How to customize lighting and edit terrain on Roblox transcript

Hi, I'm Jalapeno and in part two of our world building series, we're going to be learning about lighting your environment and replacing your gray box with real terrain. We're going to do this by breaking the topics down into four main points: lighting service properties, lighting post-processing, terrain tool usage, and tips for immersive terrain detailing. Now, you should always start with customizing your lighting before moving on to any detailing, as the lighting you choose will almost certainly affect the colors of your map.

There are multiple properties and objects that we will use to make the lighting exactly what we want. You may already be familiar with the basics of our previous video, how to use lighting and effects on Roblox, but we're going to dive even deeper here. So, buckle up. First up, we're going to add a skybox to our lighting service. Now, in my case, I know I want this fantasy world to have a golden hour vibe. So, I've picked out this classic Roblox skybox to utilize.

However, when adding lighting to your map, you should think about the mood you want to achieve. You certainly wouldn't want a moody thunderstorm in your happy, bright village. You may have noticed when we added in the skybox, some colors already changed. That is due to the environment diffuse and specular scale properties in the lighting service. The diffuse property determines how much ambient light is taken from the environment itself rather than just your lighting service settings.

The specular property is similar. However, it focuses on reflective light, such as what you'd see shining off of metal or a mirror. The closer to one these properties are, the more they will derive the lighting from the environment, resulting in more immersive visuals. Now, we are going to leave both of those settings maxed out at one and take a look at the ambient and outdoor ambient properties. Since we are using the diffuse property, we'll want to keep these settings a bit darker than usual to ensure the environment doesn't become overly bright.

The outdoor ambient property controls the hue of all outdoor areas of your environment. A good way to determine if an area is subject to this property is if you can see large amounts of the skybox when standing under it. This tree is considered outdoors even though I have something over my head because I can still see a large amount of the sky. However, this temple is indoors because although I can see bits of the skybox, the roof and pillars are covering a large majority of it.

Since our goal for this map is a golden hour vibe, I want to focus on a pinkish orange hue for the outside. And since we don't want the map to be overly bright, we're going to lower the brightness to a little over a third of the way down. Now, we're going to set up our ambient lighting. And because in the case of this map, we want the interior and exterior to use to match, we can copy over the color three value from the outdoor property to the ambient property, then make it slightly brighter so that the shadows are not too dark, and the diffuse property can take care of the rest.

The lighting is definitely starting to look like a gorgeous sunset. But this high noon sun is really throwing that off. Let's fix that by using the geographic latitude and clock time properties. I want the sun setting over the water, and I could do this in two different ways. I could move the clock time to about 17:30 in the evening. However, as you can see, the lighting begins to get dark, stars come out, and the sun isn't even over the beach.

Although, I could rotate my map to fix that. There is another option. I could slide the geographic latitude property until the sun is directly over the water. Then slightly adjust the clock time to move the sun left or right. And because the clock time is still considered daytime, my custom lighting properties stay how I set them. The beach is still looking a little dark and dull, though. So, let's take a look at the brightness setting.

Now, this property controls the brightness of the light coming directly off of the sun. Lower brightness levels tend to give cold and dark vibes, whereas higher brightness gives the feeling of warm weather and bright days. Let's try sliding this until we feel the beach is at a nice cozy level. Four seems perfect. So, let's round off that number and leave it there. I do want the light just a tiny bit darker though, especially in shadows.

So, let's take a look at exposure compensation. Just like photography, this is the amount of light that reaches the camera. A negative value indicates underexposure and a positive value indicates overexposure. So let's just underexpose this a little at.1 to help add a little bit of contrast to the darker areas. Finally, we have the color shift properties to take a look at. The color shift top property sets a hue that reflects on surfaces facing the sun.

And the color shift bottom property does the opposite, setting a hue on surfaces facing away from the sun. We could use the color shift top property to add a subtle warm goldenness to the areas hit by the sun by setting the color three of the property somewhere in the middle of orange and yellow. As you can see, that really brought out the sunset vibes of the map. We can then copy that value over to the bottom and make it slightly darker so that the tone is the same, but areas facing away from the sun aren't overly bright.

