Well these features are great and i’m sure most games will implement MeshDeformation and PBR Surface Appearances into their games
…Speaking of PBR, your post reminded me of @Maximum_ADHD 's old post about Physically Based Rendering
lol
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Seeing I would have to map all the walls and floors instead of just putting in a part and sizing it just doesn’t seem worth it. These materials should scale like the default Roblox materials imo.
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Do you guys have an idea for approximately when the mesh deformation will release? I’m planning on using it to make enemies for my upcoming game but am wondering how long I’ll need to wait for the mesh deformation to release.
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You can create your game in the beta studio then transfer it over to Roblox once the the feature is released I believe!
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I love the new surface appearance! This is the first material I made:
A suggestion I have is make it so that you can have the material tile so you’re not forced to have it squashed or stretched.
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The custom materials are amazing but right now if they are on a part that doesn’t have equal dimensions then they appear stretched or squished. However in some cases the textures being stretched may be desired so I think that there should be a property like SurfaceAppearance.Tiled or something like that to make it tiled.
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“Why is there no tiling property?”
We’re trying to ship the minimum set of properties in v1 to make this feature work. You might argue tiling is an essential feature for this to “work.” I will explain our reasoning for why this isn’t essential in v1.
You can roughly break up use cases for applying textures into 2 classes:
- Applying a mesh-specific UV mapped texture to a single mesh (e.g. armor or a sword)
- Applying and reusing a tiled texture across many different parts/meshes that don’t need a specific (e.g dirt or bricks)
We considered having a single API to cover both 1 and 2, but for several reasons this made overall usability worse. So we created SurfaceAppearance to address 1 - it’s only meant for mesh-specific textures. Next year, we will ship an API that lets you put tiled textures on many different parts without having to put a child object into each part.
Custom Materials
In Roblox, a Material is conceptually more than just a set of textures. Materials have physical properties like friction, elasticity, and density. We have some unofficial plans around using materials and their physical properties to improve immersion in the future. It’s likely some day our engine will be able to produce accurate acoustics for different rooms based on whether the room is made of concrete or sponge. If you want features like this to work with your content, our assumption is that in most cases when you are applying the same tiled texture to a bunch of different parts, the textures are part of a greater material and you want to apply the material’s physical properties to the parts as well (with the ability to do per-part overrides).
Our messaging may have been confusing here, especially since “materials” sometimes mean “render materials” or “shaders + shader inputs” in other contexts. To clarify, SurfaceAppearances are visual-only overrides, not full Materials in Roblox. Our plan is to ship a tiled custom Material API after SurfaceAppearance.
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nvm got it working. Apparently the rig must contain no animations?
Also just curious here, you’re using the words “PBR” but as far as I can tell the only real physic based rendering going on is with the sun? Normal light sources do not appear to be effecting shading at all for normal maps. Is this going to remain this way in the future or will in the future you guys be allowing for normal lighting objects to also effect normal maps?
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Those Protogens look “spectacular”!
Also, I hope they make it so lights can influence it.
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Ela’s finally got black ice 
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Did you test them out beforehand? anyways try setting the main bone’s Y position keyframes to zero, this should balance it out and not make it so bouncy.
If you’re unsure what the main bone is it’s the one that controls the entire armature.
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It doesn’t follow the animations since the only thing that has keyframing is in fact the bones of the deformable rig, so you can’t just add a Motor6 or else it won’t work.
So I suggest opening the deformable rig in Blender 2.8 or some other program and manually rig the eyes using bones, hope this helps.
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I see deformable meshes as one of the most powerful tools added to ROBLOX STUDIO.
You won’t believe how excited I was when this was first announced in this year’s RDC, as a Modeller I am so happy that the current limitations that we’re currently encountering in Studio is slowly being lifted, we can now make clothes, hair and many other things that we couldn’t do before.
With this implementation, we can truly make anything using our imagination, thank you.
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See:
And:
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It’s just great to see everything change from default materials, mesh texture to custom materials, and mesh material, and including mesh deformation. Wonder what games would look like with Future is bright phase 3, grass, mesh material, mesh deformation, and custom materials. Roblox is just changing so much this year.
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I read that and still don’t get why you say a tiled property is not essential.
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That just says the sun, not individual light sources. My post asked when will the individual light sources ie, point, spot and surface lights also change the secular shading of the meshes with custom normal maps on them, because right now the only light source that effects it, is the sun.
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In the post I linked, it is implied this will happen in phase 3, as local lights will be receiving the “fib treatment”.
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Hope this is added sooner than later, still waiting on a FIB 3 beta test
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