Minecrafted Smooth Terrain

This is a set of modified files which make Roblox's smooth terrain appear like the voxel terrain seen in Minecraft. The modification only works offline and won't appear if you publish a game with the terrain modified. It was just a fun experiment to see how flexible Roblox's terrain material configurations are.

Setup

Copy the terrain and textures folders into the PlatformContent\pc folder in Roblox Studio's runtime directory. You'll also need to go to File > Studio Settings..., and under the Rendering tab, make sure ReloadAssets is checked.

Bug Workaround

When you open a place with the modified terrain, the terrain likely won't be using cubes immediately. This is a bug on Roblox's end, but you can work around it by applying any change to the materials.json file. Just put a space next to a comma, save the file, and that'll force Roblox to refresh and correctly pick up on the cubified configuration!

Resources used to edit

I primarily used Visual Studio 2019 to edit the textures. It has a built-in toolset for editing DDS images as well as auto-generating the necessary mipmaps for diffuse_array.dds. The colorspace of the original textures had to be converted from RGB to YCoCg, so I wrote a quick program in C# to do so.

Roblox's conversion from RGB->YCoCg can be described as such in C#:

private static Image to_YCoCg(Image image)
{
    var bitmap = new Bitmap(image);

    for (int i = 0; i < bitmap.Width; i++)
    {
        for (int j = 0; j < bitmap.Height; j++)
        {
            Color color = bitmap.GetPixel(i, j);

            int r = color.R,
                g = color.G,
                b = color.B,
                a = color.A;

            int co = r - b;
            int tmp = b + (co / 2);

            int cg = g - tmp;
            int y = tmp + (cg / 2);

            Color newColor = Color.FromArgb(a, 127 + (co / 2), y, 127 + (cg / 2));
            bitmap.SetPixel(i, j, newColor);
        }
    }

    return bitmap;
}