New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[TheCrypticRunner (Cryptic)]

The metal material is way too dark and the grass is way too cartoony compared to everything else. Also, the part materials stay at the default terrain color when their color is set to white and their tiling is much more visible than on the older materials. I hope there will be an option to use the old materials for the people who liked them. The plastic & smoothplastic materials are also darker, which conflicts with the colors on my game’s buildings. The terrain materials are also very low resolution compared to the parts. Terrain transitions also look weird, having a tiled triangular look which makes everything look like it’s on a grid.

Otherwise, it’s pretty good. I especially love the sand, since it fits perfectly with my game’s visual aesthetic and keeps a balance between cartoony and realistic.

[Scriptos]

I personally like this update and find that a lot of the before vs after shots look fine, but it’d be great if custom materials were to be released along with (or before) this. That would solve a lot of problems for people. You’d be in control and don’t have to fear an update completely changing the look of your game.

[MountainRidge]

Oh yes! can’t wait to use this with my games. Very exited!

[vetexgames (vetex)]

Old Materials

New Materials (same time of day, lighting settings, part colors, and materials)

[rgdawso (Mr_Tree)]

I agree with the need to have to use both the legacy and new materials at the same time. I believe some textures do look great, but some others definitely need to be improved. Some textures just stand out strangely when used in certain situations.

New Materials

Old Materials

I did attempt to make the new material as bright as the old material but it ended up having a weird rust look to the bricks.

[ruddev_ethan (gamer961)]

Check out my original reply here.

@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?

The latter solution is far more ideal for preserving games on the platform that were never intended to be made with these materials in particular. These are massive aesthetic changes - not simple upgrades. That being said, my bigger priority is preserving the game that I have been working on for the past two years and plan on continuing support on in the future. This is not an old game that isn’t being updated, so please make sure that it is still possible to preserve the old materials in games consistently being updated as well.

@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?

New materials give us significantly less ambiguity to work with. I outlined this in the above post I linked.

@RBLXImagineer

• These materials, built to leverage PBR, are very reactive to the lighting in your places. That means global lighting, atmosphere, and skyboxes can have a big impact on how these look. We would encourage you to play with those settings too to get you place looking they way you want with the materials.

Something I keep hearing from people is this exact point but in regards to Future lighting - saying that these materials look great with Future so we should just turn it on! Except our playerbase literally cannot run our game on their phones, tablets, and often old computers with that setting toggled. Even with ShadowMap enabled and nearly everything with disabled shadows, it is an easy 15-25fps gone - and for many devices that is unacceptable. So I recognize that these are extremely lighting dependent, but these need to be made for Voxel lighting as well, at least until Roblox improves performance for those more demanding lighting modes.

I feel like I have already spent way too much time out of my days writing these posts. The majority of developers most negatively affected by this do not have time to write massive posts like I have been doing. There has to be a better way to do this.

[RBLXImagineer]

Yeah, this looks like a result of most of the texture work being in the normal, metalness, and roughness. We can certainly put some more of that detail back into the albedo so when you’re not getting any lighting data, there’s some detail there. Noted and thanks!!

[ItsKoiske (Koiske)]

@ruddev_ethan

phones, tablets

I am pretty sure future lighting auto changes to ShadowMap for mobile devices.

[x_o]

(Which has the exact same performance issues)

[Kyxino (Kyo)]

Not sure if this has been reported yet, but when the grass is turned black, you can tell that it is tiled, like the outlines of the squares are showing up.

[Cindering]

@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.

Roblox should never force such a drastic change to be applied to all games without any option to access the previous behavior. This would be unacceptable from any other engine, and it should not be done by Roblox.

So many games, models, and other pieces of content were created with the current materials in mind - their intended visual style will be completely tarnished if they are all forced to use the new materials.

@RBLXImagineer

Is this acceptable, or would you prefer that new experiences get the new materials and existing ones have to be explicitly upgraded?

