New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[IrishStukov (Irish)]

I did a quick test with all the materials and viewing them in my current places.

Quick to say, I loved the new blending and new wood materials, they looked AMAZING!
One minor problem I had with it though is the concrete and new saturation on the grass. The concrete seems a lot like play-doh or very clay like rather than its previous form, and the saturation on grass + other materials seemed way brighter than they should be.

Other than that, keep up the good work and I can’t wait for this to be fully released!

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

@SimonEnderB

I feel like this update is getting a lot more hate than it should be.

It isn’t - there is forced dark colour clamping on a large number of the new materials, which if unmitigated (i.e. by removing the colour being baked into the material, or allowing the old ones to co-exist with the new ones), could break years worth of content for no good reason.

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

@semiweb

If you want the classic and or cartoony style just set the color brighter

You can’t do that if you were already using a bright colour, and it’s been clamped visually to something far darker.

[Darkzonian (darki)]

Most of y’all would like to know how to test it out.

First, go to the link above:

GitHub - Roblox/material-update-beta

Next, head over to Releases.

Then, pick which OS you use, and click it.

Then head over to your Downloads location, and look for v1.0.Windows.zip.

You need to unzip it. You can unzip it with a third-party program, or just click above.

Pick a file location. If you do not want to change it, just press Extract.

Wait for it. It may take time depending on your computer’s specifications.

Then find the folder you extracted, and open it.

Scroll down to RobloxStudioBeta.

Double click it. It should open Roblox Studio.

If it doesn’t log in automatically, enter your username and password.

Select a game, and off you go!

If this helps, no problem!

If you really can’t do it, here is a link to download it. Of course, it is safe. I am not an idiot.

Just do it, bro.

[Dogon]

Opened up an old place of mine just to test these out. Gonna pile on and say that it’s absolutely ridiculous that a build using the same materials, completely unedited, is absolutely stripped of its original visual identity. I’d say that overall I prefer the look of the new materials, but the simple fact that none of the colors (and in some cases, the very aesthetic of the material, such as slate) are in no way consistent to what they were before is, in my opinion, completely unacceptable.

The materials themselves, for the most part, are visually appealing and well designed. They look good on their own and set out to do what they were intended to, but I simply cannot get behind the way they’ll absolutely destroy the aesthetics of so many games, even with the proposed “manual” upgrade that would be forced upon a game that relies on the current materials’ aesthetics if a developer tries to open up an old project, even just to fix a bug or push out a content update.

I cannot name a single other game development platform that would actively create more work for its developers to go back to shipped projects and find workarounds to restore the visuals of their games to their original artistic intent.

[Bigdineata (Bogathan)]

This looks really good ! Looking forward to using these.

[Lanrellian (Lanre)]

Could we please have a wood/moss terrain?
Also could we have the legacy slate as a material and maybe a terrain too?

[WiseMatheu]

If they change the textures dramatically then our developers will probably have to change a few things in our low-poly game. For example, the slate textures for the walls. If Roblox changes that for the worse, then we will have to re-texture every wall and all the hidden parts. This will especially be hard if they are in server storage and we’ll have to take them out and put them back in again. I think that it will change a lot for our game because we have a low-poly style and it is more ‘cartoony’ than the realistic style that Roblox are hoping to release. I think almost all developers would agree that if we had access to all the textures and materials (old and new) we would all be a lot happier about this update. Saying this, I am happy that Roblox are helping developers make their games more realistic but I would prefer if we had access to all the textures.

[NinjaPrecarious1 (Ninja)]

@Mad_Scientist99

I honestly don’t know which is worse: Voice chat or this thing

Do you know that this is all very early right now? This update isn’t even an enroll in beta yet because this update is so early in development. Roblox will fix this, stop dismissing an update just because it isn’t good right now.

[geigop (Ramp)]

Another concern I have besides slate and colors getting darker is the grass. I’d prefer the old grass by alot and the reasons are these: The new grass feels weird once you use it on trees once you used the old grass texture it felt natural and nice. Now it looks like its a bunch of grass on top of a tree. It reminds me of cheap 2014 unity games with low quality grass textures. Its not the worst but totally a downgrade from the previous grass texture. I’m better at making builds that are more involved with nature and less modern things so I use grass and slate alot and seeing them downgrade by alot is a big problem for me. Alot of the materials got better textures but this is really unbalanced some are really good and some are massive downgrades.

[apoaddda (apo)]

Overall I think the new textures are great, however like @WiseMatheu said if they change it too dramatically then it may destroy my obbys low poly style!

