Going to have to bump this. SurfaceAppearance looks good on paper, but for bigger meshes it’s simply ugly (or in extreme cases not worth it) because the textures are wayyy to small.
7 Likes
Up maximum mesh triangles whilst you’re at it!
(bump)
edit:
A possible solution could be including (optional) download links to the full quality games assets in the games description to increase poly count and texture size and quality.
These could then be set in a localscript if they are detected in the Roblox textures folder.
4 Likes
Bump. Would love to have better looking games, 4k textures would definitely help with making Roblox a more widely used game engine.
1 Like
Bump! We’re currently working on a realistic shooter for 17+ inspired by Hell Let Loose. The current 1k texture limit is forcing us to choose between our characters looking like they are made out of plastic or having ugly UV seams.
5 Likes
This gives me an idea. Why can’t we use vectors as textures? Much more performance friendly and they take up less space than PNGs.
4 Likes
If I recall correctly during an RDC 2019 Q&A they stated there’d be some issues or challenges with properly displaying vector based content in the context of Roblox but it was something that they were possibly looking into long-term.
1 Like
This could probably be solved by having a “Texture Quality” setting directly under “Graphics Level”.
The lowest probably being the current or a bit lower, and the highest being 4K.
1 Like
I saw staff respond to that one badge re-arrange request. You know what that means. BUMP til the day i die. This is slowly becoming a problem for us.
If worried about performance, i dunno, make a texture quality setting like (probably) EVERY other game ever?
Roblox already has dynamic texture resolutions. They will lower the further you are away from it.
But I’m sure the feature didn’t exist in 2016, when this post was created.
Bumping, tired of pandering to this engine’s shortcomings…
1 Like
If the problem is storage, it could be designed so that the high resolution version is “temporary”. It could be deleted if it goes unused for a year or two or based on some other metric like how many images the user uploaded and whether they support the platform through their creations or spending habits. After this nothing would break because the low resolution version would still be there.
If the problem is asset delivery, similar metrics could be used to prioritize delivery for places or users. It would be nice if all places and users would get full quality, but I’m open to compromises like this if this is what’s holding the platform back.
We can achieve pretty-good texture resolution for characters at 1024x1024, but it requires separating meshes into multiple pieces and being meticulous with UV layouts. Material textures have different requirements because of tiling behaviors, and would benefit from 2K or 4K.
The biggest limitation is that we can’t layer multiple recolorable PBR maps on MeshParts in a way that respects the UV layout (decals don’t work for this), but that’s a different feature.
5 Likes
Would be easier if Roblox made you download games so you wouldn’t fully require solely internet to play, it would also make people think further about what games they wanna play so they’d be more likely to play quality games instead of suspicious obby games.
Currently, you can upload 4k images to Roblox and then REDOWNLOAD them at the same resolution? So what’s going on here? I think Roblox just doesn’t let you load 4k images as it already uses a lot of RAM to run for some whatever reason? Maybe memory leak but idk. However, 4k images get down sampled to 1024x1024 which is better than uploading 1024x1024 images directly but longer upload times.
2 Likes
Hey could you show me how you had your artists split up their UVs to achieve 4k results? I’m having the same frustrations as you are right now with PBR textures in studio:
https://devforum.roblox.com/t/workaround-to-4k-textures/2665281
1 Like
Out of the many limitations Roblox has, this has got to be one of the biggest. Texturing is an integral part of games and while I praise Roblox for improving their lighting, terrain, and material system, we cannot fully enjoy these technologies if the actual models look pixelated and stretched.
1 Like
I noticed that there’s such a small difference though that it’s negligible if anything changed at all because 1k is simply inadequate of providing a proper representation of anything beyond simple and small creations.
2 Likes
Bumping this again. Roblox can clearly handle 4k textures as referencing a local 4k texture with a mod manager works perfectly fine (as demonstrated in the original post). I don’t know what Robloxs’ back end looks like but it should be as simple as changing the maximum texture size.
You could make an argument against this by saying that 4k textures would increase network bandwidth and client memory use. I don’t think this is an issue since smart developers can cut already cut their model in pieces and upload 16 individual 1k textures, which would likely take up more memory and network bandwidth than a single 4k texture while also being a lot more work for the developers in question.
It should also be up to the developer themselves if they want to possibly sacrifice performance and loading speed for increased detail. We should at least have the option to make textures more detailed than the maximum supported resolution of the Nintendo DS.
8 Likes
i was literally thinking about this as i entered the dev forum. hell yes, we need this. it’s 2023, and we still cant upload high quality decals/textures?
3 Likes
It takes 16 1K textures to make a 4K texture. I’ve done this and it’s very tedious. This doesn’t work for textures that need to tile though.
For my project, important characters have uv maps organized into squares (2x2 or 4x4), and I use custom texture processing tools to automate separating and downsampling it all. I’ve learned a lot from this limitation, but these characters would look so much better with the limitation changed to 2K or 4K. It’s also a lot of SurfaceAppearances to need to manage.
5 Likes
It would work nice if it was loaded Locally.
The client would have the option to change Texture Quality from the current one (or maybe lower) to 4K.
The textures wouldn’t be loaded on the server, but on the client to save Server Memory and to reduce Lag.
Reply if you think my idea could work. 
1 Like