Creating realistic and detailed terrains is an essential part of building an immersive universe. That’s why we are excited to announce two major improvements to our terrain tools: the add/subtract tool with no plane lock function and a faster and more efficient smooth tool.
Add/Subtract Tool with No Plane Lock
Previously, the add/subtract tool would accumulate terrain surface changes when no plane lock was selected, rendering the function unusable. With our new update, the tool will now correctly modify the terrain on top of the surfaces, making it much easier to create landscapes.
Smooth Tool
This tool is used to make the terrain surface smoother and remove any jagged lines or artifacts that may appear. With our new update, the smooth tool is now much faster and produces fewer artifacts, making it easier to create smooth terrain quickly.
These two improvements have been released in the latest version of Roblox Studio (0.570). No action is needed to enable these updates if you have the latest version of Studio.
We encourage everyone to try out these new features and send us feedback on how we can make our terrain tools even better!
What’s Next?
We are continuing our effort to make terrain tools easy to use with better functionality and UX design. More QoL updates are on their way. Stay tuned!
Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns below.
Thank you.
Oh wow I am a bit surprised about how much of a difference this update will make to the look of terrain. From looking at the before and after there is a way different in a good way.
We are definitely interested in improving all terrain tools in general!
Could you elaborate what kind of improvement are you looking for in terms of painting tool?
Hopefully one day we have the ability to have multiple colours for 1 terrain material (e.g you can have red grass in one area and blue grass in another) without having to use code.
On my way to update Castle Period’s Castle Islands
Dont know why i sent this, but i always pick the number one meme in Google Search.
Anyways, THANK YOU! I would be thinking it would be also cool to have a grass engine or something. If you step on it, it moves like in real life.
ANYWAYS, THANKS! NOW BECAUSE OF YOU, I CAN RESUME CASTLE PERIOD! MY SONIC EVOLUTION TROUBLES ARE OVER!
As the terrain artist myself, the performance update on smooth terrain is going to be a game changer. It has been known using the smooth tools will cause a lot of drop on fps and there is the point where studio crash without recovery place
Other suggestion QOL that should be focus on is,
I would like to see some improvement on blending terrain with part or mesh in future since having smooth transition between it will make sure the driving and walking experience feel nicer
Hey, thanks for the reply. I’d be happy to elaborate on this for you.
When the custom materials released, we also received an update to how terrain materials blend together. While this was a step in the right direction, it also meant some limitations in other areas when it came to working with terrain.
Currently in Studio, we only have a slider option to adjust the brush size of the paint tool. It would be nice to have another slider option to control the brush hardness similar to the brush tool in Photoshop or other terrain tools in Unity or Unreal.
In the picture above, you see mud, ground and grass materials painted next to each other with the current paint tool. In the picture below, you can see what it could look like when the mud is painted with the brush hardness at 0%.
My friend artblox (or tryler2) also talked about this somewhere, about how the paint tool could have a “strength” slider that would adjust the blending of the terrain materials.
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What I personally would like to see is the ability to have different material variants of terrain co-existing. For example, you could have both the base snow terrain material, and then another snow terrain material that is a little different, then you could blend those together, without being stuck to just a single snow material that all you can do is override - or sacrifice the salt material for your other snow texture.
Definitely a noticeable difference, but it’s still producing small steps in the terrain, making smooth slopes almost impossible, and requiring extra help using the grow and erode tool. I’d love to see the team work on the terrain tools further to get the terrain as precise as possible, to make terrain a whole lot more fun to work with.
I’d also like to slip in my thoughts with the paint tool. I believe someone suggested this under the same thread. The paint tool is, and not to sound too harsh, awful. It’s incredibly inaccurate when painting over small areas of terrain, you’d expect that painting terrain using a tool would be smooth, but it’s just way too jagged.
This is the same with plenty other tools, it’s most likely the way the terrain is handled (voxels) You can get better results using mesh terrain, which, let’s be honest, won’t be happening anytime soon on Roblox, so for now, improving the accuracy of each tool for terrain would be amazing.
There really needs to be a way to import flat/hollow terrain. Filled terrain takes up an insane amount of memory compared to hollowed terrain (which still takes up way more than it should). Additionally, large terrain loads incredibly slow for clients, I wish there was a way to preload the initial terrain map on the client and then just send ‘deltas’ of any adjustments made to that terrain template.
NOW BECAUSE OF YOU, I CAN RESUME CASTLE PERIOD! MY SONIC EVOLUTION TROUBLES ARE OVER!
