New Terrain and Parts Materials Preview Build! Oh YES!

[Spectaqual (Ivy)]

Another update to Roblox’s visual style, with a good handful of fresh new materials! However, this is the sort of thing to take cautiously so that you don’t step all over the artistic vision of the thousands of creators who built with the platform. Time and time again Roblox has tried to apply a platform-wide blanket change across the resources we use to build our games. From previous material changes, to changing the texture of terrain, to having every part have an outline…

In the forced transition from classic terrain to smooth terrain, Roblox didn’t have a wide enough array of materials at the time, nor did they have the option to set their Color3, so now every game which hadn’t been updated since has been left with a smaller selection of substitutes and a desaturated palette. While disappointing in my opinion, this was somewhat excused by how little the classic terrain was still in use, but that isn’t the case here.

Roblox is more established now, it’s no longer in that spot where we’re all still young and expect that there’ll be bumps as Roblox finds its place. That place has been found, and at this point we’ve all settled in. If any changes are going to be made, they need to either go alongside the pre-existing resources, or fulfill the same uses those old resources used to provide. There’s already been a fair amount of feedback here about that, such as @PeZsmistic’s reply at the start, so I don’t think I need to repeat it.

The overall feeling I get from this post is that there’s this belief that realism is seen as superior, rather than aiming towards the fact that we’re a wide variety of creators with a wide variety of ideas, visions, and styles. The belief that these previous resources need to be “upgraded”, along with all of our games, with drastic changes which don’t follow the already established visions of our art. To me, it implies that this update knows how our games should look better than we do, and that feels disrespectful.

[PeZsmistic]

@Spectaqual

The overall feeling I get from this post is that there’s this belief that realism is seen as superior, rather than aiming towards the fact that we’re a wide variety of creators with a wide variety of ideas, visions, and styles. The belief that these previous resources need to be “upgraded”, along with all of our games, with drastic changes which don’t follow the already established visions of our art. To me, it implies that this update knows how our games should look better than we do, and that feels disrespectful.

I very strongly agree with this note in particular. The first update about this revamp mentioned that Roblox was open to suggestions for additional materials to compliment the palette which gave the impression that they were open to considering alternative stylization alongside realism, but this first build gives the opposite impression.

Please do not forget that given Robox’s part-by-part style of building worlds, low poly and heavily stylized art styles are extremely common. Please don’t just cater towards ham-fisted early-console-style “realism”. Let stylized art styles thrive too.

[PysephDEV (Pyseph)]

Grass looks bad IMO. Does not fit in anywhere on our game's map.

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Stairs look very weird with new concrete and brick textures.

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New brick and concrete textures do not fit (wood too)

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Grass (especially on bushes and the bushes' berries) look very out of place.

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Concrete feels too reflective (the white material on the house). I really like the wood, though

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New slate material does not fit in whatsoever.

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Sand looks much nicer in my opinion.

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Ice does not fit in in my opinion and sand looks like slate...? Brightness in this picture is at 0.5, with Ambient set to 0, 0, 0. In the new picture I changed sand to Snow (since white sand looked ugly) and Foil to Glacier (Ice shards used Foil and ground used Ice in previous picture).

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TLDR I believe there’s always gonna be use-cases for both versions of the texture, and the only solution I see to this would be to offer more customization and control in regards for the material texture.

[hunterk1241 (HunterDaFloofer)]

Update (June 16th, 2023): This aged poorly. They made the new materials genuinely good compared to what they had here. I use them in this exact game now along with plenty of custom ones they also introduced. I like that they are also completely optional now

I agree with your statements you made. Roblox needs to keep the original feel of the materials while making them modern. The new textures aren’t bad… but they ruin some people’s visions and take away what they say in their catchphrase: “Powering Imagination”. I’m glad you made this post with such detail. Someone had to do it. Glad it was you.

Edit: This used to be so colourful and bright… It’s nowhere close to what it used to and I don’t like it.

Current:

Material Beta:

(Sorry for the sudden size change)

[InocuIar (Inocular)]

Just a repost of my reply from the last topic of this announcement

This is just 2 images taken and compares all the materials between the new and old.

