Upload Custom Materials in the New Material Service Beta

[ObviouslyPurple]

After a year of waiting… the time has finally arrived! Beta materials, I’m beyond thrilled for the future of Roblox with these phenomenal features being added, and out for BETA TESTING! Hype!

I’ve started replacing some materials, and I’m beyond proud of the outcome! Take a look!
The Voyage will 100% be compatible with BM!

I just wanted to thank everybody on the DevRel Team for working absolutely hard for the past year to make everyone happy with the new material variant being an option!
Cannot wait to publish this phenomenal feature once it’s available for all servers!

[JoshSedai (Josh)]

We are thrilled to announce two updates to the Material Service beta:

1. We have removed the random texture coordinate offsets for UGC Part Materials
2. UGC Terrain Materials have been added as part of the beta

UGC Terrain Materials
Creating custom Terrain Materials works similarly to custom Part Materials:

1. Create a MaterialVariant as a child of MaterialService
2. Setup the MaterialVariant as desired, just like you do for a part. Please note there are now properties on MaterialVariant that only work for terrain, which are under “Appearance For Terrain.”
3. To set the override, go to the new “Terrain Overrides” category under MaterialService, select the material, and set your override:
   
4. Any terrain set to that material —in this case Brick— will now use your custom material variant instead of the built-in one.

Terrain Brick with built-in material Terrain Brick with custom material

Terrain Brick with custom material

Note that Terrain MaterialColors aren’t applied to custom terrain materials, but we are looking into adding this behavior.

[SimonEnderB]

Just gave this a quick test run. Works great! Only complaint is that some materials and terrain textures share the same variant. This is somewhat of a limitation, as developers would be forced to use the same textures for material, and terrain textures under the same category. Not sure if engineers are already checking this out, but if not, I’d highly recommend they try to find something similar.

[PeZsmistic]

Amazing!

@JoshSedai

Note that Terrain MaterialColors aren’t applied to custom terrain materials, but we are looking into adding this behavior

Can we hear about the design for this in particular? I think this is very sensitive and I have some feature requests about this that I’ll bring up here once I’m home.

[ProtoValence (Valence)]

Terrain and part material overrides are actually separated within Material Service. In order to override a material for terrain, select the desired override under “Terrain Overrides”. If you want to override that material for parts only, you can do that in “Material Overrides”.

[SimonEnderB]

Ah! Thanks. I’m not very bright when it comes to these new features

[wallofgarlic (garlic)]

Before this feature gets fully released I’m not sure if you have confirmed it further up in chat but are you able to bring it up with your team about creating entirely new Materials? We’ve been limited to a small amount of materials for such a long time It’d be nice to further enhance this feature by allowing us to create new ones as well.

Such as for terrain you have all the current textures but if we run out of textures to override we can create more for things such multiple variations of one terrain texture.

I think the best way we can solve this is for terrain it’d be similar to attributes for creating new objects inside that value (if you understand what I mean) Really there’s a ton of cases for this I’m just not that good at explaining it.

[asimo3089]

This might be outside your expertise but do you know when Roblox will ship the new Materials they showed off about a year ago? The new look for materials (and offering terrain materials on parts!) worked so well with a project I was working on and then they disappeared with no communication on what happened.

These custom materials were supposed to be the answer to those who didn’t want the new materials.

[wallofgarlic (garlic)]

They said something about a Material Marketplace that they’ll be working on which would include those materials, I’ll see if I can find the original post for it but if I do I’ll edit my post with it.

It’ll be connected with that response, question being from the person he replied to and I replied to his post with a follow-up question regarding it.

Upload Custom Materials in the New Material Service Beta

Material Service is used to customize the existing materials. We do have a plan to expand the materials though as stated in Material Library Expansion.

[ThatLazyBucket (Just Bucket)]

Wil we be able to change the terrain grass decoration?

[PeZsmistic]

We’ve been waiting an eternity just to be able to tint surface appearance, which alone has been a big detriment to my game. I am waiting on this functionality to be able to support character customization with skinned meshes.

So naturally this means that I’m worried we won’t get five star support for material tinting when this releases.

I’ve brought this up a few times so I apologize for repetition, I just want to make sure this is heard because IIRC none of this has been acknowledged.

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Currently you can tint terrain materials but this happens as a hue rotation. Parts cannot do this, color is applied in a different manner (additive?) that totally overwhelms material colors. This means that it is impossible for part materials to match recolored terrain materials unless you replace both of them yourself (for inferior versions that are one single hue all the way through; it is very boring for reusable materials to all be one color).

It would be great to hear if there are plans to address this issue.

Here’s a feature request I’ve made for the ability to shift material hue separately from the part color, which natively offers the ability to recolor things like corroded metal, or the grout on bricks, as well as match part materials to recolored terrain materials.

