Material Service Beta Updated with Per Part Custom Materials + More

Yes, but there will be some quirks. For example, the way terrain is tinted is different in pre-2022 mats and UGC+2022-and-beyond. We’re trying to minimize them, however.

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I’m speechless, so speechless.
The moment I’ve been waiting for since these new materials came out as a Beta app, and now evolved like never before, thank you so much to everyone who is involved in making this feature sunshine and rainbows for everyone. This is heavily impossible but DevRel proved me wrong!

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One thing, now that we have “Terrain Details” do we get the option to choose Decoration details too? I’m not a fan of the way the decoration looks on Future Lighting enabled. I’m aware it was done to save performance, but for showcases and such I’d love more terrain detail options!

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This is amazing! Really love this, especially the per-part materials. Ive been waiting for this for a long time.

Small sidenote, how do we replicate current materials in the material variants?
The current materials are like this:
image

Yet only normal follows the same format as material variants.

I assumed that diffuse would be the ColorMap, normaldetail RoughnessMap, and reflection MetalnessMap, but Im not getting the expected result.

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Sounds great! I can definitely work with the tint changes as I’m not super concerned with terrain for my projects. I’m just very happy that I can finally start making my own materials for stuff. Going to be really fun!

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I understand the rationale behind unifying both terrain & part materials to use tint coloring, but would it be possible to bring back the hue shifting behavior as a per material option in the future? there are a couple use cases (things like tiny grey rocks in a green grass material, or differently colored nails in a wood planks material) that aren’t possible any more with the new behavior.

either way, thanks so much for all the hard work on this. we appreciate it!

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We hear you on the request for custom decorators but it’s not a priority right now.

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I totally understand, thank you for replying, but we can expect something like it in the coming months, or years, correct?

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You can export object from roblox like .obj file. And all textures (default roblox and texture, decal instances) will be exported to your device aswell.

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Do they come with roughness, metalness, and other things that makes them PBR?

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We are exploring an alternate approach. Stay tuned.

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I avoid commenting on roadmaps, but I will say that we are aware of the ask!

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This is really great to see, but I do have to ask @JoshSedai if there’s any chance of us getting access to some form of uncapped sliders to adjust the metalness/roughness properties without necessarily having the maps specified? This functionality was previously present in the early betas of SurfaceAppearance and would be welcomed back with open arms. I can understand if this can’t be implemented, but it would make things a lot easier in terms of tuning materials.

An example of what I mean…

EDIT: Forgot to mention that it would also be really helpful to add some form of NormalDetailMap slot with its own scaling in terms of being able to add extra depth to materials and more broadly to recreate the existing ones.

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This is very cool!

Out of curiosity, are there any plans to allow a single terrain material to have multiple colors? For example, different colors of grass for different areas in the game?

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FINALLY! I was hoping this would come out together with MaterialService and here it is!

Will Terrain also let us create materials without having to override another? For example having more than one grass material for terrain, like shown above with the brick materials

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They are export Color and Normal map. Probably, one of this 2 are used for Roughness and Metalness properties.

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Is MaterialService more reliable than setting textures on every single part? I currently do that with the beta version of Bloxy Kart, and would like to know the performance difference. I’m ok with redoing my textures if I know that there is a performance difference.

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Yesss, I’ve been waiting ages for this.

As an artist I’d also love to make my own materials and add them to the currently existing ones.

Perhaps I’ll even release a material pack for everyone to use at some point when I feel like it, I love playing around with PBR and shading.

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I would also like to see this. My game is procedurally generated and uses the built-in terrain but one problem we have is that you aren’t able to change the color of materials in different areas which is necessary for different biomes (ex: savanna vs forest grass). Our current workaround that we are thinking of is that the color changes as you walk into another biome but unfortunately this means if you are on the border of 2 biomes, the color will be wrong on one side. It would help a lot if it was possible to have different colors of the same material at once.

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Unfortunately the terrain system has some limits today that prevent this. It’s on our minds but not an immediate priority.

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