Now, let's use what we learned in the previous lighting video I mentioned earlier and add in an atmosphere. Atmospheres used to simulate mist, fog, or smog conditions. In my case, I want a subtle distant fog to make it seem like the world goes on forever. So, I'm going to set the density to 32 and the offset to zero to make sure the fog stays far away, but also that objects in the distance blend into the sky. Then, I'm going to make the color and decay pinkish values to complement the golden hour lighting.

The water droplets in fog tend to be pretty reflective. So, I'm going to set the glare to 35. And to really help blend the atmosphere into the sky, I'm also going to set the haze to 2.1. There's one last thing we're missing before we move on to post-processing, though. Dynamic clouds. Our skybox clouds are good for a general vibe, but adding in some dynamic clouds would give some good life and movement to the world. You might be thinking, I could do this just like the atmosphere.

Just add it to the lighting service. Nope. Clouds have to be a child of the terrain object in your workspace. And this is because the clouds are rendered as a 3D part of your world, full of movement and life rather than just a lighting effect. Now, because our skybox already has clouds, we don't want to add too many dynamic ones to the mix. So, we're going to set the cover to 65, but keep the density low at 0.15. This looks good, but they kind of stand out as bright white compared to the yellowish hue of the static clouds.

So, let's fix that by changing the color three until we find a value similar to that of the skybox clouds. Perfect. This looks great. So, let's move on to post-processing effects to really button up this lighting. If you're a beginner or just interested in the basics, you can check out the video how to use post-processing effects on Roblox. As we're only going to dive into surface level here, I'm going to use four effects to finalize the lighting.

Bloom, blur, color correction, and sunray. Because of the brightness of the map, we want a less intense bloom. So, I'm going to set the intensity to.5 and leave the rest on the default settings. Next, we'll look at blur. When making a cozy map, I like to put a slight blur on it to give a softer vibe. So, I'm going to enable this and set it to three. For color correction, we can increase the saturation to 0.1 and the contrast to 24 to add in some mystical flare to the map.

And since the lighting is still so orange, we can add a tiny bit of salmon tint to help bring out a more natural pink sunset. Finally, sun rays really make the sun feel like it's a warm island day, but let's not make them too big. 05 intensity and 04 spread is perfect for what we want to achieve, allowing them to shine through foliage and around obstacles without being spread out too far from the sun. And that's it for setting up your lighting.

So, let's move on to terrain tool usage. Now, there are some great community plugins to save you time on converting parts into terrain. However, I'm going to show you how to do it with just the roadblocks tooling. I'm going to use four tools specifically to make it happen. The draw tool, sculpt and smooth tools, paint tool, and the sea level tool. When working with terrain, it's important to remember that is generated on a voxal grid.

A voxil is a 3D volume of space similar to a pixel in a 2D space. Voxels in Roblox are 4x4x4 stud cubes space. To start out replacing our gray box with terrain, we should first utilize the draw tool. I like to unlink the brush size settings and use a radius of 24 with a height of six voxels. I also prefer to use a cylinder brush shape. However, you can use any size or shape you feel you need. I set the pivot position to top to ensure I'm creating the terrain as close as possible to the surface of the gray box.

Oops. When I went to draw the terrain, it wasn't staying level to the ground. I forgot to set the plane lock setting to the ground level. So, let me do that now. For this initial terrain layer, I'm going to use a manual plane lock and drag the Y-axis arrow down until it's at the surface of my grass. Then, click apply. Now, when I'm drawing, you can see my cursor stays locked to the grid height. I'm going to draw everything with a leafy grass material for now because I can use the paint tool later to get the materials I want in each file.

Now that the base layer is done, I'm going to adjust my plane lock to each of the raised areas that need additional terrain. Next, I'm going to use the sculpt and smooth tools to flush out these various hills. Making sure I use a lower strength on the sculpting to really fine-tune the details and then allowing the smooth tool with a high strength to balance it all out. Now, in some cases, due to the voxal grid, my gray box has sunken into the terrain.

