well, as far as i know, no other game engine provides default materials to its users instead of the user providing them themselves.
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lets say Epic decided that all games on Unreal 4 use cel shading now. Would that be acceptable?
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His point is that Epic wouldn’t be able to do that, users on that have full customizability over the materials.
You are also missing the point, blue’s point is a scenario similar to this current one we are in, which is where devs have little control over what the default material textures of parts and terrain are, alike to Epic forcing a lighting change for all games on their platform. Both are destructive to how a lot of games would look on both platforms if both situations were to happen.
And referring to what @sp1980 posted, in this situation devs do not have much control over the default materials at all, so comparing a situation where users have complete control to a situation where users have little control is unfair at best. One of the only ways a dev would have control of material “textures” were if they were to try and emulate their own materials by coating parts in textures and doing so for every part in their game which would be very impractical and sacrifice performance that would be better spent on gameplay.
It just so happens that the default materials provided fill the role very well of being mainly neutral and being able to be used in a wide array of situations, from low poly to more realistic builds.
However with this update, with it having a lot of potential to be the next in line of amazing changes to the platform, it is crushed by overly realistic materials that would kill the aesthetics of low poly games, and very flat materials that should be more detailed killing the aesthetic of high detail games. This forced update is a mess of out of place PBR material changes that feature baked on colors and uncanny valley worthy textures that end up removing more developer creativity overall.
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I wasn’t saying that Roblox should force this on users, I was saying that the comparison is not a good comparison. I think users should have a choice! In a previous reply, I said:
I’m all for allowing devs to have more control over the materials! I would love it myself!
I like the newfound realism, but I will agree, it’s not for every game. (Also the terrain transitions look awful now.) The baking of colors is stupid, and I honestly hate slate now.
I hope the brand new materials will be better, at least they aren’t overrides of classics.
I imagine them being like the skybox instance, except not scriptable due to performance.
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well, that wouldn’t happen, because users can write their own shader from scratch if they want to. roblox is pretty unique in how (understandably) locked down it is.
imo, custom terrain textures is one of the most needed engine features in roblox. it has a great terrain system with painting of different materials, triplanar mapping… but without the ability to use custom textures for it, it’s almost useless for me. if roblox were to implement custom textures for it somehow, it would be fine for it to exclude all the fancier features of the voxel terrain, like having different textures on the sides than on the top, custom blending like with the new grass and mud, blockier terrain for planks etc - just the basic smooth terrain with a custom texture would be all that’s needed.
i honestly don’t see roblox as needing anything else as far as texture mapping goes; for anything that isn’t terrain and is an environment prop or character etc, the existing capabilities of roblox are fine. something like a shader graph or the ability to write custom shaders seems very unlikely, esp with roblox’s cross platform aspect. but custom terrain textures would be very nice.
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Now that’s something I can get behind, custom materials made by devs would be great, and allow for the maximum amount of freedom when developing! Not too sure how difficult this would be to implement though, not easily I’m guessing if this has been considered before
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Depends if they plan to
Closest of that to happen was MaterialLibrary or something like that I saw on the road map like last year
And it shouldn’t happen in roblox either. They provided a tool for working in their platform, and they should not forcefully change every single game to look how they want it to. In my scenario, that doesn’t matter and games use cel anyways.
Bottom line is if roblox wants to be a respectable platform for making games, then forcing change like this in such a way that it will ruin pretty much every single game made on roblox would be unacceptable.
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Marble does look good, the issue is the apparently tiling.
To be frank, I do like this new texture of slate. The issue is that with these new materials, although I completely understand the difficulty in revamping and recreating materials in the first place, is in regard to the fact that players now have to rework how certain materials are methodically used.
Concrete looks VERY nice, a little too glossy but I think it’s swell.
I think it would be better to just make a higher quality version of the old brick material and have another brick material where the bricks are better but actually align.
BIG fan of how nice the wood and cobblestone textures look, the BIG issue is that there is another material alignment issue similar to the brick material issue.
It’s just that there’s a gap, and I really don’t like that.
I do know that this has huge potential, though.
Grass material somehow comes off as appearing more low-quality than the last one. Makes my mini-map look like a blocky Sims-game bootleg made on Unity.
#slateposting
I’ll be kind on the brick material for once, it does provide some degree of pretty-ing up to some builds.
BIG complaint is the one thing everyone is talking about: the ghosting of the brick material from a distance and the alignment issues involved. I see the appeal, but the execution was flawed.
Pebble is probably the finest looking material as of right now out of all of these.
Falling more in love with the woodplank and concrete material, it’s just that woodplank is incredibly flawed.
Now we get to the meaty part of my criicisms.
The big issue here is that the previous materials were broad and adaptable enough in regard to how they were used. Players we able to measure some of the parts in regard to the texture of the material accordingly, like wooden planks and bricks, to make really unique parts. The issue is that adaptability and broadness is gone. Slate has large cracks which, although great, is too large of a material texture for it to continue for builds like the ones I presented here. Another issue, in that sense, is that some materials, like grass and bricks, bring down the quality on a very weird level.
My condensed thoughts:
Bricks - Rework it for adaptable measurements; I recommend TWO brick materials, one that is for smaller bricks and one for larger bricks. Fix the ghosting problem.
Slate - Too large for what the texture of the material is, make that a new material instead and revamp slate to something more familiar
Grass - un-sims the material please, and make it so it isn’t only green
Fabric - Good, but less detailed than the original fabric; make it more detailed
Marble - Fix the material, give more detail to the material
Sand - Honestly great, but I recommend making it to where instead of being in one orientation, it can be perceived as going in any direction in regard to the sand formations
Woodplanks - Probably THE BEST, but please ix the measurements on the texture for the material itself
Nice work overall, though!
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Something like this would be amazing. The ability to select and use different texture packs in studio would unlock unlimited power (and creativity). Roblox could even consider adding more packs, such as a cartoony one, a realistic one, a old school one (meaning the OLD Roblox textures from 2013 - 2014), and a few different varieties.
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This post kind of made me anxious to jump into building in roblox, considering the fact that everyone hates this.
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Most people hate it because it ruins old builds, and grass is ugly. If you start with these materials, you have nothing to worry about, aside from maybe color less baking in a future beta or release, and grass.
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Grass looks worse now, which is an achievement considering og grass looking like there was a black hole under it. It now looks like lowest settings Fortnite grass.
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Part Picker is a pretty good plugin for something like this.
(link for those who want it) [spoiler]https://www.roblox.com/library/2666837095/PartPicker[/spoiler]
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It’s fine this is just an early beta. I’m sure everything would get resolved.
Is there a link for this plugin?
Thank you all for the wide range of feedback you’ve provided so far! We want you to know that we hear you, and we’re working to address your notes.
As part of this process, we’ve decided to release a series of updated preview builds to you as we make changes based on your feedback.
Today’s (March 11, 2021) test build has the following changes:
- Albedo colors and values have been updated to more closely match original textures
- Material height-map blending has been softened and should look better at higher quality levels
- Tiling artifacts were fixed on several materials
- Large cracks were removed from slate part material
- Ice albedo contrast was reduced to more closely match original textures
- Tiling rate of cobblestone was increased to make the stones more realistically sized
Known Issues:
- Possible crash on launch (we have one example, but please let us know if you encounter others)
- New terrain > part materials (asphalt, basalt, etc) still have full colors baked in. This will be resolved in a future build.
- Terrain detailing for brick, wood planks, pavement and cobblestone is still incorrect. This will be resolved in a future build.
Please continue to provide feedback in this thread; we want to make this a great improvement for you!
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