As a Roblox developer, it is currently difficult to create convincing effects for, say, energy shields: the best effects I’ve seen so far use neon and particles, or the newly released glass. Both look good, but what if you want a part that glows and refracts light? Currently you have to use multiple parts, which probably isn’t all that efficient.
So I propose this: a 0-1 property, like Transparency and Reflectance, but for emissivity/Neon’s glow effect, that way you can have the glow effect on top of another material’s appearance/rendering effects. There are probably a lot more use cases for this than “ooo, shiny energy shields”, but I lack the imagination to come up with any.
Of course, I just came up with a much more flexible idea as I was halfway through writing this.
Alternative idea:
Would it be possible to let us layer multiple materials per part? So we could have, say, glass as layer 1, and the neon material applied on another layer to achieve the same effect as I mentioned above. Layers could have their own transparency (and colour?), with part transparency providing the overall transparency, so layer transparencies would act as fractions. I’d imagine this would be extremely taxing if too many materials are applied to a part, so maybe cap the layers at 3?
This is probably incredibly niche, and I totally butchered the explanation of it. Sorry! If you somehow understand what I’m on about and have any ideas for use cases, throw 'em down below. Thanks for reading, and stay classy.
Edit 1: Had another use case for the second idea specifically: we could tween between materials!