Deformable meshes flicker when MeshPart size changes

My game uses deformable meshes and everything seems to be working really well - except for when I try to rescale a MeshPart with bones in it. These MeshParts are constantly rescaled as part of the game’s primary gameplay and seeing as there’s no scaling support for bones yet, this is the only way for people to resize deformable meshes. The MeshPart usually re-appears less than a second after you change the size of the MeshPart, but it’s very detracting in our game. The behavior occurs online and in studio on most peoples’ devices that have tested the game.

I have attached a minimized repro file with a single deformable MeshPart and configurable scale NumberValue in ServerScriptService so you can see the occasional flickering behavior. Change it a few times and you’ll see the mesh disappear for a brief second and reappear. The flicker time does not appear to scale with the number of meshes in the game.

scaling_repro.rbxl (22.8 KB)

CPU: Intel i7 7700k 4.20GHz
RAM: 16GB
OS: Windows 10 64 bit
GPU: Nvidia GTX1080
Studio Graphics Mode Setting: Automatic

Any follow-up or acknowledgment response would be appreciated immensely - this is the only issue we have with mesh deformation. Thanks!

25 Likes

Can confirm. I’ve been working on this Project with OP and have also noticed that mesh deformation will flicker if the color of the object or transparency is modified while said object is moving. Would love for this to be addressed so that we can continue to push and innovate with mesh deformation!

6 Likes

If it’s an issue of processing transformation changes on the mesh, would it be possible to keep the current geometry visible until the new geometry is calculated?

2 Likes

Hi, we are having trouble reproducing this bug. Is there anything missing or can you come up with better repro steps?

2 Likes

Here is a new repro file that constantly rescales the mesh part when run. It seems like the flicker happens almost every 5 seconds exactly. I’ve also attached a gif of what it looks like:


You can see it at the very beginning, 5.5 seconds, and 10.5 seconds.
Let me know if this issue is not reproducible or if you need any more information from me.

4 Likes

Thanks for the report! We’ve filed a ticket to our internal database and we’ll follow up when we have an update for you.

Please note that filling a bug report does not guarantee that it will be fixed once triaged.

4 Likes

Me and everyone else on my team is experiencing the same issue.

Currently its preventing us from being able to use mesh deformation to the extent we’d like to and in some cases it makes mesh deformation unusable.

We’ve currently found no work around for this bug.

2 Likes

I have also been seeing this issue. I am seeing skinned meshes flicker whenever I modify the position of the bones. I have only been able to see this happen on the windows 10 version of roblox. This can ruin the look of meshes if it constantly flickers. Would love to see a fix soon.

3 Likes

I’ve also had this same issue for a while now. I’ve been unable to set properties such as transparency and color to a deformed mesh without flickering.

This makes for a very poor gameplay experience for users and results in a major loss in opportunity for mesh deformation.

Hopefully this will be fixed soon!

2 Likes

This bug seems to occur whenever something new is added to the player, and it still a issue that hasn’t been resolved as of May 1st 2021

https://gyazo.com/2ebd528020133a0e6863542dd0e4b58a

2 Likes

Issue still occurs when parenting new models into the player character
https://gyazo.com/a6dcd72dcb7a259c3f6f0511e39ccb8d

2 Likes

same issue with my pheonix model…

1 Like

Same issue here. Trying to update a decal welded and parented to the head/character, and this makes the mesh deformation parts on the character flicker

1 Like

Sorry, could you clarify how to enable these fast flags? do you need a fast flag editor? or can you do it through studio?

1 Like

Sorry, my mistake, there is no easy way for you to enable flags. We have a fix for the skinned MeshPart update flickering issue that we will be releasing sometime in the next few weeks.

One thing to know, even when the flickering goes away, updating skinned MeshParts like this will be somewhat expensive and may make the game laggy if it happens too much. In the future we may optimize it further, but for now you will have to keep an eye on it.

5 Likes

Is there any update on this fix? I am experiencing severe flickering with my skinned mesh ocean that I would very much like to ship in a game.

Here’s what the issue looks like:
https://gyazo.com/b867a9f1bb7c02d6b5c5f1d980cb178c

I am moving around bones inside a skinned mesh, which works fine, but then there are these split frames where suddenly the bones lose all effect and the mesh plane becomes completely flat.

1 Like

I haven’t actually gotten any of these issues for my own ocean. Do you update WorldPosition? I do that and receive no issues. Though it could also be because I have LoD and culling to only update a few bones, which can impact flickering.

I update worldposition, yeah. My bone count is actually quite low, and I cframe the ocean around to follow the player. Is it possible that having a 2048 stud ocean is the problem?

From my experience, there’s only a very select few properties on the MeshPart you can change without it triggering the flicker. Changing the CFrame of the parts has definitely caused it for me.

Skinned MeshParts flickering to the bind pose is a known issue that has been fixed in our internal codebase, but not released to production yet. The fix is part of a larger update that we are still working on, and we can’t release it until the entire update is stable and production ready. Rest assured this is one of our top priorities, thanks for your patience!

11 Likes