I feel like this situation with requiring asset uploads is the fault of myself and others who decided to share some meme images imported into the terrain. My apologies to anyone who feels like this feature isn’t going to be as useful anymore.
With all said and done, I think this change is going to end up opening pandora’s box. There will be an incentive for people to write a PNG parser in Lua and generate terrain data themselves, because it would likely be faster than waiting for moderators to approve the assets.
Given that we can already draw inappropriate content with the existing terrain tools, this restriction should just be lifted and inappropriate terrain should be treated like any other inappropriate UGC that doesn’t go through moderation before upload (I.e. in-game content).
Smooth Terrain has been around for over 4 years now, and I’ve pretty much never seen any inappropriate uses of terrain in that time frame. I hope that Roblox’s higher ups will be willing to reconsider and trust that the majority of the developer community will use this feature appropriately.
This feature is awesome and I’m really glad Roblox added it, but having to wait 17 minutes to use a heightmap and colormap isn’t so awesome.
(cc @GeneralRelish)