Other than that, this update is absolutely amazing!
an issue I found for rough maps is that the reflective parts farther from your character aren’t white, but black. I have the SurfaceAppearance set on Overlay, with no ColorMap
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Surface Appearance fails to compress. If I take out the colormap it gives the same error but normals and roughness show up.
18:32:17.729 - Failed to upload compressed SurfaceAppearance. PBR textures may not be visible in game. Change a TextureId property to retry.
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There’s no plan to allow editing the texture properties in game any time soon. We can do this eventually, but it will require some technical work. So, if it’s valuable, please make a feature request thread. That would help us understand your use cases and know how many people want this so we can prioritize it accordingly.
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Some people on this thread are still having various issues. We are currently looking at keeping this feature in beta while working on stability, but unlocking it to work in-game with the caveat that it may not be perfectly stable at first. I will give more details on this as soon as we have them. I don’t think this feature will be completely out of beta until a week or two after we unlock its use in games.
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I would really like to make a request thread but it seems that I am not permitted. So, I’ll just summarize it.
Basically, I’ve been experimenting with custom R6 rigs using MeshParts and I would like to load the player’s clothings properly on their character’s mesh using this feature. I’ve made a thread before that completely explains my case here, if you are interested.
Thanks for responding nevertheless.
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In the future, will there be other properties to SurfaceAppearnces? Kinda like how Textures have a Z offset and stuff.
Edit: Tiling and setting an option for one side would be great, since right now if I need to make a large object, the quality of the surface appearance is bad. (ex: floor, ground, larger terrain, etc,)
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you can tile textures with SurfaceAppearance. Scale the UVs so they extend past the borders of the texture, the bigger the more times it repeats.
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Quick Question: Will there ever be an option to make Surface Appearances “override” graphics settings? Or give them the same rendering treatment as regular materials.
Example of what I mean:
Some games use the foil material for water. The material’s Normal map, from what the player sees is rendered “infinitely” I am 95% sure that normal maps don’t make a huge difference, if any on performance.
Will/Can there be an option to do this the same for SurfaceAppearances?
In the waves I showed off earlier, the waves in the mid (and/or foreground depending on graphics settings) Have the appearance of smooth-plastic (since the surface appearances aren’t loaded). Im on my phone right now, but when I get the chance I will send a screenshot of what I mean
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The same happened to me, except, for some reason, I didn’t have to re-enable the feature after disabling it. It would appear to work even when it’s disabled. Interesting…
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Whenever I try applying a normal map to my avatar, the normal map does not render properly and instead I get these weird black artifacts. I’ve noticed that problems occur if you try using already existing roblox-made meshes. If you try using PBR with imported meshes, it works fine.
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I had an issue similar to this. Is the original normal map a resolution higher than 1024? because I think something happens in compression where any small crack/detail that makes a shadow gets “corrupted” or something like that (I think its because it gets super small it doesn’t know if it should be a shadow).
I fixed mine by turning the original resolution to 1024 then uploading it as an image. I have no idea if that will work for you, but it worked for me.
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Hey everyone. SurfaceAppearance visuals are now enabled in all games. You still need to opt-in to the Studio beta to modify SurfaceAppearances. The feature should be fully out of beta in a few weeks once some final bugs are fixed and UX improves.
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So after testing, that is not the problem. The normal map I’m using is below 1024x1024. Still getting the same problem, for some reason.
I’ve attached a repro file. Notice how the upper torsos of both avatars don’t have any visible normal map, even though one is applied. Notice the black artifacts that show when moving the camera around them.
NormalMapRepro.rbxl (55.8 KB)
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is future planned to be released with it ? cause it seems that future is the most efficent/supported render engine for pbr’s appearance comparing to shadow map and voxel
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When are you adding SurfaceAppearance support for .fbx meshes and parts?
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This is really great to hear, it makes me far more excited for the future of visuals in games!
Although I was wondering, what are some of the goals, besides bug fixes, that are aimed to be reached when this feature is considered to be fully out of beta? Does it include modifiable properties or faster load times for all maps to load? (Currently, when I parent a model inside of workspace in-game, it takes around half a second for all the maps to load except for ColorMap which loads instantly. At least, on my end.)
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They removed the ability to enter in a value for roughness, metalness etc because of performance losses as a result. Just keep a library of grayscale images to use when you need a certain roughness, for example (a 1x1 pixels image works fine).
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When are we going to be able to tile SurfaceAppearance? Without having to scale UVs
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