Material Physics, UI Improvements, and Marketplace Materials

Updates Announcements
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#1

Update - Oct 13

Hello developers,

Since the original release of Material Service, we’ve been working hard to improve the user experience and overall functionality. We’re excited to announce a few upgrades today, so let’s dive right in.

Please note that all changes and additions to Material Manager are in beta and must be enabled in Studio via the Material Manager Improvements beta feature.

Custom Physical Properties

Material Variants now have support for custom physical properties, much like we already allow you to define physical properties on parts. Editing is simple, as the new physical properties show up next to the variant’s visual properties in Explorer and Material Manager. By default, they’re populated with values from the variant’s base material.

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Material Creation Workflow Enhancements

To improve usability, we removed the modal flow for creating and editing materials and moved all of its capabilities to the inspector. This non-modal workflow makes better use of your valuable screen space and makes it easier to bring existing assets into the Material Manager.

Terrain Details in Material Manager

Material Manager now supports the creation and editing of Terrain Details, so that you don’t need to go back to explorer and properties to make adjustments to the look and feel of your terrain. To do so, click on a material you want to add Terrain Details to, scroll down to the Terrain Details section, and create them from there.

Materials in the Marketplace

Marketplace now features a brand new materials category, which makes it easy to find collections of materials (“material pack”) in Marketplace. To ensure your material pack shows up properly when you submit to Marketplace, make sure that your folder/Model only contains MaterialVariants, TerrainDetails, Folders, and Models: don’t include Parts, SurfaceAppearance, or other object types.

What’s Next?

We will continue making incremental improvements to Materials going forward. We still plan to expand the built-in material library, and we look forward to sharing more about that soon.

As usual, feel free to leave us any feedback or suggestions you have about the update.

Special thanks to @TravelerUniverse, @APandaPoet, @JoshSedai, @4thchamber, @wengawenga, and @Infomancer for working hard to improve Material Manager!

309 Likes
Material Plugin - apply material like in the past
#2

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#3

Fantastic improvements!

However, is there any particular reason that material variants are under a category in the Toolbox rather than having their own asset type in the Toolbox dropdown? The current way of finding material variants in the Toolbox seems unintuitive and hard to find.

50 Likes
#4

This is epic!!! Finally people can share their epic materials for us to use, and the new physics seem pretty epic, can’t wait to try this out.

14 Likes
#5

Amazing! I can already see marketplace materials coming in useful, but wouldn’t it be better to give them their own dedicated dropdown section?

10 Likes
#6

Love Seeing these changes. I am still hoping the 2022 materials and older variants of the previous built in materials can be used simultaneously rather than requiring one to be turned off and put in manually

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#7

Though they won’t be exactly the same due to differences between variants and built-in materials, we do provide the asset IDs of all our materials at the bottom of the materials page. You can create variants with those asset IDs to mix-and-match pre- and post-2022 materials.

17 Likes
How do I get back old textures?
#8

Holy crap. I love how much good updates all of you at roblox have done! Can’t wait to see what’s next!

7 Likes
#9

If I had to guess, it’d probably clutter up the menu considering there’s already 6 dropdown options, and since materials affect the physical world, they’re tied to models in a way (and it’d give more things to put in the categories section of the model toolbox). This is just a guess, I’m not saying this is the case.

9 Likes
#10

Clearly you all listen to feedback! Thanks for these changes!

13 Likes
#11

It would be a really good update if the custom materials would react same way the built-in materials honestly, at the moment there’s no reason to recreate new textures for “Corroded Metal” because there’s no way to make the corrosion keep it’s brown-ish/orange-ish color.
I’ve been posting this before, and I’ve seen many people complain about this but nothing has been done ever since.

The comparison between the built-in 2013 corroded metal and the 2013 corroded metal using custom materials really shows why we would need to be able to use some sort of overlay/have same behaviour on custom materials as the built-in ones.

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I remember some time around May, when the update was first announced and launched, this was possible, because I tried to recreate 2009-2012 materials, and rust used to work very well.
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It would be really nice to see this coming as a new Material Improvement in the future!

34 Likes
#12

Very excited for that to release.

8 Likes
#13

This is all really good! Something I think that would be helpful in future, if this is even possible, is being able to control the specular, specular color and metallic without the use of other textures. I think it’d help a lot with more creativity and easier use for specific needs.

Very excited to see where this goes in future!!

5 Likes
#15

I want to say, first off: I am Loving all these new updates!

But one thing I’ve been curious about for a while is will we ever be able to make use of displacement maps with PBR materials?

I am aware of a couple tricks where you can apply displacement maps as part of a meshes geometry through external tools like Blender, and import it from there… but that isn’t the most performant, and is not always possible for some meshes.

9 Likes
#17

This is amazing!!! People can finally share their own custom materials for other developers to use, and the physics thing sounds really cool, I’m really excited to try this new update out.

5 Likes
#18

As someone who wants to make bricks and such, I agree with this. To make the grout a separate color from the bricks, I would either have to use textures (which is really finicky) or make the grout super dark.

6 Likes
#19

this is truly awesome! so glad this is being added, though when is support for terrain variants going to come out? EX: more grass colors, all having the “Decoration” property

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#20

Wow, I was recently just browsing the marketplace specifically looking for PBR material packs, and finding the assets like these. It wasn’t until now I’ve seen there’s actually a category for it now! It’s unusual seeing something like this, in my opinion.

I would love to make a suggestion, though, like the “terrain decoration” feature, but it is applied to normal parts instead of terrain. Being able to apply materials to sides, specifically, would be of great utility to the old stamper building communities, who attempt to recreate the bygone voxel terrain, but with as much success as there is a setback. Using decal textures and SurfaceGUI’s for materials makes for an unoptimized, overcomplicated experience.

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Example of SurfaceGUI-based textures creating lines due to clipping by proximity. Taken from Build World by Csdi.

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Example of when a voxel terrain-like system is unable to load the needed assets, instead with the initial part and its material. Taken from Build World by Csdi.

7 Likes
#21

Are there plans to add a way to replace the 3d grass, with custom meshparts?
And be able to add meshparts to other terrain? Such as small stones in ‘ground’, roots or twigs in ‘mud’ etc…

10 Likes
#22

Material service really is a godsend.

But will we be able to set a price to our materials in the marketplace or will they have to be free like models.

4 Likes