As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to create different Reflections & cubemaps without changing skybox or tricks by creating fake “interiors”
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because this would improve the way reflections work on the platform
I enjoy building on roblox & recreating enviornments from different games, movies & even older versions of Roblox.
However there’s a lot of difficulty doing this because of the way Reflections work on roblox.
Currently, reflections only reflect the skybox, or a generated cubemap if your object is placed in a covered area, such as an interior. It would be nice to be able to do this without interiors, and allow us to use multiple skybox cubemaps for relfections.
Here’s a concept I had for this:
Introducing a new “instance” type, called “Cubemap”, which would stay inside of the lightning but will not be rendered unless it’s linked to a part.
All “baseparts”, would have a new property in their appearance, called “CubemapObject”, which will let users select a cubemap object.
Here’s a mockup concept for that:
This would allow parts to reflect using different cubemaps than the skybox:
By default, each part would be using the skybox chubemap, unless changed.
Here’s a test of what this might look like in-game:
https://www.roblox.com/games/100417422518744/Cubemap-Demo
Why would this be useful?
Maybe you want to add something like “golden ingots” in your game, and want to keep a blue skybox, this would look really bad with a blue skybox. Here’s a comaprison between default skybox which is blue & a custom cubemap:
Both parts have the same appearance properties:
- BrickColor: “Gold”
- Material: “SmoothPlastic”
- Reflectance: 0.5
However, one of them has a custom cubemap, the other has the default skybox as it’s cubemap.
Can’t this be done by adding a “fake” skybox inside of the player model?
While that might seem like a solution for many, it still doesn’t allow parts to have their own cubemap.
This also doesn’t work if your game uses “atmosphere” or “fog” because the “fake” part will be affected by the fog!
There are a few tricks however, to use better colors on parts that reflect, however this doesn’t work as good, one of them would be using a value higher than “1” and using the negative color of your desired brickcolor, here’s an example:
This will however still cause undesired results, such as “bloom” or the parts appearing emissive, OR the parts would have a very awful “saturation” which is not something you might want in your game, example below:
(Not to mention this doesn’t work inside of humanoid models)
I would love to see something like this being added to roblox so that weird tricks won’t be needed to achieve desired results!