Old Materals/Current

New Materials (I didn’t remove the studs)

In case you are wondering, the colors are all set to Medium Stone Grey aka the default part color. As of right now, the new materials don’t seem color variant yet like the old ones.

Also I like to request a feature that hopefully doesn’t destroy the look of some roblox games is add a new workspace property named Workspace.LegacyMaterials or a legacy materials section on the materials tab.

Overall I like the new textures but there is just something wrong with them that doesn’t give me the full liking on them. Perhaps if this change is by force. Mind adding custom materials (Not surface appearence)

[M_caw (Macaw)]

@Spectaqual

The overall feeling I get from this post is that there’s this belief that realism is seen as superior, rather than aiming towards the fact that we’re a wide variety of creators with a wide variety of ideas, visions, and styles. The belief that these previous resources need to be “upgraded”, along with all of our games, with drastic changes which don’t follow the already established visions of our art. To me, it implies that this update knows how our games should look better than we do, and that feels disrespectful.

I could not agree more.

Roblox seems to forget that going as realistic as literally possible is not the only direction to push the platform. There are many stylistic games (not on Roblox) which do not look realistic:

Realism is not the only way forward.

This can be seen everywhere on the platform. Roblox pushed out Future lighting, but where is simple flat shading? I know Roblox wants to look like every other platform and be hyper-realistic, evident with Rthro (which I’m glad is an option) and most drastically, forcing realistic textures on everything.

Not every game wants to be as realistic as possible. I cannot believe that Roblox even considered the option of forced realism. Just as you said- this feels incredibly disrespectful. Roblox really just wants to show off realism.

[evocul]

The new materials are extremely cool! However, it shouldn’t replace the current ones, instead be in its own category.

[LikeWaterOk (MRSim_ms)]

no please i beg
-BEFORE

-AFTER

PLEASE make them optional… The textures only work for some specific styles.

Also, make the textures keep the same colour. For example, brick is basically ALWAYS red. like, why.
and you can see the island in the pictures. The top is very bright, almost white. The bottom is this ugly grey.

[V4P0R]

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

Like many others, I share the concern about the style and color disparity between the materials. First and foremost, the mix between cartoony and realistic textures causes clashing styles across a single game. Not only that but the massive color disparities between the old materials and new materials (and even between the new materials themselves) means a large amount of effort has to be dedicated to remixing colors to return a game to an acceptable state style-wise. This may be manageable for games that are actively maintained, but games that are no longer actively supported by their developers will have their unique style sullied to the point of being unplayable eye-sores. As a result, it is absolutely essential that developers must explicitly upgrade their game’s materials rather than being forced into an automatic rollout.

Do you feel the new materials give you more or less options for using them in your games?

It would appear that many of the materials have a preset color baked into them such as grass having a green-ish tint and brick having a red-ish tent. This severely limits the ability to use materials creatively as we are essentially forced into a single usage for each material.

Looking at the materials for uses other than their specific type, do you feel the new materials give you more or less options for using them in your games?

As I mentioned, the preset colors baked into the materials make it impossible to use the materials for anything other than their labeled purpose. To further illustrate my point, here is a photo of four of the new materials on parts that are all RGB [255, 255, 255].

Photo

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

No, absolutely not. In my response to the first question, I stated that materials and colors in every game will have to be remixed. As someone who frequently works with smooth terrain, it takes an appreciable amount of time to mix smooth terrain materials with default materials. The massive color disparities means that every single one of my current projects will have to be reconfigured at a massive cost of time. It is also worth pointing out that a piece of smooth terrain and a part with the exact same color look wildly different, meaning each material will have to be manually recolored again to find the matching RGBs. Here is one of my projects that has simultaneously become more cartoon-ish and had its color palette completely ruined.

Before

After

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

All in all, the style and color disparities between the new and old materials decreases the immersion that I seek in my game. As someone who builds realistic projects almost exclusively, it has become immeasurably more difficult to replicate real life into Roblox using the default materials. I think this issue is epitomized by the new brick material, which has somehow managed to become even worse at mimicking real life brick.

Final Thoughts

I know I have spent my entire post ragging on the new materials, but I think it would be unfair if I did not point out the positives. First, I really love the emphasis on PBR in the new materials. The new wood material looks great, every crack and crevice is highlighted. Second, the new materials look great from the showcase photos and seem like they could solve many of the style-clashing issues I mentioned earlier. So, in my opinion, the new materials have the potential to greatly improve the platform but are a large step backwards in their current form.

[vastqud (vast)]

Overall, all of the new materials look great for what they are and much better than before. However, I have a use case for the Sand material that this update kind of breaks. Most of my game uses the Snow material, and I use Sand but colored white to denote roads. Here’s what that looks like:

The new Sand material looks weird when trying to show roads/paths like this. Since I can’t paint color onto specific sections of terrain to differentiate roads from the rest of the snow by color, I don’t really have an alternative to using recolored Sand. This is the only complaint I’ve found so far, overall the new materials look nice.

I’d love either a way to paint color on to specific sections of terrain (like the paint tool that already exists, but for color) or for the Sand material to be updated slightly to better help my use case.

[RoboMolluskKing]

Some of the new and refreshed materials are decent in my opinion, but half of them look incredibly bland. I’m a fan of diamond plate material from in the game to real life and I think the diamond plate material looks better than the old one, the same goes with the brick material. The new foil looks hardly noticeable.

There is a model I made back in 2015 which is a theater. I dislike the new wood due to the fact that it made the brighter colors darker, the theater even looks like something from an early test animation of Toy Story.

Theater with old materials

Theater with new materials

Take these snapshots, for example, the wood on this update board uses the Reddish Brown color. I couldn’t make out if it’s wood, due to the fact that the color is pitch black.

I used Pebble to make the update board look like a corkboard. The cork on the board doesn’t look like cork anymore. That leads to this other point:

When builders build soft material (couches, blankets, 3D clothes), they use grass, for instance. I used grass to build comfy sofas, now it looks really scratchy (ya think!? It’s freaking grass for goodness sake!) They use grass to make leaves on a tree too, unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of that, but you get the point.

Speaking of grass, the new grass looks really flat, detail-wise. No dark shadows, it looks like you put heavy books on to dry the grass out.

When the colors change on the new cracked lava, I barely can see the color change in the cracks except for red.

Now, that leads to the feedback:

@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?

No, I would have a change option in the game settings. It would have an appearance menu with two options: Old and New.

@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 get it, the shinier, the laggier. This does sacrifice a lot of graphics which made everything look flat. It also sacrificed a lot of lighting. Unacceptable.

@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?

Well, I went over this without noticing, it gives me less options to use these new materials for something else in my games.

@RBLXImagineer

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

No.

@RBLXImagineer

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

It’s most likely a lighting issue, I’m going to say this just in case, there’s a party in the castle (strobe warning)

Old materials

New materials

@RBLXImagineer

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

If it’s tweaked just right it would increase way more immersion in my games, so far it’s decreased so much

[Project_Aurora]

This is cool and all, but it just doesn’t appeal to everyone on this platform. As many have said, it undermines the people who used the old textures, and it comes with the risk of destroying the mood of games. Not everyone on Roblox wants to make the next GTA V. I, for a change, would like to have stylized textures, rather than realistic ones…

Nonetheless, this has me curious, since you all have been working hard to ensure terrain materials blend well, does this mean we will also be able to upload custom textures for terrain soon?

That would be a REAL game changer, and a lot more versatile than forcing everyone to use realistic textures…

[PysephDEV (Pyseph)]

Quick question:
Since this practically demonstrates the tiling property for PBR textures, will we be potentially getting tiling SurfaceAppearance objects soon ?

[cunpliy]

Not really because the og materials also used PBR and they tilled. But it might come soon because they know it’s high in demand.

[shadowcalen1]

As developers, I feel one of the most important aspects in a platform is stability. This as it stands is the opposite.

I don’t think anyone is rejecting the idea of better looking textures per se. I am fairly sure if roblox made the effort to ensure the new textures had very similar looks/ behaviors to the old textures the complaints would be rather limited, even if it was a mandatory switch over.

That said, the current style is not intended to be particularly realistic and having the tools to make more realistic experiences is valuable. My question is why this is somehow bieng treated as a binary choice.

If it were my call I would separate the textures into two classes, Stylized and Realistic. From there I would update the existing materials such that they would work with the new framework and put them in the “Stylized” branch, and move the new materials into the realistic branch.