The wording of that point is very concerning - it makes it seem like once we create a new file, we will never be given the option to access the old materials in that file, or that the option will be taken away at some point in the future. What if we need to add new places to an existing game or create new files locally? The option to use old materials should remain available in all place files and should not be taken away.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the new materials look stunning, and I would be excited to utilize these in future projects. But our current games were specifically built around the look of the original materials, so they absolutely should not be forced to change.

[LocalWE (SteamboatOrchard)]

Before:

After!

Absolutely love this new update! However, there are a few things that could be changed.

1. Carpet material looks less like a carpet
   
   
2. I use Slate for rock walls… This looks like a brick wall with grass on top now…
   
   

Suggestions

1. If possible, Decorations on basepart grass
   a. There could be a property inside of the basepart called “DecorationsEnabled” and if that is true, the decorations will show
2. Materials named LegacyGrass or LegacyBrick for example, so we can have the classic feel, and some older games that don’t update anymore could still look good. This would be the default one, and developers would go change the material themselves.
3. Water as a material, this would make adding water in games a whole lot easier.

Anyways, other than that, I found no other issues! Can’t wait to see future versions of this!

Also sad day, Studs don’t exist anymore

[cunpliy]

Here’s all of my complaints. This is gonna be a long one.

Bit of a big issue but on lower graphics I tested it at the lowest setting. Some materials dont even look anywhere near how it looks on higher settings (tested on highest) and looks like there isn’t a material at all.

Sand on highest setting

Sand on lowest setting

Barley even looks like sand at all.
Heres more

Diamond plate on highest setting

Diamond plate on lowest

Doesnt even look like there is a material

From what I know this also effects the plastic, and foil materials. A bit with slate, you can notice it but it’s a bit harder on lowest setting.

Also studs dont appear on the baseplate on highest setting but does on lowest.

Also the fabric texture is super low res so it would be nice if it was higher. Same with the corroded metal.

Sometimes the cobblestone on parts can look really flat but with terrain it looks VERY flat. Also why is the textures on terrain a lot more low res then on parts?

Also the concrete looks way too wet.

The wooden planks has weird lines as shown here.

Same exact thing with the brink material

Also the pavement and brick textures have the same texture overlapping each other but the top one being more transparent which looks strange. This only happens on terrain though.

There isn’t enough pebbles in the pebble material. The empty spaces are too big and it’ll be nice to see pebbles overlapping each other.

The plastic materials looks strange on balls and cylinders or anything rounded. and is hard to notice as shown here

The materials have forced colouring which is nice to see be fixed as said but some materials are too dark like metal and wood.

The plastic material in general is just really streched out and has a harsh seam as shown here

And the slate material is bad. It looks nothing like how it should look and ruins games look, and isn’t rough enough. It makes games look more cartoony then realistic.
Here’s how it looks like on someone else build that I found on twitter.

Looks more cartoony then realistic.

The leafy grass looks too flat

The grass can look a bit rough sometimes, and sometimes resemble the old slate material a bit.

A lot of the materials noticeably tiles making this terrain thing I made look a bit bad. This obviously also affects parts.

Not sure if this happens with other materials but on geometry like this the sand material wont line up on terrain

Also PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE I beg you separate the secondary materials when the terrain is elevated when colouring materials this also applies with old materials. In a game I made the grass look more vibrant but it makes the dirt green which I do not want. It’ll be nice if it was separate colours.

Also a big issue that it makes builds look a LOT darker. Heres a before and after on the western template

Before

After

Not good.

Also please make this optional. This really ruins art styles and can make some games look funky. Here’s the western template tree before and after

Before

Doesn’t look bad
After

Looks kind of bad now.

Also it would LOVE to see the cracked lava in the lava cracks to have a small neon glow depending on how its the builder coloured it.

Also why aren’t the new materials released and just the updated ones? Would love to test them out!