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

The preview build appears to have been updated, the below list shows what changed:

• Plastic seems to better match the appearance of current Plastic
• Using SurfaceTypes won’t cause a weird fuzzy effect on Plastic
• Plastic texturing issue on spheres, cylinders, MeshParts and Unions appears to be fixed
• The tiling issue on materials such as Brick and WoodPlanks is far less obvious

The list below shows what wasn’t changed (yet) and will hopefully be fixed or changed in the official V2 (the updated one appears to just be a bugfix build, kind of a V1.1):

• Colours are still needlessly clamped, ruining years of work
• SurfaceTypes continue to be missing on Quality Level 5 and above (equivalent in-game to 3 and above)

Some good progress on fixing bugs atleast

[BravenwolfTFS (Braven)]

@Masquerata

It just seems like such an obvious compromise that they’re ignoring for whatever reason. Why are the old and new materials being treated as mutually exclusive? Why does it have to be all-or-nothing?

I completely agree with this. Recently, 343 Industries introduced new armor and cosmetics into one of their games, and people liked the skins, but not the armors. Instead of making them toggleable on a per-item type basis, they made it all or nothing.

There is no reason why Roblox cannot add both current and new materials to function together. Why they continue to ignore this alternative instead of publically acknowledging it evades me.

[Pharao13 (PharOs)]

The color of terrain and parts are completly diffrent!
I used “163, 162, 165” Medium stone grey

[JakeBaxtersTrains (Jake)]

I disagree. The old one looks better for the situation. It’d be nice if the new texture was named something different, and we could keep the old one still.

[OsmanNew6785]

i was expecting high resolution realistic materials…
we just got a cocomelon show.

[Lewin4]

Many people have said that both the old textures and the new textures should be kept, and I agree with this. The new textures still have a lot to fix.

• The slate texture used to be often used as ‘stone’, and the new slate texture looks nothing like the old one and wouldn’t work in the same scenes as a drop-in replacement.
• The new 0Rock texture looks nice, but is too dark.
• It looks to me that both 0Rock and Concrete textures seem to have a sort of green tinge to them(?)
• The new diamond plate texture looks much more flat and cartoony.
• 0LeafyGrass and the new Grass texture have nothing in common, and don’t work well together.
• The new texture for Granite looks flatter and less interesting than the old one.
• The new texture for Cobblestone looks great, but wouldn’t work well as a drop-in replacement in most of the scenarios where the old texture was used.
• The Brick and Mud textures for Terrain and for Parts are different.
• Many terrain textures are too smooth-looking and sometimes too bright compared to their Part texture counterparts.
• Grass, Brick, Wood, WoodPlanks, and 0CrackedLava textures have colour even when the colour of the part is set to a shade of grey.
• WoodPlanks and Wood textures are different colours, even when the material Color is set the same.
• The new WoodPlanks texture no longer has each of the planks exactly 1 stud wide. This could lead to alignment issues and @WoodReviewer being angered.
• Glacier and Ice -textured Parts have different friction levels.
• The new CorrodedMetal, Foil and Fabric textures seem to be brighter and have less detail.
• The old Sand texture is horizontally rotated, but the new one is diagonal, making it not fit in with many of the areas that the sand texture was used in place of a different material.
• The new pebble texture looks much better, but there aren’t as many places it can be used, similar to my issues with the Sand and Cobblestone textures.

I know that lots of the above issues have been talked about already, this is just my perspective on them.
Please notify me if any of the issues in this post were intended, already fixed, inaccurate, or incorrect.

Edit: Essentially all of these problems have now been fixed, and the rollout of the new materials has gone really well since. Huge props to the teams working on this!

[CaptainWeetabix]

I tried this out for myself, and I really don’t think that these should be added into all places. Many builds were designed with the old materials and are now incompatible with the new ones. I would strongly recommend some way of having the option to still use the old materials if the developer chooses to, perhaps an option in Studio settings.

I still like the new materials though and I look forward to seeing how people use them!

[iKhol]

I’m going to be completely honest, I don’t like the new textures. They aren’t absoulutely horrible but I still think they are a downgrade, if it’s possible they should try to implement a system that toggles the materials between Legacy and New, similar to how we still have compatability and future lighting. It would take a little more work but it would keep everyone happy and not completely destroy a developers work.
For example, my game Among The Dead has been completely destroyed by this update.

[ittrgrey (Ittr)]

@iKhol

a system that toggles the materials between Legacy and New

I would prefer this be done in a way that allows you to use both - I like some classic materials and I like some modern ones, what if I want to use both? A single toggle wouldn’t allow for this versatility.