This has several advantages that would not be present were we just given both materials.
A: It allows for a cleaner organization of materials, such that we don’t end up with giant lists where it is impossible to find what you are looking for.
B: When custom materials hit the library, it provides a easy(r) way of sorting them. You want a wood material that is made by user? Just set the material to wood, then select their “channel”.

[WaterGuy130 (Water)]

1. 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?

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, DO NOT AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE THESE NEW MATERIALS TO OLD PLACES. Older places were designed with older materials in mind, so unless these new materials were made to resemble the old ones a great deal, it should not happen.

2. 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?
   

   
   
   No.

3. 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?

Much more less of an option. Older materials were much more generalized and ambiguous. Sand could be used for clothes, masts, etc. Slate could be used for bark and other rough surfaces. Sand right now however, has its direction changed as others have pointed out. Slate now resembles cobblestone a great deal more, ruining the rough look and feel.

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

I cannot tell since the wood is too dark.

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

Wood planks (and other materials) have these weird creases. Speaking of wood planks. PLEASE change the plank width back to 1 studs instead of 0.8 studs.

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

As they stand right now, decrease.

Closing notes:
Fix wood planks being 0.8 instead of 1
Fix materials being too damn dark, make the colors resemble their original counterparts so builds aren’t thrown out of wack.
Fix wood for having weird ridges
Fix the terrain materials by removing the colors already on them
Get rid of those tiny grains in sand so they’re usable for cloths (and make their directions straight like before)
Keep backwards comparability
And we could benefit a lot if we were given multiple variations of the same material.

I had high hopes for this, but I’m somewhat disappointed by this early build.

[WaterGuy130 (Water)]

Might be a case of skybox choice. That or maybe turn up your graphics.

Heres the skybox I use www.roblox.com/library/627338483

[isaiahbur]

New Terrain, and Parts, and Built-In Materials, Oh my!

Will terrain be more colorable than the current terrain? Because currently if you were trying to make red or brown grass it’s pretty much impossible not to get a pink color without messing with the lighting or using a strange color to tint it brown. Other terrain materials have this problem aswell and it might present strange cases of making part colors different from the terrain colors to match.

New Terrain, and Parts, and Built-In Materials, Oh my!

Also please let certain terrain materials not be rainbow colored. I’M LOOKING AT YOU, ROCK.

The terrain color feature does not work as expected

I was trying to use smooth terrain for my alien environment but unfortunately discovered that terrain color support is lacking. In what world is this orange? (Not my alien world!) [4c4f4c9dd761d7417999bc601af897ab (2)] [4c4f4c9dd761d7417999bc601af897ab (2)] I assume the reason my rocks are blue instead of orange is because the actual terrain textures aren’t white or grayscale. The colors “bleed” together instead of showing the Color3 I have selected. This behavior is not what I expected fr…

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@RBLXImagineer

• Strive for a high level of realism, using real world examples to drive our direction.
• Unify the appearance of similar parts and terrain materials, making them more compatible.
• Author for the most common uses for each material to maximize usefulness and uniqueness of each material.
• Improve the responsiveness of color shifting terrain and parts, giving you greater range of possibilities.

complaints have been made about the coloring problem with terrain and it got a response that it will be “improved” only to see the problem made worse even bringing the problem over to normal parts instead of just terrain therefor destroying most of the usefulness/uniqueness of these materials.

it would be better that they simply keep the original materials and add new ones instead of replacing them at this point.

[nachowars21 (Musgravite)]

I don’t like this update at all, if the materials look better, but what about the games that used the old textures?

These textures do not look quite “realistic” rather it is somewhat cartoony, you can see it on the grass, is my opinion.

Roblox could add this function with the option to turn it on or off, that is, when you deactivate it, your game converts the materials to normal ones.

Something similar to the option to activate Roblox’s realistic grass.

[Fluffmiceter]

Please make sure the textures are presentable and carry the same core appearance and detail on the lowest graphics settings! PBR maps don’t render on the lowest settings, so you could end up with some really flat and ugly textures on the lowest graphics!

Like for the sand material, the base diffuse should still have the wave shape imprinted on it.