavior of roblox tools allowed me to create beach like environments with the erode tool. With the update, the erode tool acts completely different
Hi, I’m sorry to hear you’re having this experience! I’m a product manager at Roblox who’s taking over terrain and am currently working to collect feedback about the state of the world so that we can make it better. Could you DM me if you have thoughts/issues beyond what you listed here?
We worked around it by regenerating water, and flashing water in/out. The only painpoint with this, past the fact we have to do it, is that the terrain tools for coean do not remember our terrain settings, and do not syncronize in team create to other team members.
Overall, it’d be great if these tools were fixed.
Thanks for the videos! I’ve made some notes on each:
I think there’s 2 issues here:
The “blips” of water look to be an issue with the LOD system
The smooth tool is confused under water. The raycasting for the brush knows to ignore the water, but the smoothing algorithm doesn’t, leading it to think the area you’re smoothing is already solid. This is a bug I’ll fix.
The add tool fills the brush area with the selected material, overwriting what’s already there. For now, you can use the sea level tool to fill this area, but we are currently working on a tool that will allow you to achieve this with a brush.
In the video, ignore water is off, leading to the results you’re seeing. However, I put together a test case like this and found that when ignore water is on, it does result in strange water artifacts - this is another bug I’ll investigate.
I can reproduce this. It might be related to the first smooth issue as it only happens when ignore water is on, but I’ll investigate.
In the meantime, you may be able to use workaround workflow: use the sea level tool to evaporate water, work on your land terrain, then readd the water with sea level tool.
@Quenty could you elaborate on this? Especially the “do not remember our terrain settings” and “do not synchronize in team create” parts.
For the add water part, yes, that’s what’s intended to happen, and you should use sea level instead. Sea level is an easy way to fill water without removing terrain.
Thank you for responding so quick! This is great communication! <3
I leverage this sealevel feature for my game.
The position and size of the sea is something I have to re-enter per a studio session, and only I can see my settings. I would love it if there was some place these were saved to, per a place. Preferably in a valuebase object in serverservice or something.
Would be super nice if we didn’t have to do this. It’s a small thing, but it helps prevent mistakes, like flashing your whole map 100 studs underwater.
