I love this idea. I feel like it’s a good spot to go.
I guess the #1 issue people are having is that it’s not following the old style. To be honest, the only difference is that these can’t work at 5 studs tall without looking weird.
These are pretty much R15 avatars with better animations and a taller rig height, like 6 or 7 studs. I see no issue with implementation aside from games that rely on small gaps.
I don’t quite follow that comment, Technically R15 and Anthro have the same amount of joints and parts. It’s the skeletal structure and geometry that are different. By this definition we are going for exactly what you are asking.
This option for users and developers will create more varied content and experiences that can expand our ecosystem.
I imagine most concerns are due to art style rather than the engineering of anthro avatars (which is great).
Maybe my communication was off here. The anthro man is basically 1 version of the anthro avatars. There will be other packages and various styles emerging from it.
The demo should showcase this fairly well. If you dislike 1 package you will have hundreds of other choices. Does this address your concern?
I couldn’t say without seeing other packages. If they all look more like Yourius’ avatars then I’d have little concern, but I would imagine they all have to aesthetically play nice to prevent breaking immersion, and I don’t see how both Yourius’ avatars and the current prototype could do that.
Even if we have a mix and match, I wouldn’t want to see the prototype avatar in-game. It’s deep in the uncanny valley – not that it’s not blocky enough (I want to move away from this) or close enough to ROBLOX’S roots, but rather that it just looks creepy.
Your comment is rather confusing.
One thing I want to point out is the so called uncanny valley will exist - because we are about unlocking user creativity. If a user wants to find a combination that portrays uncanny valley you will see it. To me this is totally fine. In fact it’s great, because it’s show the limitless potential of the system and has creative user generated avatars.
We will on our side do the best to create the best possible Anthro avatars using this system.
Okay, okay, I don’t want to invade on this conversation, but from how I’m understanding this, you just said you want to allow these avatars be super creepy so it can show the ‘limitless’ potential of ROBLOX. And these avatars are going to be used on at least a handful of popular games.
So, creepy avatars. On popular games. With little kids.
What?
I’m not saying the avatars are exactly creepy to me (from what we’ve seen so far), but it’s the uncanny valley, and that goes into psychology, and everyone is psychologically different, and so these avatar outfit combinations can possibly be legit horrifying for some people.
But, maybe I’m taking this wrong and you mean just giving developers the possibility of having the uncanny valley, which they’ve already had, and that you’re going to change the avatars to give this uncanny valley less of a chance of happening regularly. But still, the thought of this possible eeriness being everywhere kind of makes me cringe.
I like where sorcus is going, you have my vote… Just… please, different body design then the currently proposed one, im with Echo that it is just creepy looking.
Especially with the Roblox Man face. God forbid.
h e n l o m y g u y
If that throws you off, just try any one of the other costumes in the demo. For example knight of the splintered sky or crimson costume.
My first anthro attempt from 2009-ish lololol:
My anthro prototype from 2016 (I’m too lazy to add hair styles and finish the male):
Fresh memes:
Characters are limited by your animation and rigging tools.
I can move joints and see the animation change in real time. Then I just copy&paste the folder containing the animation into my game.
I can feed arbitrary functions that return cframes to my animation system.
This enables me to implement inverse kinematics,
Without detailed UV maps or mesh skinning, anthropomorphic characters are extremely difficult to implement in a non-cringy way. Face animations do help a bit:
If this was instead a bearded dude wearing armor that had HD spec/bump maps, I think developers would have had a very different reaction to avatar 2.0:
Also there will be problems in animations when transforming the character’s skeleton variably between normal r15 and anthro. Some animations might depend on the position of limbs in space, and distorting the skeleton can cause the end-points to be off. Roblox should be very careful moving forward with this; Good luck supporting this character slider in 5 years when you want to implement fully articulated hands to keep up with what developers are creating. Don’t get me wrong, the demo is great, but every change to the avatar results in more complexity and edge-cases for developers to deal with long-term.
The animation system and server-client model for characters/animations/physics needs to be perfect. There are cases where animation packs influence a player’s ability to complete an obstacle course, in which case the animation should be purely graphical/cosmetic; There are also cases where a developer might want to make a crouching animation and have them fit under obstacles, in which case the animation needs to influence physics.
At what point should a developer use constraints instead of animations? Realistic physics is a huge part of Roblox’s vision, and perhaps we can learn something from animation systems like Euphoria.
(from 2008):
Animation packs and graphical cosmetics are very profitable, but animation packs like levitation don’t truly fit roblox from a physics standpoint. My games make a clear distiction between graphics and physics for this reason:
In 10 years we might create flying animation packs by applying forces to a character’s physics assembly to keep them in the air, or we can just divide graphics and physics, idk.
I think the best course of action from pre-r15 would have been to do automatic mesh skinning on shoulders/hips to make it look like there are elbows/knees (basically treating the tip of the hand or the bottom of the foot as an inverse kinematics target.) There might not be an elbow joint in the animation skeleton, but it can be implied using IK. This would have preserved the platform’s simplicity while spicing up the graphics without any backwards or forwards compatibility implications. Although when it comes to actually developing a game, custom complex skeletons are necessary, and r15 makes anthro characters more accessible to new devs.
Edit: Fixed dead gyazo links.
I didn’t know ROBLOX wanted to become a literal meme. The new anthro characters look extremely generic and unironically cringey.
Please don’t do this…
So were the avatars made like this to compete with Unity? I think I remember I predicted something like this would happen a while ago
This really shouldn’t be added, everyone has known ROBLOX as that blocky game, and this would be deviating too much from what ROBLOX really feels like and should be.
But it might show what Roblox could be. I just hope that Roblox won’t force this on us and takes the time to perfect this before rolling it out.
If Roblox is trying to compete with Unity. . .
lol
That is what I was thinking as well. 
I don’t see you going against mesh parts?
Just because ROBLOX was once restricted to a blocky aesthetic does NOT mean we shouldn’t allow developers to deviate from this aesthetic. Criticize the look of the bodies all you want, but this is probably the worst arguments and this kind of mentality only serves to hold the platform back and restrict developers from making games look how they want to look.
Anything that gives me tools to create more accurate and realistic characters and animations is a good thing in my book. I like the new characters, I’m not sure where the hate for them comes from.
