As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to go from a flat diffuse texture, to a full set of PBR textures.
As a hobbyist free from paying exorbitant monthly fees for texturing software, and one who works almost entirely in Blender, the amount of time I spend generating metallic, roughness, and height maps (which I convert to normal maps using an online tool) in image editing software is almost as long as I spend painting the diffuse texture in the first place. This is a massive and tedious timesink in my content authoring process.
There are several AI tools Roblox has built that generate diffuse and PBR maps on the fly, but this functionality is locked inside black boxes.
Roblox should provide inputs in-Studio that allow developers to provide diffuse textures which are then fed through the same algorithms/AIs that Roblox uses for its material and model texture generation tooling to generate PBR textures.
In essence, I want to open the material generator or the model texture generator, and provide a pre-created diffuse texture, skipping the entire initial AI diffuse texture generation step, and only following through with creating the rest of the PBR textures, which may or may not need to tile seamlessly. Ideally, I should also be able to download these textures before they’re uploaded so I can tweak them.
This would significantly reduce or entirely eliminate my least favorite part of texturing a model in the majority of cases.
Roblox has created a compelling suite of AI tooling, but is falling short on making those tools actually useful for the iterative process of game development. The future is AI-assisted, I would love to see more work done in that direction.