New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[Darboticus]

Turns out, there was a LOT more materials I missed! Looks like I shouldn’t have been using F3X to swap between materials, amirite or amirite?

Asphalt = Great!

Basalt = Crazy nice!

Lava = Neat, could have an optional glow effect to it.

Glacier = Funky and groovy.

Ground = Alright, looks a little off but it seems fine.

Leafy Grass = In regard to the new, current beta texture of grass, this isn’t as bad but not as high quality either. Could be better.

Limestone = Looking gorgeous, cracks almost look a little off in terms of literally appearing as its own layer, but it seems fine overall!

Mud = Yucky and gross looking as it should. 10/10!

Pavement = Nice!

Rock = This is LITERALLY what people want for slate lol. I think the current form of slate, both with and without cracks, should be kept, and this new rock texture should be the new old slate.

Salt = Sweet!

Sandstone = Not epic as of right now. Tiling issue in terms of the material itself.

Snow = Strange, but interesting, Could be smoother to the extent that it is.

I really do think Rock is just Slate but a little better?

Most likely not, but I’m sure Rock is what people want in regard to what Slate should look like.

Overall, some of these actually look great! I can’t believe I looked over these ones at all. I shouldn’t have used F3X to switch between materials.
Now for some applied looks!

Gnarly!

Awesome!

I see limestone’s full use now!

TL;DR:
Most of the ones that are commonly overlooked are like, actually pretty decent. Only issue is in regard to how some of them tile in relation to stuff like cylinders and spheres at certain sizes.

[KOT2885]

Wood also could have less of those eyes things because of braches on the tree (I forgot the english word) and they changed a lot of colors sensitvity so its messed up a lot of times,

also Wood Planks doesnt have a proper tiling so when you have one stud wide part of wooden planks it doesnt cut properly, you have to have like 0,8 studs or something

[BandaidKidd (choppppppppppppppppp)]

Yeah I think slate should be replaced with rock. Think about how happy the community would be!

[FreakShow91V2 (2V19wohSkaerF)]

If you want my personal opinion, these materials could be used for good buildings, but I personally dislike them. A-lot of the scaling on them is off and it really shows on certain materials with colors, as presented in my first few screenshots, which makes building with them harder. Grass looks weird on massively scaled parts, including from ground level. Glass transparency has recently been messed up, although I don’t know if this is victim of the new update. Wood carvings also look a little bit too dramatic for the texture. Either way I can see the potential in these new materials, just how their textures are scale are awful. Oh and the new concrete material looks pretty good in my opinion

[A_SquaredAnimations]

If you notice, that most of the natural/outdoor textures have the same general appearance in terms of height. Props to Roblox for consistency.

[RBLXImagineer]

Thank you all for the wide range of feedback you’ve provided so far! We are continuing to release updates to the preview builds so that you can see improvements based off of your feedback quickly.

Today’s (March 23, 2021) test build has the following changes:

• Removed baked in color from new terrain-to-part materials
• Added tint masks to new part materials
• Reduced roughness for cobblestone material in areas for more realistic light response
• Increased tiling rate for asphalt part material
• Cracked lava part material now has emissive component

Known Issues:

• Possible crash on launch (we have one example, but please let us know if you encounter others)
• Terrain detiling for brick, wood planks, pavement and cobblestone is still incorrect. This will be resolved in a future build.
• Pavers have some aliasing issues in the recent update. This will be resolved in the next build

Please continue to provide feedback in this thread; we want to make this a great improvement for you!

[BandaidKidd (choppppppppppppppppp)]

Thank for fixing the bugs! But for cobblestone, why is the base green?

[SimonEnderB]

I thinking it’s like an earthy color. Would be nice if we could have control over ALL colors in materials.

[IdontPlayz343 (FPS Enjoyer)]

the mortar seems slightly too dark, but overall this material was REALLY improved!

[WoodReviewer]

Will the wooden planks update include making it so individual wooden planks in the texture are one stud wide?

[IdontPlayz343 (FPS Enjoyer)]

unfortunately they didn’t…

[SimonEnderB]

Also found out that when saving the game, the “Yes” box is white. Just a small glitch.

[PeZsmistic]

Tint masks are cool if understand what they’re for correctly.

If terrain-to-part materials are going to be able to correctly match with terrain materials (which can contain more than one base color AND be recolored, making perfect part matching impossible), keeping color in material textures is actually not a bad thing if we also get a way to control the color of the colors baked into material textures. I linked a feature request above about this.