So, I can raise the gray box up a couple of studs to ensure my paths are visible. And then I can delete the part terrain pieces that we already replaced with real terrain. And since we kept our workspace nicely organized in the gray boxing stage, I can easily do this with one simple delete, leaving my rocks, paths, and other pieces intact. With that set, I'm going to start to use the paint tool to turn the desert and beach into sand.

The mountains will also get turned into snow using this tool. Then I'm going to select the ground material and begin painting all of our paths and roads using the gray box as a guide. Let's also go back to the sculpt tool and carve out a little hole here for our small desert oasis and paint it with some rocks around the edging. Now, finally, we can use the sea level tool to create the ocean as well as fill in that oasis.

You could transform the size and position of the sea using the draggers. And once you're in a position you are happy with, you can either click create to make the water or evaporate to remove it. Now, with the basics of our terrain setup, let's move on to some more detailed tips to make your terrain truly immersive. There are five ways you can really make your terrain feel alive. detailed sculpting, custom materials, terrain properties, detailed painting, and natural storytelling.

First, we're going to cover detailed sculpting. Keep in mind that in the real world, terrain is almost never flat. So, the first thing we're going to do is take the sculpt tool, set it to a low strength, an automatic material, and about a size eight brush. We're just going to do short bursts of clicks throughout these flat areas to help give some depth and height variance to the terrain. Then we can increase the brush size and strength and add in some larger hills in the flattest, most empty areas like the desert.

Before we continue, the default materials aren't really doing our world justice for the stylized cozy feeling we're going for. So, let's import some new materials to really make them pop. We can do this the same way we learned for the gray box material in the last episode, except this time we're going to make sure we also set them to override the default material. We can do this by going into the properties of material service and selecting the variant replacements from the drop down menu.

Now, in some cases, we know there are materials we'd still like to use, but we also want an alternative to complement it. So, in that case, we should replace a material we will never use, like asphalt in this case, with the extra-l large cliff material. With the materials replaced, we can now also adjust the colors of our terrain to really make the world more vibrant using terrain properties. I'd especially like more brown mud and dirt and a much greener grass.

Our rock already has a color map with a specific hue, so we should make sure that is set to white. We can also take the time here to shorten the grass height to something a bit more at scale with the average avatar. Now that our materials are set, we can dive into some more detailed painting techniques to make a much more immersive environment. Most of the time in the real world, things like grass, rocks, and dirt patches are hardly made up of one color or material, so to speak.

So, we should mimic that in our environment. We can take the paint tool and add mud patches into the dirt paths to help create some variance. We can do this completely at random without much thought to ensure it feels natural. Sometimes even doing two or three passes to get it right. Then we could take the grass brush and begin adding in sections of taller 3D grass around the terrain to help make it seem like some areas are more overgrown than others and create some visual noise to the player.

The taller grass can also react to the global wind that we will add in the detailing stage. We should also go through each transition point in the terrain, such as where sand meets grass, and blend them together using the same technique to create visual noise, which feels natural from a player's point of view. Let's paint some areas of mud and dirt where we'd like some rocks to be poking through the ground. and then take our sculpt tool, set the brush size and strength somewhere in the middle, and select our cliff material and pull the terrain up to create a couple of rocks mixed with the dirt and mud.

Then we can paint a tiny bit of grass on top to flush it out and feel like natural growth. Speaking of natural growth, storytelling with your terrain can make a map really come to life. We can take our sculpt tool and pull up the ground around a few of our trees, especially larger ones, to help mimic the root structures that would exist underneath, as well as the natural movement and growth of dirt and grass and wildlife, human activity, and other factors around the trees.

We do the opposite with some of the paths, pushing them slightly lower into the terrain with the sculpt tool to simulate erosion in a few places, especially the main roads. I'm also going to go back to the desert and build up the sand dunes in one direction to mimic how the wind would be blowing them along, creating piles against objects like the pyramid on one side, less on the other where the wind is less common. And with that, we have an environment complete with terrain and a gorgeous golden hour lighting.

In part three, we'll check out how to replace the last of our gray box pieces and finalize the map environment. If you're interested in checking out the final product for yourself now, head to the Roblox Learn Experience link below.