As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to make a creative set of Avatar Bodies & faces/heads on roblox.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because it would benefit both the Roblox website, clothing & avatar creators but also the community which would welcome such updates with open arms.
Currently on Roblox Avatar bundles have a few requirements that could be changed,
- Bundles aren’t reccomended to support 2D clothing, in order for 3D clothing to be more used
- Body bundles are currently only allowed to use Dynamic heads/faces
- Body bundles have a very restricted size
- Modesty layer has to be added on MOST bundles that can change skin color OR look very much like a human/creature.
These all requirements are there for a reason, and that’s very understandable, however most of these could be changed in order for creators and users to get more creative using these avatar bundles.
What I would personally change, is the following:
- Changed modesty layer policy.
Modesty layer would be unnecessary under the following circumstances:
- The avatar is fully mapped to use 2D clothing
- The avatar’s thumbnail would use Roblox’ default clothing so it won’t look like it’s wearing nothing
(example similar to avatar animations wearing default clothing)
- Allowing static heads & faces
A lot of creators don’t really like to work with Dynamic heads & faces, and a lot (myself included) don’t have a daily use for the dynamic heads.
While a lot of people in roblox use dynamic heads, there’s also the majority that doesn’t really like them and doesn’t like being forced to use them.
There’s a lot of 2D face creators that are limited by this feature, and need to sell the face as an accessory instead of face, which removes the player’s ability to change the head’s color.
While I agree that roblox should improve their technology and I like what can be done with dynamic body parts in roblox, I don’t necessarily see it as a good thing of them being forced to the players and creators.
Here’s what we can have changed about that:
- Allow static heads & faces
- Allow people to sell “Dynamic & Static faces” in some sort of bundle product (so you can buy both a dynamic head/face & it’s static variant)
- Bring back not only older faces, but also older head models.
- Allowing bundles to be scaled down or up more.
Currently bundles are very restricted regarding their size, so UGC creators have to come up with “hacky” ways of making their avatar bundle appear shorter.
I understand this would have an impact in games, but there’s a few things that could be done to prevent that, so I’m gonna mention a few changes that I think would be received positively by the community:
- Change the size restrictions for the bundles (allow smaller sizes but not too small)
- Allow bigger & smaller bundles than they are currently
- Add a few categories for bundles that show which type of body the bundle is
(2D Compatible, Rthro, R6 Compatible, Small, Big, Static, Dynamic, Semi transparent, etc) - Allow experience owners to have a filtering which allows them to blacklist categories
(examples)
A few other updates to the bundles & other avatar items will be welcome. Here’s some of my ideas that roblox could add:
- UGC Bundle compatibility for R6 bodies (it would be optional for most bundles. While bundles require an R15 body, they could also include a folder for R6 compatible meshes if the creator wants to go out of their way to add those)
- Official support for 2D Clothing on UGC Bundles
There are a LOT of 2D clothing artists out there which would probably love this update - PBR for 3D & 2D Avatar items
PBR has been confirmed for 3D items pretty much, but would be nice while we’re at this subject, to talk about how 2D clothing could receive same treatment. While not an necessary option, creators COULD add some extra PBR textures for 2D clothing when worn on r15 bodies. - Allow people to officially make handheld items (as gears), 2D faces (in the original faces category) & static heads (in the original heads category)
- Return avatar bodies deleted for these reasons, prior to this change
A lot of creators, myself included can agree that Roblox’s evolution is very impressive and all the updates we’ve been receiving lately are very nice, a lot of technology that we couldn’t imagine a decade ago, but I also think Roblox SHOULD keep supporting some of their older core features, like 2D clothing, static faces & static heads. As R6 is on the verge of possibly getting deprecated in the future, I wouldn’t expect there to be any more official support for it, but I think the majority of Roblox players & developers, would highly enjoy being able to add R6 Compatible body parts as well, which is why I think it would be nice as an optional inclusion into the bundles creation.
As an UGC creator before Public UGC, I’ve created some bundles in the past, but stopped doing so, because of the very bad policies for the avatar bundles. We should be able to support 2D clothing, add accessories in our bundles, choose between dynamic OR static heads & have a less restricted scaling for the bundles. All of these stuff restrict the creativity for the bundles, so I believe a lot of creators would like to see atleast a few changes I mentioned in here.
Another welcome change would be banning the users that use bundles inappropriately if an avatar bundle is not related to anything inappropriate. It’s very unfair for creators to have their creativity limited OR their items deleted because of 2-3 people misusing their items.
In conclusion, I think there’s a lot of changes the avatars could receive for the future, and would be nice seeing some of these coming. I highly encourage other creators to add some of their ideas OR post comments in here saying if they agree or disagree with a certain feature, because there might be things I missed and probably not everything would work healthy in Roblox’ environment, so I’d like to know other people’s opinions.