Maybe tint masks could be used as part of that? I.e. a hue property for the parts of the texture affected by the tint mask, called SecondaryColor or something. If these new materials are released without this feature, I guarantee this will be the next most heated feature request.

Also <3 emission.

[IdontPlayz343 (FPS Enjoyer)]

I do gotta say, this updated version is WAY more acceptable than the first, but players should be able to choose whether they want this or the un-updated materials.

[ruddev_ethan (gamer961)]

The brick material in this build is a significant step back from the 1.1 version - so much so that I’m unsure if it is intentional or not. For example, here’s an image taken in test build 1.1:

And here it is in test build 1.2:

Here’s another example from 1.1:

And the same scene in 1.2:

As you can see, the previous build offered some subtle color variation within the bricks (which I recognize is controversial) in a way that worked in my game. Out of the box, this offered some variation in the overall aesthetic of our maps that previously had to heavily depend on concrete. However, the newest version looks to omit that completely, instead opting for dark, thick grout.

That all being said, everything else is a significant improvement from the original build. Many use cases for old-slate will likely have to be replaced with rock (the terrain-> part material), so if anyone is still having trouble with slate being changed so much I encourage them to experiment with some of the new materials. Originally these material changes looked to just shift us from using an extremely limited selection to an even more limited one, but now it’s shaping up to offer significant improvements to all materials (except for brick, currently), allowing for more material variation in games overall (for example, previously we depended heavily on concrete, but will now able to utilize many other materials and still obtain the aesthetic we envisioned).

edit: Something else I’m noticing is that the terrain-material smoothing seems significantly more intentional depending on the materials, and I really hope that stays!

[Funie_Animates]

All the materials look good. The ice in my opinion looks a bit off. I don’t know why though…

[Darboticus]

roblox i’m begging you, please remove the chili off the wood material
and PLEASE

FIX THE STUD ALIGNMENT PLEASE

[LocalWE (WilliApple)]

While this is an improvement, it is still not perfect. First example:

1. Material: Glass
   

   
   
   Even if I turn reflectance off,
   
   The transparency of this is 0.5, and you can’t see through it at all.
   However, 0.55 has the same effect as 0.1.

2. Material: WoodPlanks
   
   This should be able to fix this 4, 1, 2 brick.

3. Material: Fabric
   

   
   
   Normally, I (And a lot of other developers) use Fabric for carpets. This doesn’t even look close to a carpet…
   Yes, this was improved from the last screenshot of this, but it is still not perfect.

4. Material: Grass
   
   I can’t really tell what this is…
   If it is grass, lt looks like someone put wood on it for a few years, then decided to pick it up a few years later, and paint the grass green.

Other than that, it is better! GG!

[Mukar]

Strange request but for terrain would it be possible to implement a sort of material instance for the different materials? for example, one part of the map might call for brighter grass and another like a swamp might call for darker grass. Creating an instance of the grass material would allow multiple versions of it on the map.

Also, going to be honest, I preferred the more cartoony grass present in version 1.0 for a good chunk of my projects. The look of it was very nice, as was the blending with other terrain. Would it be possible to ship both as Cartoony and Realistic options for people to choose from? Other than that, the materials have come a long way and I really like how the update is shaping up!

[InocuIar (Inocular)]

Anyways there is improvements on these new materials but here is some I dislike.

The brick material: Doesn’t this material look so off just by its look? The old bricks look alot smaller and more into detail than the new ones (which is how it should look like of course)

The Grass Material: By looking at it. It just give me uncomfort since I got way to used to the old grass.

The Rust Material: Looks alot more strange than the old one.

The Wood Material: Is it me or the grain it has is too noticeable? The old woodgrain was like ok in my opinion

The Woodplank Material: This looks ok but I really dislike on how the planks don’t have a width of 1 stud like the old one. Like please do anything with them.

The Fabric Material: I think this one speaks for itself. Like there is something very wrong with it.

Anyways this is like a request (probably requested by 20+ other people already) on the materials.

Please keep the old ones along with the new ones upon release or beta release. Developers or builders can have alot of creativity with these materials if both of them were kept along with each other.

Wait what happened to those material requests we made on the topic announcement. Maybe they’ll get added once there was enough feedback on the materials.