Today, we are releasing the Avatar Setup (renamed from “Avatar Previewer”) beta feature to everyone. The Avatar Setup tool lets you quickly preview how an avatar looks, animates, wears clothing, and more. We hope you will find it useful for things like creating custom avatars for players or creating NPCs.
Enabling the Beta
To enable this beta in Roblox Studio, follow these simple steps:
Open Roblox Studio and navigate to the “File” menu
Click on “Beta Features”
Enable the “UGC Bodies & Heads” option by checking the corresponding checkbox (see screenshot below) and press Save. Note that this does not mean you will be able to upload to Marketplace if you weren’t already able to.
We have also included a host of improvements for importing avatars from a tool such as Blender, benefiting creators in the UGC Program that can create 3D items especially.
In short, you can import an avatar alongside its clothing instead of importing them all individually, and convert meshes into accessories.
After making sure you have enabled the beta, create your avatar in your modeling program of choice. At the same time, create your hats, shirts, etc. Position them on the avatar however you like. Export the avatar to an .fbx as you would before.
Use “Import 3D” to import this avatar, and make sure everything you expect is in there, including the accessories. Turn on the new “Validate UGC Body” checkbox under Rig General. This will open up Avatar Setup after a successful import.
You will see a message asking you what types of accessories you’re importing. After you fill these in and click OK, those mesh parts will be converted into the accessories you chose. You no longer need to use the Accessory Fitting tool to complete this task.
From there, you can use all the existing functionality of Avatar Setup: try on accessories, test animations, preview your avatar in experience, etc.
Submitting to Marketplace
For creators, submitting to the Marketplace is now significantly easier. Clicking the Submit button will allow you to submit all assets you have selected that you created at the same time.
Known Issues
“T-Shirt” currently does not work as an option to be picked. In the interim, select it as something else, such as a Shirt, and change it during the Submit process.
You may get a warning along the lines of “HSR data not ready.” You can still go through submit if this happens.
A submission failing will not offer you the easy ability to retry. You will need to close the submit window to try again, but you can skip the submission on anything that was successful.
As you test this new feature out, please share your feedback in the comments below. Thank you!
Honestly, I’ve had a problem with the old version, which then made me use the Workspace to design character models. I’m glad you guys are updating your already existing systems to make them better. I’ll be using this in the future!
Roblox has been releasing a lotta new things lately and I’m all in for it.
It’s almost like it’s Christmas already, huh?
This seems useful for making custom body types, that’s what this is intended for, right?
I can import something from Blender and preview what it would look like here?
I’ve noticed that there’s no way to test “Tools” with this animation previewer. A lot of the avatar bundles I’ve bought (otherwise high quality ones too!) from the avatar marketplace have had the tool attachment point facing the wrong direction. I think there should be a test item that you can toggle on and off to make sure the characters are holding the items in the right spot with their hands and aren’t holding Tools upside down or backwards.
Some of the rigs used in the video are templates that aren’t meant to be used as is; the others are default roblox rthro bundles which are perfectly fine for new/free2play users ; If you want better rthro bundles you should get working on one so that you can be the change you want to see in the world when ugc goes public in a few months
You know it’s cool and I see a few use cases, but I still feel like the time and recourses provided to make this could of been used for something more useful.
I in no way want to make fun or say that what’s being shown isn’t bad, it’s just there where already ways (albeit not as intuitive) to do things like this, and this update feels more of like another show off/nudge to developers to adopt purely investor incentivesed avatar models that frankly look distrubing.
Ill say it again but I play roblox and other games to escape reality, so when roblox brings reality in via there extremely stupid features that have little to no purpose such as face tracking and calling(???), it simply removes the enjoyment and the escape I am looking for, but hey maybe im going off topic a bit here.
Roblox becoming more and more like “Ready Player One”. Let’s see how far this really goes. Good update for those who wants to make their game more realistic.
Restricted APIs, UGC validation APIs are locked behind RobloxScriptSecurity and you can’t escalate to that level of permissions. That’s a pretty big issue as most of the stuff that the Avatar Setup plugin checks requires interaction with engine level code. Aside from that, the rest of the features are comparable to a in game avatar editor, so probably not that hard to implement.