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Further, the new materials in the old beta build had the ability to mask parts of the albedo to keep the original color (e.g. for brick grout) and I think this is also currently in use for the brick material. This is a very important feature for us as developers because we will also obviously want to make our own materials for brick, tile, etc.

Will we be getting access to something like this?

This would allow us to make materials like corroded metal, and further if paired with the previous feature request would allow us to have two-toned materials which dramatically increases the reusability of any one material (i.e. change the color of the corrosion separately from the metal underneath).

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It would be amazing if we could have more transparency on where these features are going and plans so we can give continuous feedback, rather than it all coming out as a surprise months later when Roblox is tired of working on this and wants to pivot to something else for the next 2 years.

[asimo3089]

Not suuuper hopeful with the wording, “We plan to” is vague.

Any ballpark on this exiting Beta?

[BandaidKidd (choppppppppppppppppp)]

This would be an awesome feature! I’m tired of the spiky-pointy grass, it looks unrealistic and unnatural.

[ThatLazyBucket (Just Bucket)]

I agree and with this ugc terrain material update i think that should be a feature

[JoshSedai (Josh)]

There’s a reason we’re also working on a new user-friendly Material Manager. New features should never make a user feel “not very bright!”

[JoshSedai (Josh)]

If I’m understanding your ask, you’re specifically interested in having terrain materials that are more of a “blank slate” that you can define/control beyond what Material Service allows? (I think our plans for the expanded material library and per-part variants will address any other needs: let me know if that’s wrong.)

Assuming that’s right, we’re aware of this ask, but it’s not an immediate priority for us.

[JoshSedai (Josh)]

Sorry if the communication wasn’t clear before: the thread about the upgraded materials got quite large. Delivering UGC materials became our priority after seeing community feedback on the original upgrade plan. But if you look at the phasing list in the top post above, you’ll see “upgraded materials” listed as part of this project. We’ll be doing so via a switch, too.

We’re aiming to have a beta to you soon. We’re doing extensive internal testing to make this a good release!

[JoshSedai (Josh)]

We have this on our radar, but there are some other terrain improvements we decided were more important that we’re working on first.

[wallofgarlic (garlic)]

Its more of both Parts and Terrain, for parts it would allow us to have a set texture such as roads to use in mass production and as for parts it would finally fulfil the biggest request people have been asking for terrain for ages (aside from fixing the shoreline)

The ability to paint smooth terrain materials more than one color

As a developer on Roblox, it is currently impossible to paint a single smooth terrain material multiple colors in one game. In order to change the color of a smooth terrain material, you have to edit it’s color in the Terrain object under Workspace. Unfortunately, this applies the color to all the terrain of that material in the game. Imagine the possibilities if we could paint certain areas of smooth terrain different colors! For example: What if you want to have a big, blue ocean and a mud…

Is there any way for one terrain to have 2 or more colors in a game?

I just figured out how to change the color of terrain a while ago, and I really like how the system works, however, I can’t seem to find a way for a certain terrain to be able to have two colors. Such as for example, pink and blue grass in a game. Is there any way that could be made?

Have the Ability to Apply Multiple Colors to the Same Material

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to have areas of smooth terrain with the same material while showing different colors. Let’s say I have a world in which one area of grass is drier than the other. I want one section of grass to be yellow: [image] And one to be green: [image] Or, let’s say I want one part of the world to have red water: [image] And the other part to be blue: [image] But with today’s terrain capabilities that isn’t possible. This applies to essentially al…

Now as for other objects such as recreating a rock effect if we had a the depth map you could use that as the tool it uses, I’m not really sure how yall have that part of the system setup but it’d be really neat.

Here’s a better list of what this could be used for

Terrain

• Support for multiple colors on one material type (although you’d need to duplicate the material then change its color it’ll still get the job done even though it would be a hacky method of doing so)
• Allow developers to create multiple variations of one ground, such as mixing different types of grass together whether it be flowers mixed with grass or just grass.
• Will add more later

Parts

• PBR Road Textures
• Ability for building games to allow its players to use PBR Textures without having to create a new UV for each object
• Will add more later

[JoshSedai (Josh)]

To give you a peek behind the curtain as to why we’re being vague, we’ve found every aspect of this project has more nuance than you could imagine. For example, defining the internal structures we use to reference material variants seemed obvious at first but as we worked through key use cases (per-part materials, materials in packages, materials in models), we found that each option for something that we thought would be simple had pros and cons: there’s no one solution that worked for every need. Figuring out the right approach adds unexpected time to our schedule. And we picked one way to do these references initially, but we think we need to switch approaches to support per-part variants. Because this beta is Studio-only, we can make that change with minimal impact to you. That’s just a hint of the nuance

But please do know we are working hard, and we know you’re excited to use this in production experiences!