Also please make stylized materials as well to chose from. This is gonna make it harder for people to make more stylized games and not everyone wants to make a realistic game. Beautiful stylized textures would be great to chose from and can make stylized games still look graphicly impressive if used and done right.

Heres an example of some stylized materials which look great

If we had quality better or like this, it would be spectacular to have!

[ItsKoiske (Koiske)]

@WEcompany

Carpet material looks less like a carpet

Because the material is called Fabric and it was too carpety for any other use case. Now at least people would be able to use it for something else than only carpets and rugs.

[LMH_Hutch (Hutch)]

reposted from from: New Terrain, and Parts, and Built-In Materials, Oh my! - #1467 by LMH_Hutch but missing some of that posts context so pardon some of the dramatic tone.

---

For a lot of developers on Roblox this isn’t just a hobby, it’s a job. Time spent working on something quite literally costs money and having to cover the costs of what might be hundreds of hours fixing mistakes they didn’t make is a huge loss. Hundreds of hours is by no means an exaggeration too:

• Can a color change fix it? Quick and easy.
• Can I even get the same color as before? Make a new texture per color I can’t get, not quick
• Did the texture sizing change / direction change? Edits to the build, not quick, potentially needs new textures to be made which is again, not quick
• Does the new material even look the same? Remake the texture, deal with color variation, not quick

This process for every part, every mesh, every model, and every bit of terrain in my game. Cherry picking my example but in my current project that’s north of half a million parts, an attire color palate that’ll need updating, our day night lighting cycles will need to be adjusted, and we’ll probably need to hire texturing artists to create and iterate on new materials to replace the old ones. On top of this we’ll have to pray that all these new textures even load in for people in the first place and that there won’t be performance implications from all these changes.

The complaints are warranted. There is real consequence to making changes like this and I for one am not looking forwards to the direct cost that’ll come from fixing it, the delays to our timeline because we’ll need to fix a directly visible player facing issue we didn’t create, and the waves of complaints we’ll get from our community until it’s fixed.

---

I really hope this preview build was super super early along and further iterations will have better parity with the current materials. This is far from an upgrade for me, my team, and our game. While some of these look great, others really really ruin things.

• Our white brick light house is now red
• All of our grass is green. Dead grass? Green. All the color variants of green grass no longer look as varied
• Our old slate rocks that looked pretty rocky now look like low poly blobs textured with dry lake bed chunks.
• All the metal in our game has been scratched up
• All of our light colored wood is now dark wood
• All out fabric is the wrong direction
• All our wood plank parts no longer line up with the material textures
• All our brick material parts have the same problem as our wood plank parts
• And almost all of our colors are darker and wrong

[Rockerite]

@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?

After going through and looking at some of my old builds using the new textures, I have to say that it is unacceptable to force these changing onto every existing game on the platform. While the new materials look nice, current builds were not created with them in mind. The solution to this requires hours of labor fixing materials and colors until it looks good. A lot of materials lost what they were good for. On top of this, all the colors automatically look darker with these new textures. Slate used to be good for a wide variety of textures, it was used to create something that looks rough. Instead, it now looks really smooth with cracks.

Before:

After:

@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?

In my opinion, the changes between textures when lowering your graphics is too extreme to the point that everything looks like smooth plastic. The worst material i’ve seen that this is an issue for is diamond plate, which just looks like normal metal. I know it is better for performance, but it wasn’t a problem with the old materials.

Example:

@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?

I haven’t created anything new with the materials, so I can’t be for certain, but it seems there is less options using the new materials. This is because of the realism and details of the textures. If I had to pick two that I would think have a high range of use, it would be granite and concrete. A lot of the textures have had their versatility removed such as slate, grass, and sand. In a game I build for, sand is often used for its soft texture in desserts. The course texture with bigger waves just doesn’t look good for them anymore. Grass is often used as both grass and also leaves, but the new textures leave nothing to the imagination. The material that used to have the most variety was slate, it was often used as a rough texture. One common use of slate was to represent dirt. It just doesn’t look right anymore.

