Hello there ROBLOX admins, WoodReviewer here, today I have a special post on not what people can do to improve wood grain on ROBLOX, but what ROBLOX could do to improve wood grain. Now, just as a disclaimer I do not know exactly how ROBLOX works with textures, so all my suggestions may not be 100% practical, but the general idea can help improve wood grain.
My first suggestion: Fix the size of wooden planks. Well, what does this mean? Remember my wooden planks and why they suck, I mention how they can have this thin sliver that can occur.
I believe the route cause of this is that the wooden plank texture is not a specific size. I spoke with someone at ROBLOX about this, and they said each individual plank should be 1 stud wide. I told them this was not correct, and they did not believe me. I then showed them and they said, and I quote “#### ## ####.” Not sure what exactly that meant, but I assume it was not good and that this is an unintended behavior. So, what causes this? If you look at the wooden plank texture, the top 4 boards are all about 105 pixels wide, give or take a pixel.
However, as you can see the last board is only 92 pixels wide, well short of the usual 105. When ROBLOX applies this texture to bricks it tries to evenly separate them, but the one being slightly shorted causes issues. I am not exactly sure how to fix this, of if this is really the cause, but it needs to be fixed. Not just so the slivers disappear, but so that all the planks are a uniform size so that you can more accurately predict where the lines will be.
My second suggestion is to more properly align the nails, or where boards meet.
This is the default texture, and as you can see the 5 boards meet at 5 inconsistent areas. I want something more like this, where there are only 3 areas where the boards meet that needs supports underneath, and they are roughly spaced out at consistent distances. I used 3 since the texture repeats I don’t want two boards to have end areas right next to each other.
If the texture was changed to 4 or 6 boards, ROBLOX could get away with two spots where the boards meet, alternating them. Here is this texture in action. Not, I only have the diffuse part of the texture complete, but it is just a rough idea of how it would look.
And here it is, with bricks above the gaps at a nice, even, 1.6 studs apart.
Those are both general suggestions. My next suggestion is a three part suggestion, with the above two suggestions applying for wooden planks.
The first option, and easiest, is to take the two existing wooden textures, wood and wood planks, and merge them together into two textures. By that, I mean either taking the lighter grain of wood and replacing the darker wood grain of wood planks with it or visa versa. This would make both regular wood and wood consistent, allowing both to be used interchangeably in places without either appearing out of place. That was supports can be made that look similar to plank parts without having the flaw of lines in them, and get the lines out of long cylinders. This is the easiest option.
Here is an example of what this new texture would look like if made from the current wood texture. While some may prefer the current wooden plan grain, I was unable to easily make an example.
The second option is sightly more complex and involves making a wood and wooden plank textures that uses both the wood grain from the wooden plank textures. So there would be a lighter wood and wooden plank texture, and a darker wood and wooden plank texture. The differences in wood grain would appeal to those who like one grain verses the other, and opens up the door to greater differentiate wood. For example, the lighter wood textures based on the current wood textures could be used for indoor, more fine items like furniture, while the textures based on the current wooden plank texture could be used more outside for more robust items like decks or siding. If this route is taken, I would just suggest the wooden plank texture based on the current wood texture would have smaller boards and no nails to more resemble furniture quality wood and/or laminated flooring that have small, almost unnoticeable nails rather than the giant ones in the current wooden plank texture. Personally, this is my favorite bang for the buck option.
My third option goes a bit further than option two by creating a third material: endless planks. This is a combination of the wood texture and the wooden plank texture, basically have planks that go on for ever without the ends, or nails. This will allow for easily creating fences, without having fence pickets being split in half due to boards ending while still indicating each picket is an individual board. The following image of fence pickets being cut in half and irregular spacing due to not all planks being a uniform size.
This is a texture I made up, based on wooden planks, that shows what a continuous wood texture would look like, again only with a diffuse map. You can see the nails where I combined the textures, but otherwise it is what I want.
IMO this is the best option. But I am WoodReviewer, and I understand ROBLOX may not want to add four more textures, and may be unable to if they want to keep the size of parts down. That is why, in my opinion, the first options is the bare minimum that needs to be done, having one uniform wood type. The second option is a compromise between having too many textures and not eliminating any current textures in a way that would ruin places ascetics. This last option is my pipe dream that, when all PCs have 64 GB of RAM and a connection to Google Fibre, may be possible, but is not realistic. There is also a fourth option that is similar to the first, but instead of just having two textures based on one wood grain, a third based on the endless planks texture is added.
But what ever ROBLOX decides to do, wooden planks need to be looked at. The current difference between wood and wooden planks is so great it means they cannot be used together, and realistically to make proper wooden structures they both need to be used together since both can do what the other can’t.