Anthropomorphic Avatars

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.

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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.

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image

:smiley: :dragon:


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.

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Especially with the Roblox Man face. God forbid.

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h e n l o m y g u y

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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.

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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,


And also this :flushed:

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:



Having some division between graphics and physics is the most practical from a game development perspective for a few reasons:

  • Complex graphics can be generated client-side, instead of by the server
  • Physics is stable and overhead on the server is low
  • Animations can be creative (backflips, dancing, flying)

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.

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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…

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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

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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.

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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

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That is what I was thinking as well. :wink:

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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.

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For the inf time, people aren’t against the “blocky aesthetic” change, Everyone loved the Union, MeshPart and Smooth Terrain features, it’s about the fact that they’re changing the way people look at ROBLOX as a whole, ROBLOX is ROBLOX because of the lego rig, the characters you see roaming the front-page places are what’s going to representate the platform in general.

If you ask someone random on the street about ROBLOX, chances are they

  1. Have no clue what Roadblocks is, or
  2. Say it’s that “lego spin-off”

Exactly, ship it as an easily installed plugin, free-model or just as a checkbox under place configurations, just don’t make it the face of the website. ( which would be by adding Anthro Catalog assets, making people able to change their profile page to it, ect )

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And things can and most likely will change
ROBLOX is deviating away from platform loyalty and more towards game loyalty with this you can expect more and more platform-wide associations to break down and become more game specific. Which has already been happening.
I don’t believe there’s any way ROBLOX should specifically ‘feel’ like or should be aside from being a platform for letting people create games.

Your argument mainly persists on the basis that developers will always keep the blocky characters and will never opt for a different style. Which may not even be the case.

Please quote me on that, I specifically said

Developers can opt to more realistic body-styles all they want, I don’t think anyone is against that, atleast I am not, and I thought I made that pretty clear. Having pre-coded and pre-built anthropomorphic avatars for people who need it isn’t a bad thing, but having it representating the website is. ( Which has nothing to do with development )

So no, my argument doesn’t mainly persist on the basis that developers will be forced to make blocky rigs, if you interpreted it that way, please quote me and I will edit my post.

Also, I find it quiet sad that you want ROBLOX to deviate from what it already is, and become another indie game platform. You’re basically saying that ROBLOX is trying to become Gamejolt, or Newgrounds, which I don’t quiet agree with. If you want to make Indie games and release them on a more mature and game specific platform, there are already plenty of choices out there. In my eyes, ROBLOX is its own thing, and should stay so.

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ROBLOX is its own thing, and provides many features other platforms don’t, but as I said ROBLOX wants to deviate from platform loyalty and more to game and developer loyalty.

What you’re asking for a quote on - here

This specifically refers to the blocky characters on front page places that represent the platform. This statement unless my interpretation is wrong, is running on that ROBLOX developers (and many front page successful devs) will stick to the blocky aesthetic/blocky characters and won’t deviate from it which may hold true for now, but isn’t very reliable in the future.

ROBLOX is another indie game platform to a degree - as you have other community stuff to do like war groups, or building showcases which I think ROBLOX will cater to these for a long time. Thats another part that makes them unique, but I can’t see ROBLOX holding a single aesthetic besides web page design forever.

Okay, your interpretation is slightly wrong then, because I stated that I am all for developers opting to more realistic body types, and if every single front page place does so, then that would be, well, weird but acceptable, because there would still be places running the classic lego rig, and the catalog and profile pages would still representate ROBLOX. And that’s where my arguement ends, I am against the idea of having this representate 90% of all places and become an official avatar with official catalog assets, I am not against the idea of having this morph available for people who need it for their places.

Also,

Ofcourse you can’t see that, it has already happend plenty of times ( all web layout changes, logo changes, feature removals and additions ) and it will continue to happen, because every platform goes through phases and change and I, for the third time, am not against that. I am all for changes and improvements, but just not this one, I don’t want these Anthropomorphic Avatars to representate the website, to me, thats like if Club Penguin changed
From this image
To this image

( rest in peace )
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