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.
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Yea, but Flostrus wanted a faster/easier way, so I was just pointing him to this 
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Support
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.
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
Agreed. I’d love to see this feature come to life.
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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?
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I fully support this!
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!
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This would ultimately be the best action. One other limitation is that the terrain grid is still on 4x4x4 stud voxels, inherently stunting precision.
This post initially focused on water exclusively but I think having all materials available is just as good an idea and overall more beneficial.
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I desperately want this. This would also make dynamic water for things like floods possible. Right now I use custom water to achieve that.
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Filed this request 
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I must’ve misread that. 
This would honestly be great! Perhaps more than just the water material - maybe all smooth terrain materials? 
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I love the water material that voxel water uses but I don’t like using voxels in my games because they are hard to work with and also make my games look like every other game that uses voxels since the textures are not customizable.
Would be awesome if I could just apply the material to part instances.
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Sorry to be a bother, but is there any kind of ETA for this or anything you can tell us at all? For me this is probably up there with Future is Bright for most wanted features.
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I think it’s due time for a bump. Most games use pools of water or liquid in some form. Voxel water works for very few of these use cases, and when it does, it is incredibly hard to work with.
This is a really important visual element that is lacking in many Roblox games, and we have no way to make it ourselves.
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Bumping this. No clue why this still hasn’t happened.
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Bumping this thread again because I feel this would add an enormous amount of creative solutions and should be reconsidered.
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