As a Roblox developer it is currently impossible to create specific “special effects” using the newest features like Trail, Beam or Particle Emitter objects.
I’d like to be able to assign materials to them, to create fancy or even very fancy visual effects. Two of which could be water splash effect using Particle Emitter objects with assigned Glass material or heat distortion effect with the same technique. We would also be able to assign Neon material to them that would turn their normal appearance to a glowy one (without even using a texture).
And of course the other materials too, they’re not as interesting as Neon and Glass, but I’m sure someone in need will find a use case for them
Right now we are forced to use Parts instead (which probably require more memory than those mentioned above). And even with Parts we can’t afford everything that say a Particle Emitter could do.
imho they’re way more likely to release brand new API for effects like light distortion rather than add Materials to non-BasePart instances. You can already achieve a glowing effect with LightEmission properties combined with Bloom but I suppose it’s not truly bright (even with 0 transparency). I’d be interested to see more distortion effects, but I’m not entirely sure about the engine’s rendering capabilities with more complex effects. They’re still kinda ironing out the Glass material’s features.
IMO, using the features that are already in —rather than shipping a completely new one— would be a better solution. Plus I assume a completely new Heat Distortion effect would have only one use case - for heat distortion.
Glass material is already distorting light, so why not use it?
I’ve seen Battlefront having some water splash particles that distorted light. I also looked up various heat distortion effects done in other programs and I don’t think it’d differ much from the Glass material.
Using Bloom to achieve a glow effect is a bit hacky and inconvenient, since it would make everything glow, and not one object only.
material support for trails and beams would be indeed very appreciated and much needed ; for particles i am not sure due to the sometimes ridiculous high amount of particles especially when the particles interlace and overlap .
Some sort of real default neon/bloom glow option for all effects would be neat at least .
