When you import a Mesh on Roblox, the bounding box and centroid of the geometry are used for the MeshPart’s size and position. This makes sense given how Parts are supposed to work, but this behavior is not always desired. For instance, models in the VMF importer I’m working on tend to have varying origin points, and I usually have to redefine the original origin point relative to whatever shifts the geometry went through.
Well, a couple years later and we’ve got a use case which is soon to be a lot more important in the near future, UGC items. Currently, aligning items is tedious, inaccurate, and unreliable, a method of trial and error. In something like Blender, it takes mere moments to set a new origin, knowing it’s in the exact spot it belongs.
When dealing with something like accessories, it’s important that everything is aligned, so that new accessories are in positions where they’re more likely to work well with currently existing and future accessories. It’s even more important when considering that without this option, many UGC creators may simply position items in spots which are “good enough” due to the annoying steps to getting an accessory centered with Studio’s tools.
While creating an origin attachment object is something which would work for this use case, another option I’d like to bring up would be using the origin to set the pivot point of the geometry. I’m not sure how well it’d work with MeshParts, but I feel doing so would make it a lot easier to work accurately with certain shapes which have odd pivot points applied from their bounding box center, such as pentagons.
While this is an option, I wouldn’t consider this a reasonable workaround. It’d be tedious to create extra meshes for every origin I want to import, and I don’t want to flood my mesh library with empty garbage assets in order to import individual Vector3 values.
Hi there! I noticed this thread got new responses and am happy to report that this is solved with the new 3D Importer!
By default, Meshes will import with Use Imported Pivot set to true. If you want the mesh to be reset, you will have to deselect this option. As an example:
