I think I referenced the issue some time ago, but now that a custom MaterialService is being added I felt it right to bring it back up, incase any Roblox staff are occasionally checking through replies to the thread. If this was the wholesale “workaround” without releasing the old material files, we’d be back to square one.
I don’t try or want to cause argument here. All I’m stating is that if this is the route Roblox seems to be going down (I don’t object to it, provided it works in all use cases including terrain), we need what is necessary to preserve our creations as they are today.
And again, I can understand your frustration behind this and would like to see an ETA for plans/changes some time soon. However, considering the feature for the custom materials currently causes crashing unless applied a specific way (whilst not being in active use on a Part), I do think it is fairly unlikely we’ll see any updates on the matter for some time yet.
As to what’s causing the release beta Studio build to crash, I can confirm it is NOT down to missing FFlags, or anything online, as it seems to crash when offline and also when StudioApp flags from June 2021 are supplemented locally.
There may be one other cause in that according to a friend, more modern Roblox uses the registry to block using older versions of the software, however I’m yet to investigate if this is the cause.
I’m just going to wait and see what Sorcus has to say when it’s reached a point where it’s nearly ready.
That being said, I would be frustrated if terrain didn’t work with it or if we were required to reupload the old materials ourselves and change a crap-ton of stuff in our workspaces.
Thankfully, the solution hasn’t even been officially announced yet, so I imagine it’s still being worked out.
Roblox has already expressed interest in giving us more customization options for terrain, such as materials. I can only imagine making custom materials work for terrain is going to be a bigger obstacle than it is for parts. It would be more frustrating, in my opinion, if they kept us waiting on custom materials for parts while they sorted out terrain despite it already being well ready to release.
I have gone through and tried to supplement/recreate certain existing materials’ normal maps.
Some look more normal than others (I have also gone through some materials from around 2011), although one big problem is that there is no field or option to change the NormalDetail object of a material, making it impossible to fully realise current materials such as Slate and Wood.
Those that do have pre-existing NormalDetail objects seem to tile massively to the point you’re forced to use another material to get around it entirely. I don’t think this is supposed to happen, but the feature is technically still in internal testing and I’m not really supposed to be able to access it, so hopefully they’ll fix this prior to the release.
One possible fix would be to add a field for NormalDetail maps, but adding a separate StudsPerTile property for that field only (i.e. DetailStudsPerTile) which would hopefully allow certain maps to be usable again.
It does feel very much like a feature that’s still being actively worked on so this probably isn’t the final state of things and I probably shouldn’t yet comment on it when these issues are probably already known internally, just something I’ve been looking into.
it’s not a highly complicated and definitely not highly ambiguous process to covert the normalmaps. you can download a utility like GameImageUtil by Scobalula and do it in one click if you would prefer that to Blender nodes.
These are honestly such a great addition, I love using them for my builds and greatly prefer the new materials over the old ones. Just can’t wait for them to release publicly.
Did you somehow get the builds to work? As others have mentioned, v1.5 doesn’t open, v1.4 has a blank properties panel, I also tried v1.3, which has the same issue as v1.4.
Not sure if this has been touched on yet here, but something I desperately want, more than any other material change, is non-opaque objects being visible through glass. Glass was released nearly four years ago, and non-opaque objects still don’t render through glass.
I am more than willing to suffer a performance impact, as it makes several things I want to do impossible. Even something as simple as a room overlooking the ocean is impossible because glass windows would make the water disappear and ruin the view.
I know that feeling. I was working on a team create project relying on this build when it stopped working. I haven’t been able to properly build for a month now.
