Surface Appearance Textures Backend Upgrade

Hello developers,

We wanted to give you a heads-up regarding SurfaceAppearance. We have been working on improving our backend systems that are the foundation for future development of SurfaceAppearance.

However, due to the nature of the change and the huge amount of textures available in Roblox, there might be some latency when this is first enabled:

For example, you may or may not see the PBR textures (roughness, normal maps, metalness) for your game in the first few times you play (you will still see the color texture though).

We will enable this change in a couple weeks time and will let you know when it’s actually enabled.
If for some reason you are experiencing issues with PBR after this change, that persist after a few game launches, please let us know as soon as possible so we can investigate.

Thank you for reading the post.

P.S. If your game uses SurfaceAppearance heavily, you can leave a comment below with the place ID/URL. We would love to check out and be amazed at your creation!

**Update (5/10/2021): Backend upgrade has been completed. Please let us know if you have any issues regarding Surface Appearance not showing up in game.

200 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 12 minutes.

My game only uses PBR textures and is a current test place.

edit: thanks for everyone checking it out!

edit 3: since a lot of people are asking me how I made this, I used Blender and Substance painter as my only other softwares than roblox studio. This is currently just a solo project by myself.

89 Likes

For example, you may or may not see the PBR textures (roughness, normal maps, metalness) for your game in the first few times you play (you will still see the color texture though).
I feel as if this will scare some people, if there is latency then how long will it be?

15 Likes

This is a map of mine that uses PBR a lot.

5 Likes

We recently switched over our main game to have the majority of its textures using SurfaceAppearance a lot.

13 Likes

I’ve got Surface Appearance on every part in this game

4 Likes

my pbr testing place

edit: roblox if yall seeing this please 4k textures, or at least 2k please i beg. while a good UV unwrap can fix low texture resolution on small items, large environments need to be cut into tiny pieces to not have pixels that are 1x1 studs.
https://www.roblox.com/games/6243624116/pbr-testing

7 Likes

I’m currently working on a project that will probably release in a few weeks as well. and it heavily uses pbr… i’m gonna update you guys if something happens with it (currently all files are local and still don’t have a public test place).

3 Likes

If you don’t mind sharing, What type of backend changes have been made? Performance improvements?

3 Likes

A desert map I’m working on, which extensively uses PBR textures
https://www.roblox.com/games/6435606181/Desert-cliffs
:smiley:

6 Likes

We use SurfaceAppearance for our foliage in our test server:

11 Likes

the game I been working on with my friend is going to use PBR entirely,

https://www.roblox.com/games/5063114695/Physically-based-rendering
https://www.roblox.com/games/6300631262/Perdana-Leadership-Foundation

1 Like

Tiled SurfaceAppearance when? Are you at least planning to work on it?

6 Likes

This is one of my horror games, they all use PBR Texture to look more realistic.

https://www.roblox.com/games/5786591054/Automatonophobia-Nightmare?refPageId=26fb65a4-3a24-4dbf-8ea3-c97af33039b5

4 Likes

My entire game depends on the color texture of SurfaceAppearance, so as long as that gets shown without delay, as usual, then things should be okay for my game.

1 Like

roblox could add a uv scale / shift u and v parameters which would also be useful for scrolling textures etc

3 Likes

Bruh. I LOVED NO MANS SKY.
I love this game too! Defiantly fits with these textures.

1 Like

great Thats Will Help me alot With other devs

1 Like

Roblox looks so realistic when you remove the water texture from the roblox player client folder, look at this beauty!

And this next shot, is with future lighting! This is amazing.

Wow roblox, amazing to what we came to in the past 14-15 years

Game > Vehicle Legends - Roblox

Learn More > Surface Appearance Textures Backend Upgrade - Updates / Announcements - DevForum | Roblox

5 Likes