SurfaceAppearance Studio Beta [Released]

Oh yes, that is hot! Can’t wait to use it!!!

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That. Is. EPIC!
That is honestly amazing! Great work!

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This looks awesome! This combined with something like the Future is Bright lighting system could make for some really high-quality games. I can’t wait to start experimenting with this for my own projects!

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So awesome that roblox is finally making some tools for developers to make some really realistic stuff. I can’t wait to try this out and see what can be done!

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What can I say? Applause! :clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

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It’s hard to make absolute claims about performance. On high graphics quality levels, MeshParts with SurfaceAppearance read more texture data in their shader than MeshParts only using TextureIds, so they’ll be slightly more expensive. On low graphics quality levels, the extra textures are disabled, so performance should be similar between SurfaceAppearance and just MeshPart.TextureId. Low end devices in Automatic graphics level mode should have no issues.

Memory usage is a little more complex and is subject to change.

We have discussed the possibility of adding emissive textures. That seems like a likely addition at some point.

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YESSSSSSSSS We needed this!! I wonder when yall will release this to roblox game and not to just studio??

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The only problem is that even if you upload a 4k texture to Roblox it scales it down so you can’t really get a high resolution texture in Roblox right now.

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Yeah, I know but that lol, but for meh it still ok. The biggest problem is roblox now allow we to upload some mesh that have over 10k triangles which is make the texture look more wierddddd

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@Homeomorph Any clue why my PBR textures from Blender, even when re-baked, tint themselves red about 5 seconds after a colormap is applied on them?

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Since when can we uplaod meshes with 10k+ tris ?

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you can lol in uh avatar evolution not in normal roblox studio

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Ah ok I already thought I missed that we could in the normal studio version.

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Textures made in Substance Painter

Vehicle from: Tank Warfare - Roblox

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Finally games becoming like AAA titles from steam and consoles!

this very cool! i seen some peoples places with this mind blowing to me.

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Great to see this feature finally out.

Although i have two questions, will alpha/mask maps have their own channel like roughness and normal?

And is it possible we could see more maps coming out in the future such as emissive and displacement/height maps?

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The AvatarEvolution build was more lenient with what kinds of content it allowed. We are being more conservative with the main Studio Beta to not allow certain things until we’re sure they’re in a state we can support long term. If you want to load content you made with the AE build you may need to

  1. Remove all SurfaceAppearances from regular Parts.
  2. Convert your rbxgameasset:// references to rbxassetid://.

1 is because we are still thinking through how custom tiled materials should work and we want to leave room for us to decide how SurfaceAppearance works on Parts later without committing to a sub optimal solution right now. We may want to explore smarter tiling techniques and likely another API that doesn’t require an instance to be parented under every single Part in your game.

2 is because of some technical reasons that make rbxgameasset references difficult to support right now. See my original post for instructions to convert these references.

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@TheCarbyneUniverse Even Unity doesn’t have HDRI’s, skybox’s are fine atm. I just hope Roblox gets to the rest of the road map.

Overall, this update is nice. But I don’t see my self using this until the workflow is improved. Right now it is too tedious to import in PBR materials at a large scale. Looking at the roadmap:
image
It seems there is already some sort of feature being developed to make the workflow with materials easier.

@Homeomorph Will this be like other engines where you can create a material in the new asset library and set up textures and just drag and drop it to parts?

Also, will texture tiling be added soon?

Oh nevermind, it seems you answered that question with a post right as I posted this. Good luck! I really hope a better solution for working with PBR materials can come out soon. :slight_smile:

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I appreciate it, I’m having some other issues with SurfaceAppearance not displaying my diffuse/base texture at all.
Every time I click off the SurfaceAppearance object the decals appear from the input box and never display in the first place. I’ve attached a gif of the bug below:

It works if you instead grab the asset ID
image

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(referring to picture 1) on the left we have your plastic toy sword and on the right we have the mighty excalibur ready to be swung at your will, cool update, hopefully wont destroy bad mobile devices

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