Roblox have released some amazing lighting and ambient features since the beginning of this year, and one of the updates allows us to have some realistic and lovely reflections. In this tutorial, i will show you how to get some great reflections on the floor, making them it like glass alongside its texture.
Please note: This does not reflect you character, but reflects the skybox in a very realistic way.
First, open up Roblox studio and open an your place or game in which you would like there to be a reflective surface. i’ve gone ahead and made a quick floor with a tile texture.
Here, my texture is made to fit the part, and all the lighting is set to default. Now, the first thing to do is to enable shadow map. This can be done by clicking on lighting, and scrolling down until you find technology. By default, this is set to Voxel. click on it and change it to shadowmap.
Now, to enable the magic, we must scroll up to the top of Lighting and there, we will find two options: EnvironmentDiffuseScale, and EnvironmentSpecularScale. these are set to 0 by default. setting them both to 1 will result on the skybox emitting light, which is what we want to get our realistic reflections. These two settings also change the behavior of how metal, glass, corroded metal and diamond plate react to light.
once these have both been set to 1, you will see a change. your screen will become very blue and bright. This is because of the Roblox Skybox emitting light. Since the Skybox is blue, then its light is going to have a blue tint.
Now click on your floor part. once selected, change its material to glass, and pump up its reflectancy to around 85%.
You will see no change on the top of you part, because your texture is on top, and is not partly transparent.
Oh my goodness! Your tutorial shines (quite literally)!
With all jokes aside, thank you for this tutorial because adding this reflective surface on objects such as a dominus was very difficult if not impossible before. I like how, as soon as the new properties (i.e. EnviornmentSpecularScale) came out, you swooped in and found a way to utilize it to meet our needs.
I feel like i would only use this method to change the reflectance on hats, not textured bricks. I would just make the texture on the brick transparent, and make the brick it’s on reflective (using the same skybox method you used).
Thanks for the tutorial anyway, i bookmarked it because i will 100% forget this method otherwise.
so, thank you
I see you found all the dominuses and tried the method on them. When i started off with this feature, i found that pretty much all of the hats or weapons on the meshes tab of the toolbox look really nice. So if you’re looking for items to fill shelves in an environment, i suggest you just get a bunch of random meshes from the toolbox and turn their material to metal.
This is amazing! I am not a builder or a mesh designer or anything like that – I am a programmer, it is all I know how to do – but I am definitely adding this to my group’s game. My builders will definitely like this.
Hey! This was a really good tutorial, full props to you. I know it’s very late, but hey! That doesn’t mean I cannot show my thanks. This really helped me with a Lab I’m working on to make characters look a lot more shiny, since Diffuse surfaces just look to flat. It makes them look more real, especially with Future Lighting. Future lighting with this tutorial is definitely a go! 10/10
I’ll get some for you, right now! I will edit this post once I do so…
Update
This is probably one of the best shots I could take. Since my character is well… white, it’s pretty difficult to see the shines. I’ll take one more to demonstrate the Advantages, only with CRM, and being all black.
Somewhat hard to see in both, but in my opinion still looks good ingame, in some areas where the sun shows, or there are Light Points. Thanks for this ^^
p.s Future still kinda buggy, so shadows on the walls are natural I suppose
Oh my God. Thanks for the tip. That looks so gooodddd.
Roblox should add better reflections already, maybe using the same system as water so that we dont have to do this.
