Overall, I love making lightsabers for game types I usually mess around with in-built blender textures. This makes me so happy I can finally use Surface Textures wohooo!
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This amazing I love the realistic feeling of the textures
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Heya!
I’m super happy with this beta and I’m really excited to see the release 
I do have 2 questions (@Homeomorph):
First of all, will catalog items (incl. community creations), in the future, also be able to contain the SurfaceAppearance properties? (aka. being able to implement normal maps and similar?)
Secondly, I really liked the control we used to have with the maps in the separate Studio build. Right now, I don’t see any sliders anymore which bummed me out a bit because being able to set the Roughness on top of the texture maps (or without any texture maps), was very convenient for e.g when you want to make something look really wet using a slider. That way, for example, when it would rain in-game you could just gradually change the value instead of instantly change the texture map.
Are there any plans to (re)introduce a way to control the texture maps in-studio (incl. scripts)?
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SurfaceAppearance will eventually be allowed on catalog items, but this may happen some time after SA can be used in games. We want to add some extra optimizations for avatars to support 100+ characters all wearing unique accessories.
We removed the roughness slider because proper support for it incurs a performance cost and we weren’t sure if it was worth committing to support. We can add it back if there’s enough demand. We’re also thinking about other options to achieve wetness, like material layering. We want to do more research on this.
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What’s so cool is it even can make the head under the mask in the testing place look amazing.
I am looking forward to amazing features like this, Roblox!
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Absolutely hyped for this! This is a huge leap forward for realistic-looking games!
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Awesome, that’s super cool!
Thank you for the information, I’m excited to see what’s next!
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This excites me alot, I am going to use this alot in the future. I could use this for many materials , plus it would make my game look better by making it more realistic. 
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Quickly made some custom brick texture (grey so i can recolor it) and a normal map.
Now, why do they appear red? There is nothing red? My bricks are white/grey, I put the colors in color and normal map in the normal map id. Am I missing something? What went wrong here?
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I think you may have the first setting in the SurfaceAppearance object not set to “Transparency”, or it may be the fact that this is still a Beta-feature.
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Awesome that you, the Roblox team, are implementing this sort of tools and additions to the site, games and community.
I am using Roblox from 2014 and I have seen Roblox from 2006, the development that it went through is mind blowing.
Good luck and stay safe everyone out there!
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I have noticed that its not doing the “bumpmap” look-and-feel on all sides of part, such as the back surface. Hopefully its not just me and that this gets looked into
Preview:
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Combining SurfaceApperance + FiB 3 + PBR textures + Sunrays + Realistic looking RTHRO + and Fog.
These will make Roblox look super realistic!
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Try it on a newly created mesh part, i had same issue and tried it on a new mesh and it worked somehow
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They were initially new meshparts. Just basic cubes. Inserted a new surface appearance and applied the textures and this is the result:
It seems to only affect the Front and Back surfaces. All the other sides are fine. Preview:
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I am very excited to see this in action! I have checked the test game out and it looks extraordinary. I am very happy that roblox is finally expanding and helping the development community more and more. This is definitely a step in the right direction to creating more realistic games. Maybe in the future they will raise the limit for meshes imported? Im not sure but whatever happens, I am excited for the future.
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I’m concerned on one thing: Will there be a texture-style tiling feature on this that works on normal parts? It’d be quite useful to not be forced to use Blender just to make a road for example.
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I am more than happy that such a feature exists now!
Here’s a realistic rock I made, thanks to the feature, I could finally insert it in Roblox just as cool as it looks in blender.
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Uhh… Tried to add one to a part thinking I could change some special properties of it, but gave man error and now the object adder window is stuck on my screen, completely frozen, I can’t see what I’m typing so I hope it’s at least somewhat gramatically correct. Clicking anywhere on studio or the frozen window results in the windows error sound, I cannot do anything with Studio now. The program is not “not responding” but does not respond to anything. Hopefully I can at least end the process.
Anyway, to replicate this, just right click on a part, search Surf, try to add it to a regular part, and then boom its frozen and you can do nothing about it. This is probably really scary for the users who don’t know the Task Manager and such, should probably fix asap.
Edit: I can’t save what I was working on, that is unfortunate.
Edit2: I successfully closed it with the Task Manager, will try to replicate it again to see if it was just a one time thing or if it still happens.
Edit3: Yup, it is 100% replicateable, tried 3 times, happened all 3 times.
2 Likes