How to use materials in Roblox

Help and Feedback Building Support
#1

I’m finding this painful, so I guess I am doing something wrong.

Let’s say I want to make my own slate roof material and apply it to part of a roof, I would then like to snap another part (different size, common geometry edge) with the same material next to it and have the material tile seamlessly between the two.

It seems I have 3 options:

  1. Material Variant:
    I can define my own color, metal, normal and roughness maps and scale it - great.
    But it does not appear to take any notice of UV maps, so although my parts have similar UV map orientation/positions (identical for the face I want to match) the material application is offset by an unknown amount, giving an undesired edge.

  2. Apply a texture:
    This allows UV offsets so I can perfectly align edge conditions - great. But it is just an image, no metal, roughness or normal. So it looks different when next to a full material surface depending on lighting and viewing angle.

  3. Use Surface Appearance:
    Just like a material variant, but still no UV control. (hard to see the point of this).

So how do I align UVs for custom materials when I want color, metal, roughness and normal?

1 Like
#2

I’d go with MaterialVariants for your use-case. Roblox doesn’t allow you to manually edit UVs for meshes, and the “Texture” properties you mentioned are not really what Blender has. They simply offset the texture or size it.

#3

Unfortunately, you can’t control UVs on mat variants, so it is impossible to align boundary seams.

#4

Your best bet is to combine those meshes into one, no other choice until manual editing of SurfaceAppearance or MaterialVariant UVs come in place.

1 Like
#5

OK thanks, that is an unfortunate approach from Roblox…

1 Like
#6

union those two objects and THEN apply the material if you want it seamless.

#7

Unfortunately, the objects are meshed parts placed as part of a kit, so union is not available. For now I’m using Texture as it is the only way to have a seamless aligned image, although obviously I lose the nice material appearance.

#8

you could do this, but you could also simply use a surfaceappearance and align the 2 mesh’s uvs in blender seperately, without combining them.

although this is of course, very tedious, it’s still quite a similar approach to aligning textures (but better).

this is where you are incorrect. surfaceappearance are far greater than materialvariants due to the sheer fact that it will follow mesh uvs.

#9

Nice, I did not realise they would follow UVs - thanks

1 Like
#10

This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.