Negative GUI elements

You have a frame and can set its style to negative. It’d act a bit like clipping but in reverse. Anything GUI related behind its z index isn’t rendered. That area only renders the 3D real world and whatever GUIs are above it in Z index.

It’s much simpler than CSG for GUIs but it’s somewhat close. It wouldn’t work for rotations because that’d require roblox drawing extra polygons out of guis or whatever that reason is for no rotatable clipping.

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It makes everything within the hole invisible.

btw if this can be a thing I’ll forgive Roblox for everything they’ve done so far this year

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Roblox has already pretty much put their foot down on complex UI (see posts about clipping rotated GUIS). Dunno if it’s really a technical problem or if they just don’t want to pitch in the effort to do it.

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Rotational GUI clipping is not as simple as what ScriptOn is proposing. He’s proposing adding a GUI hole object which only makes un-rotated guis clip. It’s just the opposite of ClipsDescendents so it wouldn’t be adding in too much code.

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Maybe it would be cool to have generic “clipping masks” such as rectangles/circles that can be both positive and negative. Negative example is given in the figure above, a positive example could be a minimap that should have a circular clip around it.

Similar to this, but then not just for images, and able to set a position offset:

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This is still necessary.

As a Roblox developer who does not specialize in UI design it is difficult to make custom shapes that cannot be found in the toolbox or online. I am a better modeler in Roblox Studio than I am in external software like Blender. It is much simpler to use Studio for basic models however Blender is probably better for more complex stuff. Same for UI design: I am better at using Studio’s UI tools than I am using external programs. And you could probably get more out of an external program meant for this kind of stuff however some users might prefer to use Studio’s built-in stuff. unless it’s for programming

This would be great for cutting holes in frames for stuff like binoculars or scopes for guns. The current solution is to make it yourself in another software, then wait for moderation to approve which is a waste of time, or get lucky that you can find what you want specifically.

Please consider this, it would make UI design on Roblox so much easier and allow for more creativity.

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A possible solution you could do right now is by manipulating the camera and CSG in viewport frames. It’s hacky but you can create an orthographic camera by setting Field of View to 1 and then use bricks and decals as UI elements.

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Just found a use case for this that is a bummer why we don’t have it right now.

I want to make an interactive tutorial that involves clicking a lot of UI buttons, yet many of my UI is complexly scaled and positioned and what I want to do is have a black frame cover all the UI except for that button so it indicates that that button is the one to be pressed, which can be made way easier with negative GUI elements.

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Wish canvasgroup would’ve added this feature… we finally got clipdescendents to work properly with rotated frames.

So close yet so far!

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