Hello developers,
We are thrilled to announce that we are now moving User Generated Content (UGC) Materials and the Built-in Upgraded 2022 Materials out of beta and to a full release. The new material features are now available to many, and will be rolling out to all developers over the coming weeks. These features give you new capabilities to take the look and feel of your experiences to the next level.
Let’s take a look at what’s in this release and what’s next.
UGC Materials
The UGC Materials system enables you to create your own custom material variants and apply them to a specific part or globally across all parts and terrain.
Image provided by BIGBOOSTLP
There are three core components to building your own custom materials:
- MaterialService - The fundamental system that enables UGC Materials capability.
- MaterialVariants - Custom variants you create. They must be a child of MaterialService in Explorer to be active and usable within your place.
- TerrainDetail - Provides a way to further customize terrain materials, changing the look of the various terrain side faces. TerrainDetail instances must be children of the MaterialVariant instance they affect.
Material Manager
While it’s possible to interact with MaterialService, MaterialVariants, and TerrainDetail via Explorer and scripts, we have also released a brand new Material Manager. This user-friendly tool replaces the former Materials drop-down in the ribbon bar and makes it easy to create, edit, and manage all of your materials
Throughout the beta, we’ve worked to address your feedback and improve the performance of the tool. For example, we reduced the amount of clicks needed to apply materials to parts compared to the old workflow by adding an “Apply to Selected” hover option and a Paint Bucket bulk-apply button. We also made Material Manager’s design responsive so you can keep it docked at a narrow width.
Take a look at our comprehensive new documentation about Materials on Roblox to learn more about creating and using MaterialVariants.
Built-in Upgraded 2022 Materials
We are also upgrading the default, built-in materials. This upgrade is optional for existing experiences, but will be ON by default in our Studio templates for new places. Upgrading is completely optional: your current materials will not change.
If you would like to opt-in to the new materials, you can enable them by using the MaterialService.Use2022Materials property.
What’s Next?
There are a few additional refinements we plan to make to the new material management features over the next few weeks to make your workflow even smoother:
2022 Materials enabled in new experiences by default
We will update the Studio templates so that new places have 2022 Materials on by default. It will still be possible to toggle between the pre-2022 and 2022 materials. This will not affect existing places.
Creating and editing a MaterialVariant in Material Manager will become non-modal
Rather than opening a separate window, you will use the inspector to create and edit a material. This will make it easier to copy/paste asset IDs for existing images into variants, too.
TerrainDetail support in Material Manager
In today’s release, you need to use Explorer/Properties to create TerrainDetail instances. We are adding this functionality to Material Manager.
Smoother Save to Roblox/Convert to Package integration
When you publish a model or package using custom UGC Materials, you currently need to manually copy any MaterialVariants the object uses before publishing it. We want to make this an automatic option as part of the publish flow in the future.
Other minor bug fixes and improvements
Thank you to everyone who shared bug reports and feedback with us during the beta period. We will continue to adjust and improve based on your feedback.
Keep the great updates coming! 
