Asset Import and Management Recap Jan-Apr 2025

Updates Announcements
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Hello Creators!

It’s been a while! Since our recap last year, a few things have changed.
We’re expanding the scope of this post and excited to cover updates and fixes for both the 3D Importer and the new Asset Manager. Our goal is to continue to improve content workflows centered around how you create and use assets. We wanted to update you on the latest improvements, bug fixes, and other notable changes to both features, and give you an opportunity to provide feedback directly to the team!

Let’s dive into it!

New Features

Asset Manager Beta

We released a new Asset Manager beta feature! You can learn more in our original DevForum announcement here. With the new asset manager, you can view a more comprehensive directory of your assets, organized by user and group inventories. You can also:

  • Search those inventories using a new and improved search feature.
  • Filter and sort assets, and bulk select items to insert multiple at once or copy their asset IDs.

These are just a few of the features included with the release, and provides a foundation for things to come including folders, better bulk importing, and more. We’re hard at work getting ready to take this out of beta as soon as possible; thank you for the great feedback and keep it coming!

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Import Queue Design Changes

New designs and features are coming to the Import Queue beta. You’ll have a cleaner UI experience, the option to quickly toggle the asset creator, and more visibility into the state of each file. We encourage you to try out this new import workflow before it officially launches in late June. Please leave us your thoughts and feedback in the comments!

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Error and warning icons jump to the problematic node

The 3D Importer shows you errors and warnings when we have issues parsing certain objects in your 3D scene. Before, you would have to keep clicking to find which node actually had the error, if it was buried in your scene hierarchy.

You can now click on the icon itself, which will automatically open the relevant node with the error. We hope this allows you to identify and resolve issues faster, and speed up the import process!

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CreateAssetAsync supports Animations

CreateAssetAsync now supports creating Animation assets. Please try this out and let us know what you think! For more information on the CreateAssetAsync API, take a look at our announcement post here.

Fixed Bugs

Asset Manager

  • Fixed a bug where enabling both the Next Gen Studio Preview beta and Revamped Asset Manager beta would cause some UI elements in the Asset Manager to render incorrectly.
  • Fixed a bug where the Asset Manager button was disabled when the viewport was hidden.

We’re also currently investigating an issue with the bulk importer not being available in a published experience, and the difficulty of finding recently imported assets. Please stay tuned for those improvements!

3D Importer

  • Drastically improved importer texture preview performance, which should fix a number of out of memory crashes.
  • HTTP and moderation errors will now be translated in the error popup.
  • Fixed a bug where bones under the Head were lost on import.
  • The neutral FACS pose for glTFs should now be the 0th frame as consistent with documentation.
  • Fixed a bug with imported glTF tangents which would cause normal shading issues.
  • Fixed crash caused by empty glTF animation names.
  • Fixed renaming issue with duplicate glTF bone and node names.
  • Fixed FBX dynamic head scale issue causing exaggerated poses.
  • Fixed a bug causing errors and warnings to disappear in the properties window.
  • Animation names no longer add _animation suffix.
  • Import Queue progress bar no longer miscounts files.

Other News

A quick update on our future work!

@tasavix will be continuing to work on the Asset Manager, addressing bug reports and feature requests for the foreseeable future.

@georjozh will be expanding our Import Queue tool to support other asset types soon; we hope for this to soon become a strictly better feature than the current Asset Manager bulk importer, which we will then replace.

Other members of our team are cooking up more exciting things for the future, please stay tuned! We are also continuing to monitor for reported bugs on these features, so don’t hesitate to reach out.

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Would it be possible to revert back the locations of all previous buttons for Importing 3D Assets? Most of them were valuable locations not just for developers who are used to it, but it’s pretty hard having to switch a ton of times just to import something again.
I fully would appreciate your full support in making this happen as many Developers had made their opinions highly negative in regards of that one valuable button missing on the new Next Gen Studio. I doubt you’ll listen to my request, but I beg of you.