Before:

After:

Overall, I think that these textures look great and can allow developers to create realistic worlds. That being said, that is all that developers can create. These textures are very limiting for anything but their intended use. This forces developers to stick to a realistic style, or to just use smooth plastic. I think the most important thing when it comes to materials is options. I think that developers should be able to pick between a set of materials that look the best for their game. A choice between the new and old textures would go a long way.

[TaBigMemesGuy (ulur)]

I really have mixed opinions about these textures, some look like they are going for a cartoon style look and others are made to look realistic. Personally, i think roblox needs to re-do these so they all match the same style.

[Thezi (TOJI FUSHIGURO)]

I can really only offer my feedback for:

@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?

My opinion is that you should not force the material change. It is a very strong opinion too, so please hear me out. Roblox, in the past, has been known for it’s faulty/unconventional quirks, and I would throw the current ‘part material system’ into that package of unique and unconventional quirks. This means that a copious amount of games have, and are, using the quirky material system for unintended purposes - it is what makes Roblox, well Roblox. Your “powering imagination” slogan and weird looking sand material allowed a myriad of robloxians to create unique waters for their world, same story with the granite material; I for one have seen many oceans comprised out of sand and granite. Forcing that material update would ruin that creative workaround that some robloxians used to create their own cool, unique ocean. There are countless workarounds for the imperfect material system currently in place, and I love that you are improving it but forcing the update could ruin many nostalgic places, and force some people to trash that creative solution that they would have kept for an eternity otherwise. That is why I think forcing the update would be a bad idea, thanks for hearing me out !

[Fire540Games (FireForge)]

The new materials aren’t bad, they’re just way too different from the current ones. Some of them are much better, like sand, cracked lava, and basalt, but some of them are ugly like salt, cobblestone, and slate.

Original reply

(new on the right, current on the left)

Salt:

Rock:

Cobblestone:

Grass:

Some of the materials look a lot different on the lowest and highest graphics settings. Several of them look like their textures are “shrunk” on the lowest setting (no, I didn’t move the camera on any of these. The materials actually get smaller depending on what graphics setting you use):

Basalt:

Glacier:

Sand:

Cracked Lava:

You can see the edges of marble, no matter what graphics setting you use

The lines on diamond plate disappear on the lowest graphics setting:

This is just a few of them. I found that almost all of the new materials have some bugs like this, especially on parts.

Studs also disappears on higher graphics settings:

Personally, I’d rather the current materials just be updated than completely scrapping them and replacing them with something completely different.

EDIT:
I tried the new materials in my game, and it’s a mess. Some of them are better, some are worse.

This is with the exact same color, materials, lighting, and it looks completely different. Limestone is orange, and cobblestone dosn’t look natural anymore. I do like the sand much better though.

The pink space grass is now reddish-purple, and sandstone is a lighter color. Grass looks flat from a distance, where the old one still had texture. I actually like the new sandstone texture though, except that it should be a bit darker to match the old one.

The new cottage cheese salt texture is complete garbage.

I love the new ice, glacier, and snow textures though:

[draco23681001236629 (draco236810012366291)]

I would personally like to see it being made possible to simultaneously be able to have some things be the new texture and some the old in games instead of trying to force this update or saying you can only have the old or the new not both.

I can see where there would be benefits to using some of these new materials on our game such as asphalt to mimic scales on some creature models, but then it would mean giving up having the old slate and sand used as an ambiguous texture. I don’t work with coding so maybe there would be an issue with having both the new and old options at once, but I really think that it would be worth it if it’s a possible change.

I also have a major issue with forced coloration, we heavily rely on custom coloring with materials and the forced coloration causes a lot of issues with tints being off from what we want to achieve. I would personally prefer to have parts never exactly matching terrain in exchange for a broader range in ability to customize the colors.

Overall not really thrilled with this update, I was expecting it to be more in tune with what devs wanted, but at least i’m glad to see feedback is going to be taken before it rolls out.