New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

@RBLXImagineer

We are currently going to automatically upgrade all experiences to these new materials. If you open a place you made 3 years ago, your materials will automatically upgrade with no way to revert to the current ones. Is this acceptable, or would you prefer that new experiences get the new materials and existing ones have to be explicitly upgraded?

This is outright unacceptable - these new materials, as nice as they are, should NOT be forced onto old games, and furthermore, if the current ones are kept around, we should further be able to choose to use them in not only existing places, but possibly in new places in conjunction with the new ones.

Not only would this potentially ruin experiences developers have spent years creating, it could also limit the possibilities of what could be created by new developers, which goes against the platform’s remit of “Powering Imagination”.

No other platform this big or significant would even consider such a move - people don’t want or expect to play an abandoned game they liked back in say, 2018, and have it look completely different.

@RBLXImagineer

On lower-end devices, Surface Appearance objects scale to a color. You can simulate this by choosing File > Studio Settings > Rendering > Quality Level > Level 01. Is this acceptable?

I don’t really mind this behaviour either way since it doesn’t impact me in a big way, though one does question if the behaviour of the specular glare on low quality settings should atleast try to look similar to how things are on higher quality settings.

@RBLXImagineer

Looking at the materials for uses other than their specific type (using wood grain for another purpose) do you feel the new materials give you more or less options for using them in your games?

Personally I think the new materials would be better and more varied if they were more consistent in style - I really like the new Brick, Wood, WoodPlanks, and Grass (other than the dark colours/clamping behaviour) materials, but they don’t flow together very well with others (i.e. Slate, Sand), some of which look less realistic than before which completely defeats the purpose of this update.

@RBLXImagineer

Do the new materials better blend with other models and assets in your game?

Under the current “dark colour” behaviour which myself and many others have called out, the new materials currently make things seem less consistent and less well-blended than the existing ones. Would be interesting to see how they’d be without the colour clamping, however.

@RBLXImagineer

Are there any visual bugs introduced by these new materials? If so, please provide images and comparisons.

There are currently some tiling bugs on certain materials (Brick, WoodPlanks) which cause thin white lines to show wherever the texture is tiled.

@RBLXImagineer

Do these materials increase or decrease the immersion you seek in your game?

Under the behaviour in the first preview build, these new materials currently feel like they’re a bunch of different styles cobbled together and don’t provide much of an improvement, if any, to the immersion I seek in my games.

Also, on a side note…

@RBLXImagineer

Some New Part Materials have full color baked into them. We are currently removing some of this to give your more range while still allowing for color matching between terrain and parts

I would personally prefer if there wasn’t any colour matching between terrain and parts, if it allowed for all of the colour baking to be removed, which would be better for everyone. People who like the current colour palette can make things darker again to match, and people who don’t, can enjoy the materials to a far fuller extent.

Hopefully certain changes will be made for the V2 build to maximise the potential for these new materials.

[EdlonNightwood]

Forcibly replacing old textures with these new ones would be an absolute travesty. It completely ruins the aesthetic of old builds in more ways than just the color. Slate and grass are my two biggest complaints, given that they are two of the most prevalent materials, and this update entirely changes their appearance, and consequently the situations they’d likely be used in.

Color also seems to be far more limited. While the baked colors in materials such as grass has been addressed, others such as wood are so dark that it is impossible to make white wood. I tend to avoid materials such as fabric and cobblestone because of their slightly limited range of color, but some of these take that limitation to a new extreme.

As for immersion, there seems to be a conflicting blend of more and less realism on some of the materials. The current materials sit at a comfortable middle ground, for lack of a better description, between realistic and cartoonish. They can feasibly be used for a variety of styles. This is not the case with many of these new materials. Some of them have become significantly more realistic, which looks terrible in games that perhaps aren’t going for an entirely realistic style, whereas others look far more cartoonish, which presents the reverse issue of the more realistic ones. Many of them also lose their definition when viewing from a distance, such as slate and grass, making them look like smooth plastic when not being viewed directly in front of the camera. All in all, the new textures make immersion far more difficult than before.

At the end of the day, I would be happy to have access to both the new and old sets of textures. The option needs to be there though, and some of the aforementioned issues should be addressed. In its current state, though, this update would by no means be a positive change.

[TheDisfunctionalOne]

Looking forward to the new “carpet” texture!

[Cookie_DevX]

Interesting, I really like some of the textures, Indeed some of the roblox material textures are “iffy”.