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Random, and not that I’d use it in my current project workflow, but what are your thoughts on adding support for importing & updating .PSDs?

I found the workflow in Blender to be more efficient for texturing than saving to a .png or something (and reselecting it). Updating models in Studio (or any game engine), through a .PSD when I already have the 3d model set, would make things faster. I say that cause I recently saw Unity has this functionality. I know packages exist, but I haven’t used them yet. I don’t want to change my current process of things until my next project, just in case I run into issues.

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Hey Mathew, I totally hear your request and understand how this affects longtime Studio users. I have shared it with the team in charge of the NextGen update. In the mean time, there are alternatives to the system menu (File > Import 3D):

  1. You can create your own tabs in the NextGen Studio ribbon so that Importer is always one click away
  2. You can use the Cmd/Ctrl-M shortcut (or set your own via the keybind editor) to quickly toggle it

Let me know if you have more concerns!

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Well, there some things old Developers would want back and if you’d be up to it, we could talk directly as it is likely going to be plenty of information and discussion needed to organize that information. Especially the “View” tab.

I send my regards.

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I think the more file types we can support the better! Typically when we’re looking to expand functionality in this way, we prioritize more “generic” file types first, which is why we focus first on things like .png or .jpeg. We’ve also built direct sync tooling to import directly from Blender. We’re currently thinking a lot about how Creator workflows can improve across the spectrum, for everything from supported file types to new ways to build great experiences. Thanks for suggesting this, and let us know if you have any other ideas!

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Makes sense. I’ll keep the direct syncing for Blender in mind.

This is kinda related (with improving workflow), I assume it’s a different team, but the Animation Editor needs an overhaul. Do you know if there are plans for it?

I say that as I’m having an issue, but also in general. I can file a bug report, but I’m currently having an issue where bones aren’t recognized by the Animation Editor:

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Definitely file a bug if you can, but I’ll also pass it along!

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make sure you have a primary part set on the model

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This is going to be a bit vague as this was a while ago, but I believe this 3D import queue thing failed to upload a model properly. The model was made of multiple meshes and, while it did import it, the positions and scales were not preserved. Meanwhile, uploading with the old import asset system did not have this issue.

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Somewhat of an offshoot of asset importing, but are there any plans for plaintext files and file types other than .luau?

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yeah it has a primary part set; changing it from the characterMesh to the HumanoidRootPart didn’t make it work either

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Thanks! Just filed one: Bones Don't show in Animation Editor

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When will we be able to delete our assets totally?

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By any chance, would it be possible for the development team behind the 3D importer to look into supporting GPU Instancing?

Currently this is really problematic if we are importing like 1 file that contains let’s say 5 of the same meshes, which are just duplicated. The 3D importer ignores this and will upload each mesh with a new ID. This is problematic because some people level design within blender or other programs, then when you import said levels you suddenly have a massively inflated drawcall count, which leads to incredibly poor performance.

This is already addressed for SurfaceAppearances on materials within 1 file, but for some reason not meshes.

However surface appearance duplication will also occur if we have 2 FBX files which are both referencing the exact same image files in 1 material. Instead of reusing 1 that was uploaded, we get the same image uploaded twice. This will increase upload times and also just add more performance problems to games.

I would really appreciate if this would be looked into! This has been bothering me for years now.

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do i have to scroll through a list of different people in filter dropdown, creator section, in shared with experience tab just to find myself?

i don’t really able to showcase it, but i wrote the replication and it seems annoying so nice (i think) to report

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Personally I like the new asset manager, but I think the only thing it’s missing is displaying only the recently updated mesh/decals/images like the old one does.

I know you can sort by “Date Modified” but it becomes a tad messy if you ever need to reupload a mesh, while the old one would just ONLY display the one you uploaded

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make the default search filter by recently uploaded :pray:

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Have you made it easier to simply delete or even possibly overwrite assets? I have so many copies of assets because a new version needs to be saved for each iteration and there’s no easy way to simply delete it.

I’m sure roblox servers have at least 3x-4x more data stored than they need to because of this.

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