New Terrain and Parts Built-In Materials - Release Build

I appreciate that Roblox is listening to the devs on this issue! This being forced would’ve ruined the look of my game entirely. One suggestion I have for this update if it’s not already in place, just add new materials into the game instead of potentially having a place-wide toggle. For instance, with the new DiamondPlate texture, why not just make a new material called DiamondPlate2?

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Thank you so much for listening to us, it’s honestly refreshing to see our feedback make an impact on the platform. I have a suggestion regarding the new materials’ looks and feels though, one that might capture your interest: Using the Reflectance Slider to control how shiny each material is, regardless of what material.

Trust me when I say this, that just adding that will make every material you guys made usable for just about ANYTHING ELSE. For example, foil. Foil looks perfect for foil, but it also can look like tarp. However, not all tarps are shiny. If you added the ability to change its reflectance, then we can turn Foil into tarp, bed sheets, cloth, and more, all from a single material. The possibilities are endless!

Another example would be wood: with reflectance, you could make wood look more polished as you rack the reflectance slider up, which is perfect for distinguishing between polished furniture wood and raw wood without adding another unnecessary texture to the mix.

And my last example would be with metal, where the more reflective you make it, the more chrome-like reflection it gives.

EDIT: pls read this Sorcus

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also, just to clarify: SurfaceAppearance supports tiling; you can scale your UVs. What you’re asking for is an option for is a triplanar projection instead of using UV mapping.

I know that, I was thinking more so about the Terrain textures. However I can see how it may not be able to easily be done, but it would be great if we could. Tiled surface appearance textures would be a big improvement, I think of things like UE, I don’t use it but I’ve been seeing some things it can do, would be nice if roblox could give us a bit more options for custom textures etc

hmm… I can’t find anything on youtube about how to add the new textures in. Can someone direct me to a video or tell me how to do it? Thanks

The textures haven’t released yet and is currently being put on hold.

The only way roblox lets us upload textures is through Surface Appearance and the other PBR stuff. But even then, we’re limited heavily and have to texture everything externally on meshes, it only works on meshes, and it doesn’t tile. It just gets bigger. Roblox is genuinely about to push me over to something like Unreal Engine or Core because the benefits of staying on roblox are so small now. Other platforms pay their devs better instead of only giving us %25 of sales (after factoring devex and the initial roblux tax. [I wouldn’t mind this if it weren’t for the fact that all our money that we don’t see goes to stupid updates like this that harm us developers.]), other platforms allow more freedom, other platforms don’t have some arbitrary moderation system that gets people banned for seemingly innocent things. Roblox has entered an abuse dad that tries to hide it phase. At the end of the day, roblox doesn’t care about us Developers. They care about lining their pockets and capitalizing on children spending money on their game.

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I think he meant a tiling tool/scale. Similar to the one shown in Hack Week 2018:

The video is already set to the time of the clip. Do not skip ahead just click play.

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I thought there was a way to get them in a beta form, is there not?

it’s a triplanar projection or something similar. studspertile wouldn’t work if it was tiling the UV projection, because the scale of the UV map would be independent of the units in the engine. but yes i understand what you’re asking for.

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Although it can be done like that, you have to re-upload every texture to Roblox once scaled. This is a potential issue because moderation may warn for PBR assets.

There is, go to the GitHub link at the top.

Their release to Roblox Player is on hold though in favor of optionality.

This is too hard Roblox-wise, as it would create too many textures to download, massively hurting performance.

I’d love to see this if it was possible though.

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Amazing how materials can match terrain :slightly_smiling_face: I wonder if induvial parts and terrain will have a new property for opting out of new materials, like UseLegacyMaterials. Maybe parts of the game may want the old look and others may still want to look realistic. For instance, if you made a game with certain parts that actually look even better with the new Wood textures, but the lava textures need to stay the same, this would be a truly beneficial addition to the update.

Also, SurfaceAppearance only works when placed in Workspace, and can not be parented inside parts. If this could be fixed, that would be really nice.

There could probably be an option in studio/game settings with that UseLegacyMaterials, so you can switch between them easily.

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The problem with it being a toggle means not only would you be locked into only using one set of materials, but also that in 2-4 years some random intern might decide that it’s a toggle labelled Legacy and therefore they can remove it.

Allow using both sets of materials simultaneously. They both use the same engine and by having both without allowing them to be used interchangably Roblox is limiting imagination.

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no, you don’t have to reupload the textures. you just have to scale the UVs of the mesh.

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Don’t force it, there is a better solution.

Yes, there is a better solution to this problem and it will solve 2 problems. So what is it? Well, we can have something called “Material Manager” which will allow developers to choose what materials they want to use for their games (or “experiences”).

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By doing this, we will allow developers to import materials from Toolbox.

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By default, there will no materials, but developers will able to go to the Toolbox and import materials they are interested in using, this also cuts down the loading times because materials that aren’t used are not loaded because the developer chose only the ones they were interested in.

Alright so the “Material Manager” is now implemented so, now what? Well, now Roblox can “forcefully” import the old materials that they had uploaded to the Toolbox for all existing games so they don’t break and can continue to function as intended. After this Roblox can upload their new materials to the Toolbox and developers will able to import them if they choose to. Keep in mind that all materials will be separate.

So what else this solves? It will allow developers to upload their custom materials to Toolbox so they can import them to their games (or “experiences”). Materials will be subjected to moderation like any other asset on Roblox. It’s also a good idea for Roblox to add tiling for the materials (duh).


This will not only solve 2 problems but it will take Roblox games (or “experiences”) to another level. So please take look at this Roblox staff.

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There are many better solutions, and don’t worry, they are unlikely to force it.

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I never necessarily said I hated the change. A lot of the new materials are improvements and more importantly, more of them are now useable compared to some of the more outdated ones - I do however have gripes with the new sand, grass, and of course the notable forced coloring/darkness of some of the materials.

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