I know that but likely your best bet would to just use viewport frames (it’s all I could think up of atm). I’m on mobile too and battery is low (unable to recharge) so I had to make a quick answer. I have to go now.
I don’t think there’s a Roblox API available, since the removal of generated place thumbnails, that can do this easily. The best way I can think of (that isn’t ViewportFrames) is having a NodeJS bot upload a model with a set ThumbnailCamera to the catalog using data sent through HTTPService, although you’d probably get rate-limited and the data sent over might be huge.
This would work very well for smaller projects but I doubt it could handle thousands of parts per request with many thousands of models.
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Thank you for actually reading my post! You might be right, it’s a shame that roblox removed that functionality 
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I’ll see if I can find anything that might help, but I have a strong feeling that it’s close to impossible without the use of ViewportFrames.
Maybe a good feature request for Roblox would be adding a property called “RenderMode” to ViewportFrames, where the two options are Dynamic and Static. When set to Static the image rendered is only rendered once instead of each frame, until a descendant changes.
Or just the ability to generate a temporary image ID from models, without having to keep the model in place memory. (Would be better for your use case, as the problem is memory not framerate.)
Maybe something like: “AssetService:GenerateModelThumbnail(model, [camera]) → String image ID”
For any Roblox staff reading this…
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Hey,
I read the post already, I just told you it is the best option to do.
Awesome! I’d have made it into a feature request or replied to yours if I had the permissions 
. Still stuck with member rank after 2.5 years.
For a temporary solution however, it might be possible to generate the ViewportFrames as they come into view with a small loading animation, maybe in sets of 10. As you scroll down it’d load in more items and remove ones that aren’t visible anymore. This might reduce memory but it’d come at the cost of efficiency, hence the loading animation to let people know the data is being loaded and processed.
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The best option like you also said is to upload it as an asset. By serializing the model we can get the XML format. Once we have this it’s basically just a matter of uploading it.
When the model has been uploaded, using an api such as https://assetgame.roblox.com/Thumbs/Asset.ashx?width=110&height=110&assetId=1818 would work just fine.
This might be of some help when it comes to serializing, it is a bit outdated but seems to work fine. Just make sure you change this:
if not hmm:find("%[") then props[name] = realTyp(typ) end
to
if (hmm) then
if not hmm:find("%[") then props[name] = realTyp(typ) end
end
Example:
local m = require(script.MainModule)
print(m.Serialize(workspace.Baseplate))
For more information on uploading a model, this endpoint seems ideal.
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Wow this is an excellent idea, thank you! I’m a bit of a noob when it comes to website APIs and such, would it be possible to do all of this from in-game? I’m trying to avoid having to set up my own servers as much as possible.
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Roblox web APIs can’t be used from within the game, hence the NodeJS bot I mentioned before, basically he just explained it better lol.
You’d have to setup a server with a web endpoint (REST or something) to send over the serialised data and make the upload request from there.
The serialization is done purely in-game but you will sadly have to spin up a webserver to handle proxying requests to roblox.
Step by step it could look like this:
- Serialize the model into XML
- Send a POST request containing that xml to your webserver
- Webserver sends another request to the
/uploadendpoint with the contents - Send the asset id back to the Roblox server
You might also have to take the image Roblox returns and upload a separate decal of that. But only if you are unable to get an asset thumbnail using some sort of in-game api.
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Do you mean something like this, i mean you could just make it model and publish it, You just have right click model and press save image as
(the image that right beside the sales is me moving icon with the mouse)
To clarify, are you trying to generate a thumbnail for something that was user-generated at run-time, or are these just static models that exist in the game when you publish it?
This is another fun case of Roblox’s tooling being insufficient for scenarios like this, requiring 3rd party software to accomplish. Even if you do get something like this working, you have to keep in mind there’s a potential risk of being moderated since the auto-generated thumbnails have to be looked over by someone now, and you won’t get an immediate thumbnail as a result.
I do understand the frustration with ViewportFrames and the amount of memory they consume, we’ve struggled with that problem in our game too. Would certainly be nice if we could capture a ViewportFrame into an image once and then free it from memory.
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User-generated models at runtime, every minute or so. I want players to be able to cheaply preview a potentially massive asset without having to download it, which is why Thumbnails appear to be the only option.
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So, the OP explicitly clarifies that they do not want solutions that involve ViewportFrames, and you willingly ignore this request? Telling the OP that ViewportFrames are the best solution is unhelpful as the OP already realizes they do not want to utilize them. What’s the point of your post if you’re not adding to the topic?
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I just thought I would bring that in, I know he doesn’t want ViewportFrames to be included but all I said was it was the best solution then I said the unexpensive solution
This is exactly what we need. Would be perfect if we could do this server-side. Perhaps these images could have a unique content format so they are game-specific. This would prevent bloating Roblox’s content server with temporary asset ids. They would probably need to clean up or be down-sampled based on a few factors like image age, times since last viewed, and whether the game is producing an unreasonable number of icons relative to the player count. There would need to be some way to verify that one of these images hasn’t been cleaned up, so that the server can re-generated it. Image deduplication would be great too.
If images could be generated on the client, they definitely should be local and only work on the client that generated it. Images generated server-side could be potentially used cross-server, but not cross-game; Games should be held accountable for generated ViewportFrame images if the feature is misused.
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This is a ridiculous suggestion but you could run a stripped down version of your raytracer with actors to generate the images.
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I’ve considered this but I run into two of the same issues:
- 1: I now need to store 4096 * (5 - 14, depending on Color3 values) bytes to store just a 64p image, which means I have to go through datastores, which is a strict no-no for my use case due to latency
- 2: I now have to load 4096 (64p) parts/frames per room, but I can have tens of rooms visible at once, which quickly adds up
The only reasonable solution is to just have every place be a small icon. Memory efficient, easy to store/access on my end, and the asset ID only takes up like 10 characters?
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Is it possible to approximate the model with fewer parts? There could be a low-detail version of each asset in the model, and obstructed assets could be omitted.
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