It should be unnecessary to provide both sets of materials if Roblox is stylistically faithful to the old ones when creating the new ones. What are the odds that can be pulled off?
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Is the opposition to the new textures a vocal minority? I think the change will be fine. I remember when materials were first released in 2009; The platform has improved with each change to materials since then.
It may still be a good idea to implement tileable / compositeable PBR textures though. This way unhappy people can get the old look using a plugin. It may not tile exactly the same way, but compositing would make features like CorrodedMetal’s orange overlay work.
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I agree with this. Seen the opposition toward it, but the positives of having both on simultaneously far outweigh the negatives.
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I never completely denied it, I just said they have a tendency to stick to their original vision.
This. Not only because you can get the old look, but because you can create your own! Only textures behave somewhat like this, and are completely outdated with the new MeshPart and PBR workflow, lacking UV unwrapping compatibility and any of the normal/roughness/color map properties of PBR.
Currently it’s impossible to have full live customizability using PBR, like say if you wanted your players to be able to customize the color of their car, boat, custom avatar, gun, etc. Opening up a custom equivalent to built-in materials would give developers much more freedom over the visual look of their game, and while custom “materials” might not perform as well as the built-in materials, they could really complete some games on the platform. Even just having a color property for SurfaceAppearance that shifts the ColorMap would help a ton, as this thread proposes.
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This should’ve been the goal from the beginning.
Minus slight colour variation, the RC (release candidate) Wood and WoodPlanks work well in practically every scenario the old ones were used. Why can’t all of the new ones be redesigned the same way, whilst being faithful to their predecessors?
If Roblox had realised this early during the development stage, there would not have been swathes of negative feedback. The currently-proposed materials have barely changed in terms of anything but removing colour-baking from the original preview build, and are completely inadequate for existing games.
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There were comments on older topics showing people demonstrating how to do this. Too bad Roblox saw nothing.
Please update grass and ground, and add a short grass material.
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I would rather deal with a long list than have to force one or the other. They could make it like this:
But with the textures.
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How come roblox is so limiting? Like come on. Point lights max distance should be larger, we cant have custom terrain materials, particle rate limit should be higher, we cant implement custom shaders, I could continue the list. And how come roblox makes stuff that looks incredible, but when they release it its not as cool as when they showed it off? For example, PBR used to have the ability to control certain maps, made the material repeat, and other values. How come in the official release of PBR we couldnt do anything but change maps and transparency? Its very stupid. Why not give us the option to change the Metalness, Size, Color (like on decals), Roughness, Depth, ect. Just putting it out there that the roblox engine is quite limiting. Don’t take this as, “oh roblox is lazy, roblox bad!” Because they arent. They simply slack in some areas. They do a pretty good job in most areas. Roblox is a growing platform and has lots of room for improvement.
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Okay I must have done a really bad job of explaining what I meant as a checkbox under properties.
cough
Here we see the properties of a basic part. I opened a baseplate and created a part for this. As you can see, I specifically chose the “Appearance” section of these properties. My hypothetical “Use Legacy Material” property would go right under the “Material” property and have a checkmark.
I really hope I conveyed my point well enough, but just to be sure I specifically mean for the property to be under each individual part and not under “Workspace” or “Lighting” so every single part in the game is affected.
OHHHHHH I thought you meant globally! I’m so sorry. But yeah I agree with you. There should be a legacy checkmark.
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This is looking really nice so far, some good variations and styles, the grass in my opinion looks very flat and wet. As for the materials with baked colour, it does feel a little odd in areas, mainly with the leafy grass, as leaf’s aren’t always that colour, being able to tweak said colour would be nice. They are also very bright yellow right now which doesn’t help.
As id imagine there will probably be some additional materials added to the collection, to make up for some missing areas, one of which could be tile. Tiles can be pretty versatile in their use, and would be a very good addition to the collection.
I think further developments into materials after the preset PBR materials are implemented would be to focus on Shaders, the lack of customizability with either custom materials or native ones really shows through when trying to achieve more advanced effects/looks. My research into creating a shader editor/an engine capable of using custom shaders is not enough to understand just how resource intensive these types of things are. While i’m aware of things like UE5/Unity having very robust shader editors, I am unsure of how well a similar system would work for a engine more focused on playability.
Either way these are looking very nice and its a great step towards hyper-realism/newer graphics.
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What about the decoration of terrain(grass)? The new leaf-grass texture looks very bad and most games use it as grass that doesn’t have decoration
This is the old leafy grass terrain texture (In my opinion, it’s better because the tiling pattern it’s difficult to see)
And this is the new leafy grass texture (I can literally see the pattern when it has no decoration)
The new leafy-grass texture it’s a totally different texture and it looks very bad, I don’t know where in real life I can find grass with this amount of leaves! I think this will ruin most games that use the new grass decoration 
I think it would be better adding a new material called EmptyGrass, that material would be like the normal grass but without decoration
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Personally, I don’t really see the need for any of this. Why not just let developers make their own materials down the line, seeing as SurfaceAppearances are already a thing? And if this is already planned, what’s the need for this change if it’s clearly unpopular? Allowing custom materials would make every developer happy. And if it would take much longer to implement, I’m sure we would all rather wait.
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Updated materials is fine. I think its great. The reason why it’s not favored is because 1. Its forced, 2. Few of the materials isnt great. Like grass which just looks really flat and bland. And the reason for this is just to update the outdated materials which is great. Sure they can give us the ability to do the same and I agree with that, but it’s also more convenient to have high quality materials to use quickly without having to search yourself and keep looking through them till you find something you like.
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the terrain textures can also be changed for more realistic ones even though I don’t know what the RGB violet color is
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LOVE EMM!!!
also find it great that you leave optionallity, i absolutely prefer the ones you guys are working on, but i can definetly see that it could ruin some creations intended look, KEEP IT UP DEVS N ARTISTS!
SurfaceAppearances unfortunately have a huge performance impact, from what I’ve heard from developers like XijQL. It’s been called “bloatware”, even.
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I believe that’s incorrect. Or just way over exaggerated. No idea where they got their info from because I did 2 tests and noticed basically no difference.
1st test. This one is older but this is what I noticed performance wise
Built in
Memory: 359.02mb
Cpu: 16.86ms
Gpu: 10.55
Sent: 0.20 KB/s
Recovery: 0.08 KB/s
Ping:71.41ms
Custom PBR
Memory: 384.10mb
Cpu: 17.94ms
Gpu: 11.11ms
Sent: 0.18 KB/s
Recovery: 0.09 KB/s
Ping:67.29ms
Second most recent test
Custom PBR
Memory: 393.20mb
Cpu: 16.57
Gpu: 10.23
Sent: 0.31KB/s
Recovery: 0.09 KB/s
Ping:164.51ms
Built in
Memory: 372.28mb
Cpu: 16.99ms
Gpu: 11.09ms
Sent: 0.13 KB/s
Recovery: 0.08 KB/s
Ping:114.17ms
I took the results as soon as its been 1 minute when I loaded in on my timer for both tests. Well the 1st test might of been 30s. Im unsure why theres an increase in ping on the second test, maybe my internet got a bit weird. All of these tests has the exact same of different textures and everything in the same camera posistion and same everything. You can test it yourself in these games. I have noticed that loading in is a bit longer with custom pbr, but I’m sure thats because its streamed. Any increase in memory could be improved by simply compressing the textures more for the custom pbr textures.
Heres where i tested it at
Custom Pbr stress test
https://www.roblox.com/games/6906392400/PBR-Stress-Test
Built in materials stress test
https://www.roblox.com/games/6650375215/PBR-Stress-Test
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