[ProfessorOfK3ology]

Very happy to see that Roblox is at least trying to listen to devs for this update. Definitely a controversial one, this is

As for the developer input you wanted (it’s 3am and I’m on mobile so I can’t give screenshot examples but hear me out)

1. Absolutely not acceptable. My current builds look alright with the update but I’ll definitely stand behind the people who literally make a living off of this and would have to spend weeks fine-tuning their places if the update was forced

2. Not sure what is meant by this, but I’m assuming it means forced colouration on lower graphics settings. Forced colouration is NOT OKAY under any circumstances imo, it ruins the experience and kills any versatility whatsoever

3. The new materials are definitely less versatile. Several instances where I have used sand/slate are ruined because of their newfound specificity. I can see this potentially being fixed with new materials types though, whenever those are coming out

4. They don’t really improve or take away from them in any manner. Of course I can’t speak for everyone though

5. Can’t provide screenshots as I said before but several people have already highlighted the graphical bugs so

6. see #4

Overall I’m probably one of the least affected by this update but I’m definitely concerned about Roblox trying to push “realism” especially when they know full well that some of the most popular games on the platform aren’t realistic. That really strikes me as odd

[Disobeyedcrab04 (Harrison)]

Ok, this was not reall what I expected.

My Expectation

I expected a refresh of the 'old' materials where they would keep the same design and coloring ect but simply increase the resolution and create better looking with PBR

The Reality

I turned out to be a complete chage of all of the materials where we have to change materials in out games just to keep the asthetic of our games. This is not very good and being a Terrain designer, we have to go around finding a material that is 'close enough' to the original. This is an example of @asimo3089's twitter showing how Jailbreak is going to have to completly change Sandstone to Limestone!

Positives

• Very high quality materials
• Sand looks gooooood
• Material blending is fantastic!

Negatives

• Complete change in colouring
• Materials have changes too much
• Everything seems so dark
• Lots of changing is needed

Plenary

All together this update is not the best and needs A LOT of improvement. Hopefully Roblox listens to us this time and works with developers to create a better system.

Alss apparently custom terrain materials are happening soon! Via @RBLXImagineer

@RBLXImagineer

Custom material support for developers is in the works as well. With this, you’ll be able to recreate any particular style you want, and still tie it to the material properties in terrain. Keep an eye out for that announcement in the future!

This will most likely ‘save’ the people who want less realistic materials in thier games!

[geigop (Ramp)]

This is a 50/50 for me. Some of the textures look way too different and unnatural like slate. Everything is way darker than its supposed to be which is a huge problem for me. Especially since slate looks like cobblestone the slate I used as rocks and map walls now look weird. I’d like this better if slate had a better texture and if the textures were lighter. Coloring these new textures are really painful compared to the old textures I personally like the wood textures etc but overall the colors need to be fixed and we need better slate.

Before:

Now:

[Supersnel11 (Robin)]

Between the images below there is no difference in lighting settings whatsoever. Why did it turn so dark? Why is a single brick the size of an elephant?

I understand the need to upgrade, but there is no way this is acceptable. The colouring and differences in material are too much compared to the old textures.

Old:

New:

Old:

New:

[FrenzyyLumina (Frenzyy)]

The update is wonderful and all but I have a couple concerns. in certain graphics settings materials gets changed.
for example this ice material:

Graphics Level 1

Graphics Level 3

Graphics Level 5

Graphics Level 10

[micheal999990]

thats because lower graphics will want to render less detail/quality materials. Defeats purpose using higher quality ones on lower graphics

[FrenzyyLumina (Frenzyy)]

Would be more convenient if the colours were less changed

[micheal999990]

probs early days defo something to look into color wise

[SillyMeTimbers (Silly)]

Yeah, def a big color change between 3 and 5.

[Edo_UK (Edo)]

It would be useful if there were an option to adjust material scale, so materials don’t appear too big or too small in our use cases. It’d also be useful to preserve old materials such as brick, to preserve the look of current games.

[Anjaneytripathi2 (Myst)]

im very hype to see this update launched it’ll take roblox development to a next level!

[BXREDEWIL (Surn)]

To be honest a lot of the part materials are nice if we arent talknig about granite, brick, stone/cobblestone, grass and some others. I dont like how marble looks because i personally wouldve liked the black lines in marble more accentuated in the new textures. I dont like that hte textures are colored, which limits creativity, like how the grass is green when set to instututional white or how sand is yellowish when also put to the brightest white, how stone and pebble textures have warm tones.

[Extingale (Ext)]

I stand by what many have said, these textures are barely a high definition improvement and more of a complete replacement. Ruins a lot of games that cleverly utilized the materials. It would be better if the default textures were just improved upon, maybe with AI upscaling. Although these materials can still remain as a variety, the bigger the selection the better.
As I’ve said on the first announcement post, it would be better if we just had a huge library of materials that players could upload and contribute to.

[Enk514 (Enkcl)]

I don’t think it’s that bad, big difference in bricks, reminds me of classic English houses! I like the bricks ngl, yes it seems more gloomy, and horror games will see this as a dub, it’s more eerie, but accommodating for the population? They failed, as you can see everyone’s complaining, it’s not that bad to me, it looks the same if not better in my opinion, this though, is subjective, so what are your thoughts on it

[Enk514 (Enkcl)]

I can see you zoomed in the new pictures, this makes the new one seem significantly bigger, anyways I like the new more, it’s more realistic and makes it just, better, reminds me of craft mine

[Bac_Stab (Sentient)]

This is the worst possible way roblox could have released this update…Does ROBLOX realize not everything has to change just because it’s “old”?
And forcing part color=not cool.