Goodness gracious. I’m operating under the assumption the provided build is an extreme work in progress because the current state of the materials replacing the current part materials is completely unacceptable if they’re actually meant as replacements for existing materials.
I’m really hoping that these will not replace the old materials in anything near their current state, and that this build only has them overridden to make it easier to preview how they look in existing builds. If the intent is to replace them, Roblox needs to be way more faithful to the old materials, since developers have grown to expect them to look a certain way with respect to patterns and brightness.
As general rules of thumb, Roblox should make sure to do the following when designing these materials. Almost none of the materials currently in the build meant as generic part textures (not materials meant to match smooth terrain) follow all of these rules:
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NEVER force a color onto a material. Pre-existing materials such as corroded metal are obviously the exception. Developers need ambiguous and versatile materials. A second color property on baseparts to adjust material accent-color tint would be acceptable if this is necessary. (My game has blue, purple, and even orange grass since my map is an alien planet. Now it’s all green…)
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Equalize the overall value / tone of the material to match the value / tone of currently existing materials, or offer a material intensity [1] [2] property on baseparts (I’d expect this to raise the darkest color in the texture according to the property value, basically compressing levels). The materials in the build have wildly different brightnesses compared to their original textures which throws off careful contrasts artists have chosen. Also, these materials are extremely visually busy and noisy, reducing intensity like this would help immensely.
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Materials that have tiling features such as wooden planks should be sized to the stud grid so developers can create 1 stud planks for example, or else provide a material scale [1] setting on baseparts. (Currently planks in the new build are roughly 0.8 studs wide. The old planks texture was 1 stud wide, so this change will break careful material usage in builds)
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Materials should maintain roughly the same texture as their original versions, since developers have used them under that appearance, or else should have generic variants that can be used for arbitrary purposes. New materials need to be faithful to old materials. For example, slate in the current build now has aggressive cracks, when previously it was a nice all-purpose rough texture, and has since been used for all kinds of non-stone purposes (e.g. as tree bark in one of the template games even). Additionally, sand is now diagonal instead of directional, which messes up places where developers have used the sand texture relying on its direction.
Also, wood and wood planks look totally different, it’s a bit unappealing to use them together just as it was with the old wood textures, please try to maintain some kind of consistency between alike variants of textures if possible.
Other than these issues, these textures look nice. Hope to see some stylized ones as well. Realism is not the only art style on Roblox, and the new materials on low-poly builds using many straight edges and regular parts look incredibly busy and visually noisy.
The materials meant to match smooth terrain materials on parts are also pretty good, and since they’re new and (should) not override anything, it’s probably okay if they’re less generic. Smooth terrain materials also look great.