As a dev it’s pretty hard to get good looking ponds or streams with terrain water when said water is used in conjunction with normal smooth terrain.
With the current way terrain handles occupancy and the way certain materials handle joining voxels together, water can do some very weird and wonky things that can cause visuals to really go downhill. I feel that if we were able to use normal parts that are affected by terrain’s water properties (WaterColor, WaterTransparency, these sorts of properties) but were otherwise independent from the voxel grid that terrain uses, we could achieve very precise details with water, without the worry of weird wrinkles along the edges of a stream or lake or the worry of having to use parts around a body of water.
I saw that one but the drawback is that it still uses terrain, which effectively contradicts what this suggestion had in mind - This was to use a standalone part that wouldn’t interact with Terrain’s voxel grid.
Yes, the fact is that terrain and part-based terrain feel like two completely separate things means that water only works with particular styles of games. It would be absolutely wonderful to have a nice way to put the cool wavy looking water from terrain to a material of parts. As of right now, for me anyways, its either doing all water with terrain, or just a union of transparent blue ice parts.
Yeah the Part-To-Terrain is great, but what if you want to put the water into ServerStorage? You can’t do that with terrain. Also, in my opinion, it would be a lot easier to make water levels rise by having a water brick rise and lower rather than need to bother with the whole terrain thing. Major support here. Edit: Another thing you can do is make parts of the water higher than others (ideal for making ponds, pools, etc.)
I put a suggestion similar to this up on the regular S&I forums a short while back - another use-case would be for large areas of water (say, an ocean) - instead of having to generate millions of voxels (which more often than not kills the server when generated at runtime and makes the game refuse to load if generated locally and uploaded), you’d just insert a new part and resize it.
That, and we could maybe have water with different wave speeds/sizes (useful for waterfalls? terrain water “falls” too slowly to be convincing) and colours if those properties were added to part-based water.
Tbh, I think the reason roblox doesn’t have this yet is because Parts do not support the same reflections that water support; it’s like collision groups, but reflection groups. So any part that has a reflection like water would be in the same reflection group as the terrain. Roblox would need to make a new individual instance like a “WaterPart” or something that has the correct Reflection Group, but still supports everything a Part supports. Then, making scripts and everything else in the game support WaterParts (like API’s and stuff) would be a whole different adventure… So in other words, unless Roblox adds realistic reflections on Parts, I don’t think it’ll happen any time soon.
Yeah I get your point here. Terrain reflections are exclusive to the terrain water material. To be honest, I think something like this would be possible with the HDR / Lighting update (Future is Bright) since it changes the way specular textures work in-game.
This is a very late bump. I am reviving this topic because the issue is still relevant in a lot of different places I own, and I am certain that many others still would like to have this feature for their own places.
Has there been any discussion on this behind the scenes?
I’d much rather have it be so any Terrain Material can be applied to BaseParts, as Smooth Terrain feels very, very limited due to the tools being lackluster in my opinion.
Still though, having water be a part material with the wave effects would be amazing!
