Transparency for Ice would be very cool!
Edit: Failed to see that this update was put on hold, was meaning to make this post for a while and I guess I posted it nearly a week too late. Whoops! My points here still stand in regards to needing more control over other features. I’ll leave the original post here as follows:
After finally deeming ROBLOX terrain viable for our future projects thanks to years of being hesitant about using it and taking into consideration the limits of the system, the new leafy grass material on terrain absolutely destroys the style my team was experimenting with for our new game by not at all blending in with regular grass.
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We’re currently having to use leafy grass up against things like our sidewalks and other objects because there is no control over where the detail meshes for the grass pop up. Control is something that developers need to make the experiences they want to make, and something ROBLOX time and time again fails to give us when they add a new feature.
The amount of extra color we have to add to the leafy grass to get it anywhere close to the unchanged grass color turns the dirt of the mountains a sickly green:
Aside from that point, most of these materials look really, REALLY good, and the blending between terrain materials is especially impressive. That said, I’m going to be pretty blunt here:
Why should our team, or any studio or independent developer for that matter, invest in using these materials when they could be subject to change again at any time in the future?
ROBLOX has proven time and time again that we cannot rely on these to stay consistent, and having to adjust our art-style to the whims of ROBLOX’s vision for their built in materials with absolutely no viable option for replacing them with PBR solutions of our own design (outside of the Surface Appearance element, which does not allow for tiling in the same way that base materials do, and is not compatible with terrain) is quite frankly unacceptable for a tool designed to let creators make artist-driven experiences.
Every developer I’ve talked to who has even the most basic of experience in other engines that support the platforms that ROBLOX does, such as Unity and Unreal, is absolutely baffled by the lack of basic features such as creating custom materials for use on terrain and meshes. At a bare minimum, we need a solution to just upload our own replacements for the images used for existing terrain and part materials.
As others have said in this thread it would solve pretty much every point of backlash ROBLOX is facing with this change, as developers would have even the slighest bit of control over the aesthetic of their experiences.
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Roblox*
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They said they’re working on it.
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These textures are just some small image files, so I doubt it’d cause any performance drops. Probably takes about 20mb for all the images at most.
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Fair Point, I’m still stuck in my habits from a decade ago when it comes to writing out the site name lol.
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I didn’t see the addendum to the original post (I don’t use this site very often often, marking it as a solution rather than editing the original post to properly include the new plans seems a little strange to me but that’s my fault.)
Regardless, consider my post a reply to their original intentions, in that case. It’s something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while, because quite frankly the issue of optionality and control over needlessly limited features that would otherwise be very useful tools for developers extends far beyond this one issue. Will reviste my post to state as much.
This is genius! This would also allow devs to make custom materials for others to use, full support for this idea!
I’d love to see this as a feature request tbh
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There’s a transparent slider for Parts and MeshParts under the Appearance tab. Use that.
Appearance tab? Do you mean properties tab because I’ve never heard of that.
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Whoops, forgot to clarify. I meant the Appearance tab UNDER the properties tab,
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Honestly, this just sounds really counterintuitive because we already have MeshParts and Textures available to our disposal. Roblox just needs to tweak them to our liking, so I understand your frustration.
Thank you so much, this is exactly what we wanted: an option. You may as well have just saved the entire developer community with this announcement.
Let’s just hope that when the new textures do come out, at least some people will find a use for them. Again, thank you. 
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VRAM usage doesn’t affect performance (other than memory allocation due to possible fragmentation). However on devices like phones and tablets (which are the only devices Roblox cares about nowadays), VRAM is an extremely limited resource.
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not mobile players who have to work with 2-4 gb of ram. And keep in mind that lots of ram is used by your system anyway. And also keep in mind that ram is not the only problem
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See this argument very frequently. While it does work (somewhat) it’s a hacky solution at best.
Terrain exists, and surface appearance is not built into Roblox. That many parts using textures increases texture memory MASSIVELY and it is a completely unrealistic solution for those of us who make large scale games which already push Roblox’s limits.
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But it isn’t, Textures don’t support Normal, Metalness, or Roughness, and the Surface Appearance doesn’t tile like Textures. So yes, they should make custom materials. And they will, they already said this.
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Parts are not terrain. That completely different thing.
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There is an Ice material for parts. I thought you were talking about that.
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Both are perfectly able to run the update with both textures simultaneously.
iOS only uses ~300 MB RAM, not that much. We don’t need to worry about Android because most Androids have 6 anyway.
I don’t think we should really be comparing companies here, more of devices because alot of people would probably get toxic on here because of the comparison.
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I agree that people will get toxic, it’s just people. However, what I have stated is factual, so there’s no arguing against that, therefore I’d hope nothing bad comes to this topic.
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