UGC Material Variants & Upgraded Built-in Materials Release

[fnublox]

Thanks for your feedback, we have a fix in the pipeline.

[CartoonBlur (Dunold_Turmp)]

@fnublox as a part of this community I have been developing and honing my skills on Roblox for 5 years now, eagerly waiting for environmental updates regarding Grass (decorations), Water and Clouds as well as Terrain updates to make better environments for players to be immersed in.

Recently I have been moving away from Roblox and going into Unreal and Unity due to the fact that after so much time there still has not been any significant updates that would allow experiences to be pushed to the next level in terms of visual style and quality other than the materials update which is one thing I was eagerly awaiting. Yet I thought that Roblox would push more changes regarding clouds, terrain decorations and ESPECIALLY water, there are so many frustrating things that made me lose motivation in what I love doing most (environment design and foliage).

In other engines there are so many features that let you customize grass and foliage that in turn allow you to create amazing environments, I cant really do that in Roblox, if I wanted to I would have to use “hacky solutions” for water ripples for example, layering the surface of the water with particle textures but even that does not work well.

Features that are essential to create immersive experiences are:

• Interactive/Actual Water behavior
• Customizable material textures (now present)
• Customizable terrain Decorations
• Efficient Terrain Feature (Flat plane terrain edit option and maybe better Voxel placement/density)
• Efficient Clouds that can be walked through.
• Volumetric fog or better smoke/particle system (I can see that being improved)
• Good lighting that will allow for possibly even Subsurface Scattering or other features to make things interact with light in other ways.

With these elements you can create stunning scenes.
I know that with these in place the coding features should be created to work along side these to have proper manipulation of their properties. But the base features should be present, especially the manipulation of Grass and terrain decoration that people have been waiting a realllllyyy long time for.

So far Roblox has only delivered on not even half of the essential points which is why I’m having a lot of difficulty creating the things I imagine.
I could go way more in depth about these features but for now I’m still just disappointed in the feature priorities. I understand that mobile is also a large aspect that is taken into consideration when pushing features, but maybe even have separate builds of studio or and upgrade/downgrade of features when you are using the mobile version compared to the PC or console version.

Recently you guys have been releasing more things which is good, so good work on that!

So my question is. Do you happen to know any information regarding any of these features being close or scheduled for release?

Thank you!

[LightBeamRays]

Hey @CartoonBlur, thanks for your feedback! We are aware of the frustrations different developers have been experiencing with the systems you listed. We value the feedback we are receiving on these various systems very much and we are looking into improving them. Unfortunately, we are not ready to share details at the moment, but this is on our radar.

[poohler]

Are we going to get the ability to not have to replace the default materials, and create new ones for painting? We are limited to the existing materials right now. This is a huge huge part of a project I’m currently working on, and I have halted development due to this fact.