3D Import Recap [Aug-Oct 2023]: Avatar Workflow Improvements and More!

[tasavix]

Hello Creators!

Welcome to the Aug-Oct 2023 recap for the 3D Importer! As always, we are excited to share with you about what we’re working on to improve your 3D asset workflows. We’ll highlight some new features since our last post, bug fixes, and other news. Let’s dive into it!

New Features

Open Avatar Previewer after Import

If you use the Avatar Previewer plugin as part of the UGC Heads and Bodies beta feature, you can now open the plugin automatically after importing an R15 rig. The Avatar Previewer helps check your rig for UGC compatibility and shows more Avatar-specific information. In order to do this, just toggle on the “Validate UGC Body” setting under the Rig General panel of the import settings.

Please note: in order to use this feature, you must also have “Insert In Workspace” toggled on as well.

Improved Lighting in Preview Window

We’ve tweaked the lighting in the preview window to better show the details of textures and meshes. Previously, details were especially hard to see non-textured models. Here are before and after screenshots for comparison.

Before:

After:

We welcome any more feedback on how the previewer looks and works!

Dynamic Heads in glTF

With the release of glTF, we were still missing one key feature: dynamic heads!

We can happily report that we’ve remedied this deficiency, and you can now import any kind of funky glTF faces you so desire.

Dynamic heads in glTF work identically with their FBX counterparts. Just make sure if you’re exporting from Blender that you check the Custom Properties option when you export your glTF!

Fixed Bugs

• Animations now scale with rig changes, so the scale factor should now be respected
• Fixed glTF issue where wrong UV coordinates would be used for textures
• Corrected Hip Height scaling for animations for R15s
• glTF now respects mesh pivots defined by the 3rd-party application
• Fixed issue with extra bones not following animation in FBX dynamic heads
• Fixed a bug where renaming the workspace camera caused the importer to error
• Skinned rigs now scale with settings changes
• Fixed bug where glTF attachments had incorrect parents

Other News

This has been a busy couple of months for the importer, but we’re not slowing down! Here’s a quick look into the next few projects and features being worked on.

In Progress:

• @OriginalSleepyhead is working on allowing upload to groups directly from the 3D importer.
• @iridiumegg is working on expanding the ability to preset settings to include custom presets and the ability to set a preset as your personal default
• @iridiumegg is also working on allowing you to select multiple FBX import files and import them at the same time.
• @tasavix is working on performance improvements. A common complaint is that just changing the name of your assets takes a while. We’re hoping to fix this!
• @tasavix is also working on a public import API that lets you make import plugins powered by the same systems our 3D Importer uses! We hope this allows you to create highly customized, powerful workflows.

Asset import crew, over and out!

Note: there will not be an update for the Nov-Dec months due to the holiday season, but feel free to keep messaging us your questions and comments!

[Ron1n_Sim (Ronin)]

Hey! Amazing improvements on 3D import previewer. Just a question though.
I have seen lacking support on R6 and R15 avatars being able to smoothly be converted to blender and back to Roblox normally
This is a huge ask for Roblox but will it be possible that some sort of Blender x Roblox Plugin like the one in the marketplace be integrated to Roblox?
Being able to be useful for rigging all the animations and converting back onto Roblox character Rigs will be Amazing!
(I beg for something similar of sorts due to the original Plugin is not being updated anymore and has bugs).

Overall I like the improvements on the Import previewer. I hope this isn’t offtopic to the discussion. But it is related to being able to convert animations to Roblox.

[younite]

Some great news, thanks for all the updates for 3D Import!!

@tasavix

@tasavix is also working on a public import API that lets you make import plugins powered by the same systems our 3D Importer uses! We hope this allows you to create highly customized, powerful workflows.

In the future, can we see these tools being open sourced to other aspects of Roblox development, ie. UI design? One of the main issues with UI is the lack of an importing tool to import your UI from other 3rd party tools. Will these public import tools eventually expand to other areas of Roblox development?

Thanks!

[tasavix]

Not off-topic at all! Thanks for the feedback, we understand that currently going back and forth between outside tools and Roblox can still be better. We’re looking into improving it and hope to bring you some good news soon

[tasavix]

Interesting idea! Currently this import API is centered around making our 3D import pipeline available to creators, but I can definitely see the use of UI import too. I’ll forward this feedback to the relevant people. Thanks!

[Beloathed (Gamer)]

3 words: RAISE. POLYGON. LIMIT.

[imdaros]

Hey I am happy this is a feature that isn’t neglected like the hundreds of other features such as the VoiceChatService and particle emitters,

good to see at least something is going on at roblox other then wasting money and recourses.

[Joinadfe (Aboltus)]

Wow, thanks for fixing some of the problems, the thing that bothered me the most was the lighting. Continue at the same pace. And have a good holiday season!

[xalwaleedx (MinimumWageEmpIoyee)]

@tasavix

Animations now scale with rig changes, so the scale factor should now be respected

THIS, THIS RIGHT HERE, IS THE REASON I HAVE HAPPINESS IN MY LIFE!

[xalwaleedx (MinimumWageEmpIoyee)]

They already mentioned it and they said they are not able to make this because of something in the engine.

I saw the discussion about five to eight months ago, so that’s been a while, from what I can recall, therefore I don’t have the link.

[itsDenDenn (Den)]

Currently, when importing Custom rigs the RootPart gets created on the center of the scene and doesn’t represent the rig size at all, can we have an option in the 3D Importer that let’s us resize/move the RootPart without having to reimport the rig many times until we get it right?

[Judgy_Oreo (phoenixwhitefire2000)]

Here is the post @xalwaleedx is probably referring to:

3D Importer Support for glTF Files [Beta]

@felipe2008si @1Arenio @ffrostfall @Beloathed Re: Triangle limit First off quick caveat, our team works on the importer, but we do not work on the rendering, and the triangle limit is a hard rendering limitation. This is my best-effort attempt at trying to provide a little bit more clarity as to the reasoning for the limit from someone who doesn’t work on rendering code. The TLDR is: Roblox runs on so many devices, a large amount of which are very low-powered devices (e.g. old phones). Becau…

TL;DR: Some devices Roblox supports force a limit on the maximum number of triangles at around 21K ((2^16)/3=~21845). There have been some rumors going around and some "We’re considering…"s by other engineers that work on rendering features that the super old devices that have this limitation might stop being supported in the near future.

[ObylxV5 (jaleese)]

3D import will be very useful, thanks.

[RealTitoepf (Ene)]

Will we have the option to disable roblox vertex normals changing? I can’t make anime like avatar bundles because roblox replaces my vertex normals so it goes from looking flat like anime to something weird. What causes this is stuff that has a WrapLayer (layered clothing and the future accessories)

before and after

[tasavix]

What causes this is stuff that has a WrapLayer

So this happening on application of a Layered Clothing item on the rig?
Interesting, I’m not sure about the mechanics behind the normals changing with Layered Clothing, but will forward this to our Avatar teams. Thanks for the report!