An interesting aside is that if you know what you’re doing, you can (ab)use this feature + EnvironmentSpecularScale with the right metalness/roughness combinations to more or less recreate the current material configurations in a style that more closely matches the Legacy lighting mode.
Not exactly perfect yet but shows that it is possible to bring this look back.
I do intend to ship this to my games once this rolls out fully, the only real downside being that you’re limited to using one image for your skybox as the actual Sky object has to use pitch black in order to get the desired effect.
I will also make this material pack publicly available once I’ve been through with creating everything and have fine-tuned it to a point where I am reasonably happy with the visual parity of the materials versus how they looked in 2017.
I’m sure someone else could probably do a better job of this than me but it does show you that the default configurations Roblox currently use are of a questionably poor nature, something I’ve been trying to highlight for a while for varying reasons, here, here, here and here:
Positives of such a method:
Things have more depth and life to them again and IMHO look immeasurably better than default Compatibility mode
Plastic doesn’t look horrendously washed out anymore
Some of the “classic” October 2013 materials can be restored in-place of their newer versions (i.e. WoodPlanks, Marble)
Negatives:
Significant loss of skybox customisation due to hacky implementation (impact varies depending on your game)
QUESTION!
Hey! I’ve tried this and its really good https://gyazo.com/f8568b4a82f0118cd39e0f02f974357e
Problem is when I leave and save studio and come back The MaterialVariant is all gone and I have to redo it. Why does this happen? is it because it’s a beta feature or do I need to save it in someway?
That’s what PBR is though, it makes flat objects look 3D. Also can’t you just get a MeshPart and put SurfaceAppearence or a Texture over it? Sorry if I sound stupid, I don’t know much about building.
I could be wrong though that definitely is what pbr is but they can imrpove it instead of having it like an illusion yk? it can be a slider for how much it can pop out possibly
Robloxes renderer is almost identical across devices, it would introduce so many bugs to split the renderers across devices (assuming engineers would have to work on two renderers)
Maybe they could make it where you have to have your graphics all the way up for it to show then? i just think Parallax Occlusion Mapping would look amazing in games i’m sure they could make it possible
@LucidPolygon
Roblox wouldn’t render tessellation shaders for mobile since it’s too performance heavy. I doubt the Play Store or Apple App store has any games that have tessellation or POM shaders.