For some reason this is happening to my Shark with a bone structure:
The actual 3D model imports fine using the usual mesh import.
https://i.gyazo.com/2b35b633f2dd5b00656f647eaa362319.mp4
https://i.gyazo.com/2b35b633f2dd5b00656f647eaa362319.mp4
5 Likes
Im happy, but also scared, lol
time to learn some rigging and modeling in blender for the future roblox 
2 Likes
Hehe weird fleshy guy in roblox (Animating isn’t my strong suit, I know it’s pretty bad). Can’t wait to see these new features used in games though!
31 Likes
That’s a bug.
Could you share the model? Ideal for us if you can create an issue on github and attach a link to the model. If you can’t share the model publicly can you DM us with it here?
4 Likes
I’m excited to start working with these features!
I have rigged and animated dozens of pets/characters over the years on Roblox. Working late nights cutting/rounding hundreds of limbs for hours is exhausting, and this is a breath of fresh air.
Plus physically based rendering can make characters look so much better!
Before:
With normal map:
I wouldn’t mind a SurfaceAppearance.EmissionMap property for meshes with glow/neon, but otherwise the only rendering feature we’re missing is “cutout” rendering for realistic fur and foliage:
As I posted before, bones would benefit from support for scaled/non-orthogonal CFrames. Multiplying a bone’s cframe by CFrame.new(0,0,0, 4,0,0, 0,4,0, 0,0,4) could result in seamless per-bone scaling similar to this:
It would also be possible to animate the stretching of foliage using shear transformations. Skyrim uses transforms like this to achieve a seamless werewolf transformation animation by stretching the character into the new proportions, and there are many other applications. These transformations can be easily applied on RenderStepped without the huge performance cost and complexity that comes with updating the size of many parts along with bone offsets.
50 Likes
Posted a new release of the build on github with some fixes for PBR properties.
@Homeomorph also added a bunch of great documentation on surface appearances on the Avatar Evolution site.
The Avatar Evolution build does not automatically update! You’ll have to go back to the site to download the latest release.
10 Likes
When an animation is playing on a mesh with bones, the visible pose changes but the bones appear to have not moved. I was trying to throw together a mockup of what characters might look like with this feature, starting with a tool system, but I can’t get the position that the right hand (a bone) appears to be at. I know this is super early, but can we expect this to change? (Or maybe I don’t understand bones at all. This is my first time working with them…)
Can you explain what you mean a bit more, maybe attach some screenshots or a video?
Sounds like a bug. Can you post those as a github issue?
2 Likes
What I have selected here is the right hand bone. As I walk, it remains in the initial position. I am playing animations from a local script if that’s at all significant.
15 Likes
Just imagine applying seamles Materials to the Custom Triangle terrain! gonna try it right now.
It might be time to download Substance Painter and buy the licence.
17 Likes
This is awesome! I’m super excited for mesh deformation and custom materials! I can’t wait for these features to be released!
these things used to be a dream to me
im so glad they arent anymore
now that i think about it, theyll most likely become overused, but im prolly gonna end being one of those people who overuse it anyway so yeah
2 Likes
It would be nice to have a way to make the Albedos and all other maps be scalable, we might need to use Seamless features in the future.
11 Likes
i could recommend taking advantage of that to make something neat out of it, but other than that, yeah i agree with you on those seamless features
1 Like
I’ve been hoping for a mode gravel-y texture for use in gravel roads and gravel train loads, and I found a set of textures with diffuse, normal, bump, and spec maps. I applied the normal map to the SurfaceAppearance, and converted the AO map to be black and alpha (to create a colorable material in the translucent areas) and applied it as the color map.
I expected the color map to overlay on top of the part color in cases where the image is translucent, but that didn’t happen. I hope it will gain this feature so I don’t have to create different color maps for each different color gravel I need in my game.
Tiling is also important to me.
Thanks for continuing to improve the Roblox engine!
10 Likes
Nope. “Future Is Bright phase 3” is coming, but won’t be ready any time soon. And we decided to use metalness over specular maps since metalness covers most use cases and uses significantly less memory.
This property wasn’t meant to be visible. Internally it holds a reference to compressed textures as an optimization.
Most likely. Since SurfaceAppearance is a huge change already, we’re going to ship the minimum API that makes it work in v1 then expand to common use cases afterwards.
It’s too soon to say. We’re investigating multiple options to improve reflections.
Not at the moment.
Difficulty ranges from hard to impossible to change Roblox APIs after we’ve shipped them. That’s why we’re shipping the minimum number of properties that make this feature work instead of shipping a bunch of extensions all at once. There are plenty of improvements we want to make in the future, but we need to collect feedback and adjust our course along the way.
This is on our radar.
16 Likes
How feasible would it be for every part to have a SurfaceAppearance with all of the maps? How will this increase load times? I am definitely all for this, but I’m pretty sure the biggest part of game downloads come from textures…
1 Like
For some reason it wont let me manipulate an imported mesh rig, that has already been boned and stuff. Help?
1 Like