As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to create UGC accessories that give a “transparent” look
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because this will improve the creativity and expressivity for those looking to create avatar and accessories using semi transparent accessories.
One of the hacky ways people are trying to create “Transparent” Accessories is by adding more face to give the effect of “transparency” from a distance, but this won’t look fully transparent, and also takes up a lot of resources.
Upclose Example:
There are a few Roblox-made accessories which use transparency, and would be nice to be able to do these as UGC creators.
I understand that in the future, we will be able to upload “PBR” textured items, which is a nice feature, and therefore I want to request allowing transparency as a new feature which could be released with the PBR update.
Both of these updates would make the UGC creation a lot better.
To prevent limited rip-offs such as headless bundles, or glowing eyes copies, I think we could limit the transparency to 0.5 on the “Handle/Part” and the image must have pixels that are higher than 127 Alpha level.
This would make sure there can’t be fully transparent items which could be used to fake stuff.
Additionally this could only work for accessories, and not bodies, so headless copies can’t be made.
Unfortunately, from how I personally see it. There are currently a few massive limitations that would either de-value this feature or cause issues with it:
Transparent items would require essentially two review processes:
Roblox doesn’t render translucent objects behind glass, so it’d very easy to hide violative content masked with a translucent layer; to prevent that, Roblox would essentially need to do two review processes; one supporting transparency and one without.
Translucency on Roblox is expensive:
As of currently, a translucent object is quite expensive to render over its opaque counterpart, afaik.
Roblox has less-than-ideal depth-sorting support:
If you hop into Studio right now wearing a bunch of accessories and then set every part in your character to be translucent (or even just the accessories); you’ll likely have a lot of Z-fighting. This is because Roblox doesn’t do per-pixel depth-sorting, they do it on a per-part basis; this means any translucent part that is both in-front and behind another part isn’t ever going to be able to depth-sort properly.
Roblox doesn’t handle translucent objects well for thumbnails:
If you’ve ever owned a translucent item and decided to wear it; you’ll probably remember the white background that appears behind it if nothing else in the render is visible there. Roblox presumably limits themselves to opaque / fully-transparent avatar thumbnails and hence fills in the area behind translucent objects with a white background.
Some developers don’t want translucent objects on player-characters:
This may be a feature-request in itself. But, developers who don’t want translucent objects in their experience for some reason won’t be able to detect that your accessory uses translucency and even if they could, they would effectively have to delete your accessory from a player’s character. There wouldn’t be any way to retrieve a version without transparency in the case the developer would rather use that. Theoretically, a developer could use an external server to analyse images to detect translucent textures; however, it would still be less-than-ideal.
Current translucent items will be worth less:
As a disclaimer here, I own a translucent item; however, I never directly bought mine, I got it from a ‘chaser’ gift code without even knowing about it until a few years ago.
Of course, you could say this for limiteds when UGC went public, too. However, Roblox still protects the IP of those accessories. Users buying translucent accessories for the translucent effect is a bit of a different story; sure, the exact accessory would still be IP protected; however, the translucent aspect in itself wouldn’t. I know this sounds very ‘gatekeep-y’ but I still find the need to flag this as: not something to entirely stop this feature but certainly something to consider when following through with it, as to not upset anyone.
This is all I personally know about this subject. Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong or outdated on any of this!
Of course, Roblox already has translucent items made by them. However, my fear is that by having it released to the public coupled with not mitigating any of the above; it would lead to a lot more accessories being created (potentially also some with malicious intentions) all using this broken-enough technology and suffering from the exact same problems.
I don’t think you need to request this as another thing as with PBR textures, you can use surface appearances which already have a transparency option! Thus, allowing translucent/transparent UGC accessories to become a reality. Correct me if I am wrong though.
Can you tell me a reason why a developer would not want translucent accessory for their game? I am just curious as I can’t think of a reason.
If a game heavily-uses the glass material; they may decide to remove translucency in it’s entirety to prevent creating visual issues.
For games that include ‘ghost-like’ avatars; they may decide to disable it to prevent users posing as ghosts. Especially when the player’s actual body part size is very small.
There are performance reasons for disabling it, albeit I doubt most games would have that as their main reason for doing so.
It may break some visual effects in-experience, depending on their set-up. For example, Highlights under Humanoids also highlight translucent parts afaik.
There are many different reasons why a developer may decide to limit it. A lot of them rely on very particular use-cases, too, so it’s unfortunately extremely difficult to provide full context for all possible cases; I hope these few highlight why some developers may decide to disable it, though.
I know there are current limitations, and it’s probably not a good idea to currently release it, but once I think once they figure out the PBR process for UGC accessories, they could consider the idea of transparent or transluscent accessories. Using Surface apparence can actually create a better transparency effect than normal transparency, so there’s a few things Roblox could work with.
Also, if they were to go with the classic way instead of SurfaceApparence, I personally don’t see too many issues with the hats not being rendered behind the glass, many users don’t pay attention to such details, nor do they care much about the Z-Fighting caused by these. This feature being limited to accessories, would also make sure avatars aren’t rendered invisible behind glass, and but only a few accessories.
(here’s a picture of an item using SurfaceAppearance, notice the head of the character inside of the eye)
I agree that Roblox currently has a few issues with those, but I believe it’s something that would have a good market into the catalog, and something we need. I believe Roblox should do such an update, and I wouldn’t personally mind this taking longer to release and get perfected, because I know it’s going to be cool and awesome if it’s going to happen. Roblox should take as much time as they need to release such a change.
I mostly agree. Speaking as someone who owns both The Fire Crown and Transparent Icephones (as well as several other non limited translucent accessories), adding this as a feature for UGC would completely ruin all of the preexisting translucent accessories by Roblox.
The same way only Roblox can upload particle and sound accessories, translucency should be kept exclusive to Roblox as well.
