Hello,
I’m requesting a new material, a tree bark material.
Today as a builder I have to cheat using “Slate” to fake the roughness of the tree’s bark but its still not looking like it should be… Of course there is “Wood”, but it’s too smooth and belongs to planks and man made buildings.
Using Meshpart’s texture isn’t the right thing either, the texture looks smooth, Materials has normal/bump map + few more that makes it a “Material”, feels more alive than just a smooth flat texture on top of the meshes.
Same use case as every other material roblox has added, simplicity and making things more approachable.
Not everyone should have to be a texture designer.
Support, would improve building for a lot of us on the platform.
I feel like @WoodReviewer would strongly approve of this feature. As for me, even though I’m not a builder, I know for a fact that this would help builders thus, I support this feature.
There are a lot of materials that could be added for any use case. I feel like Roblox should just let us upload custom materials instead of having to use textures on every side of an object - which eventually causes lag and can mess with transparency. I don’t support this because it’s pretty niche I feel, but something which would allow the upload of custom materials would be perfect.
Actually I wouldn’t. If you read my blog post here you can see my thoughts on how tree bark should work on trees. This would still apply to a tree bark material, with the texture of a bark following some a pattern that extends away from the origin of the tree. What the exact pattern would be can vary, but that isn’t important. The main problem is that for a tree bark texture to work it would need to entirely be made out of bricks. I highlight this in the blog with unions, but TL;DR Roblox materials for bricks and unions do not bend. This means if you have a curved branch, or a Y split with the branches, the material will only go in one orientation. This can be vertical, horizontal, or at some odd offset, but the point is if you have the main body of the tree textured in one orientation any branch that deviates too much from the initial direction will have the bark facing in an improper direction.
There are some ways to combat this. One is to have the bark material made in such a way it appears correct from any angle, but that option would likely cause it to loose most of the appearance desired in the OP. Another way is, with unions, to make a UV map, upload a copy of the Roblox material as a texture, and make the UV in a way that all the branches/trunk of the tree have the correct orientation of the bark. This is possible, and I have done it with meshes before, such as with the book shelf which is a mesh part.
No support, this seems pretty niche. Roblox could’ve added hundreds of textures, but just like with the Roblox API, they want to avoid having too many features which make the essential stuff hander to find.
I think the solution is to let us put normal maps on textures. I don’t imagine it would be a lot of extra work since we already can send our own diffuse maps and the normal maps for Roblox’s materials are also just images.
Having the ability to upload custom material textures with normal maps, bump maps and custom properties would be great. And, if our uploaded custom materials could also be applied to terrain, that would be an awesome feature to have!
As much as I’m not against this material being made, I do think things are at the point where we should primarily just look to go in the direction @Lightlimn is suggesting. A lot of games have different styles and aesthetics, and as custom characters become more common we need to the tools to make our games feel more like they’re ours.
Despite any of that, supplied materials are great for beginners and even if this is only used on trees, trees are so incredibly common. We should really focus on how often the material would be used, not how many things it would be used on. If the time comes for more default materials, I personally think this one makes the list.
, nice trees!