Upgraded Materials, Material Manager, and More!

Also I would like to thank everyone for providing feedback on how to improve Material Manager. We hope that this update has addressed most of your concerns.

@ggslpk @savio14562 @UltraMegaRobloxStory @AstralPaws @goalmwo @nakoyasha @Rockerite @BackspaceRGB @Vyntrick @star_dustfalls @BillB1ox @sicknoobie @gato_todomenso @PysephDEV @synical4 @Skelesus @TenBlocke @FifthBread @mer5000 @itsDenDenn

And I hit the mention limit …

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@Sterling_ODeaghaidh @ronell20_RBLX @Radiuohfoam @ObviouslyPurple @Blokhampster34 @vandanke @PeZsmistic @Wertyhappy27 @The13thHippie @Bitterman1021 @F1ndlay @minkmink @A_ngelics @java8198 @dummycide @DevariteTheFox @GamingBert52 @Blue_blockhead

Whew that was a lot of you, I hope I didn’t miss anyone. Either way, thanks for your help and let us know how you like the changes!

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Glad to see that our suggestions have been considered and implemented, and I think I speak for everyone mentioned when I say a huge thanks to you too, as well as whoever was working on this behind the scenes!
These changes may seem small however do greatly speed up our workflow, and really empower the community.

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I am happy to see that my suggestion was implemented, not having to select all the parts in the model and instead just setting the whole model’s material with one click is such a time saver!

Thank you!

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I would like these parameters to be able to be changed on this page without including a separate tab, which also takes up a bit of space and a bit of time. I think it will be convenient for some.

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This is much more workable for my workflow.

Thanks for this. In fact, I believe it is now better than the Material picker we had before.

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Thank you for the suggestion, we’ll take into consideration!

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Thanks, I also noticed a problem for people who load textures via asset-manager (I’m one of them). You can’t copy the texture ID (or, rather, nothing at all) and put it on the texture modification page
Of course, it’s not really critical, but it may take some time.
it is shown more clearly in the video

Exiting out of material overview seems to sometimes completely screw up the grid’s rendering until you scroll

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Woohoo! This is SO much better. Perhaps make the apply button slightly larger in list view?

I am very nitpicky :sweat_smile:

Aside from that, this is so much easier to apply materials than the properties window. Thank you one billion trillion times :happy2:

It has definitely done that!

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I’ve gone ahead and filed a bug report for this, thanks for bringing it to our attention!

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Looks great! Thanks for digging into all of that. Feels much more usable. :slight_smile:


One thing I noticed just now that I didn’t before was that you cannot click into studio when you have a “create new variant” modal open, which is a little bit annoying if you want to reuse an already uploaded asset.

There is also no feedback when clicking Save in the new variant modal when you’ve forgotten some fields (e.g. name), the window does not scroll the erroring field into view which makes it feel broken until you get confused and scroll up.

An unfortunate thing I found also is that if you rename a material variant using the material manager, it does not correct any references to that material variant in your game, so everything that used that material ends up broken. It might be nice to show a dialog asking the developer if they want the tool to attempt to remap existing usage of the old variant name to the new variant name.

Lastly, just a minor issue here…

Thanks again!


A side request: The ability for Studio to convert a heightmap image into a normal map without developers needing external tools for this. A lot of the time a black and white albedo texture makes a perfectly suitable heightmap, but developers currently need to use external tooling to convert this to a normal map. I use NormalMap-Online extremely often for this purpose (and the options here for strength, level, and blur are essential), but this is just more cumbersome workflow nonsense that Studio could offer natively for a much more streamlined experience.

E.g. this carpet texture would make a decent height map.

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Thank you for implementing these suggestions, I really appreciate it! There’s only one change which I think would REALLY help (Assuming it isn’t added already). Allow us to change the default material of a newly inserted part. You could do that before the Material Manager was added but as far as I am aware, that is no longer possible. It would make building stuff a lot easier if this feature was re-implemented!

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Upon using this, I’m quite fond of the compact design. The only criticism that I have is that the “apply to selected parts” button on both the top bar and the list is a bit small. Its difficult to select at a glance because I keep opening the menu for the part.

I think that the function of clicking the material on the list and the button to actually apply the material to the part should be swapped. This would make it easier to change part materials at a glance and not really make it any more difficult to add a material variant.

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For anyone also who has a texture but has no normal/roughness/metallic, I’m going to make a brief tutorial on how to generate them as realistic as possible.
1st step: You’ll need Materialize
2nd step: You’ll need to extract Materialize in whichever folder you retain the best for your organization.
3rd step: (For windows) Run materialize as administrator.


4th step: Open your diffuse map in the materialize editor.

5th step: When you choose your colour map, open it by clicking on “Select” on the bottom right. Administrator permissions were required to complete this because the program has a poorly made file explorer and it needs permission to work on basically any folder on your PC.

6th: Create your textures following the numbers on the picture:

7th: Select “PNG” and save it in your desired folder, saved projects are non-destructive and can be opened at any moment.
image
(You can watch your generated procedural material by clicking “Show Full Material” and selecting your desired settings.)

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Some of my custom materials seem to delete themselves.
This floor is checkerboard tiling.


image
The images remain in my creator dashboard
image

This happened when I exited studio and then opened the game back up ~45 minutes later.
This has also happened as I was working. I don’t know if they’re doing this themself or if I’m causing it in any way.

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None of the Material Manager changes could have made this impact, and this hasn’t been reported before. Are you sure you didn’t just forget to hit save before closing studio?

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I’m positive of this. I uploaded the material as I was making the room; the entire room would be gone if I hadn’t saved.

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Is it possible to get a change to the property material menu? The Material Manager has pictures of the materials, and the property menu does not. Switching and reopening tabs to change a material with pictures is not too fun. I understand that there may be a minority of people who use the property tab to change materials, but I think this would be helpful for those developers.

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Hi devs,
Just wanted you to be aware since Material Service isn’t fully enabled yet in all platforms, there might some issues when publishing a place with Material Service features and playing it with clients on platforms that don’t have the feature enabled. We suggest either limiting this to PC/Mac or simply remove Material Service features (parity materials, UGC materials, etc) for now. If you do find issues, please let us know, it will help us greatly to fix issues. Thank you for being patience with us, we are working hard to get this done!

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