I wanted to try to work with a designer who doesn’t know anything about Roblox to see if we could build something on the Roblox platform that is outside of the conventional realm of thought in Roblox ecosystem. She doesn’t know anything about Roblox, so she thinks without limitations, which is great and really interesting. So she wanted to make all these squiggles:
Most people on Roblox probably wouldn’t even think about trying to make something like this given the blocky nature of the platform. It would be a massive pain to build, but you can do it with CSG and a lot of patience (I did it once with this model and it was a terrible experience). I don’t have the patience to make as many of these as she wants, so I set out to make a tool that I could use to trace her images and generate parts to cut them out with CSG.
Basic Usage
Here’s what I got with the tool using her drawing:
Here are some other shapes:
To use the tool, you first first select a drawing plane by clicking a surface. Then you lasso draw your shape on that plane. Parts will be generated inside or outside of your drawing, depending on your choosing. You can then use those parts as either negatives or positives to build your CSG objects. I’ve had most success with drawing the parts on the outside of my shape, and then using the parts as negative unions to cut out my shape. You can also try using the tool to construct positively, though. Here’s someone building positively:
And more examples of 2D cuts:
https://twitter.com/swagan2009/status/706654525067636736
3D Shapes
You can also do 3D shapes. Here, I used three orthogonal views of a Cessna to model a fuselage in less than 14 minutes. A plane builder responded to my tweet and said that the process takes him three days.
This raptor was made by Deadeyeguy_45 with a similar process. He and Raptor Laboratories are both saying that the plugin saves them a ton of time over their previous workflow.
Mistertitanic44 made this coke bottle by revolving a cut:
Limitations
This isn’t a magic union-everything tool. You still have to deal with the trial-and-error process of making unions work. Generally, however, the output from the plugin is pretty workable.
The plugin doesn’t always solve every drawing 100% correctly. In some cases, little corners of parts may stick into or out of your shape where they aren’t supposed to be. For now, these have to be manually corrected. Luckily, there usually aren’t many of these if any, and they’re all easy and quick to fix. As an example of this, see the spikes in this model, which mostly all have to be fixed. Skip to 2:40:
Alright, that’s my first plugin. I hope this saves a lot of people a lot of time when trying to cut out all these weird organic shapes that don’t really work in Roblox.
Thanks for looking at my thing!