Introducing the "Avatar Evolution" Studio Beta Build!

[Tomarty]

I’m excited to start working with these features!

I have rigged and animated dozens of pets/characters over the years on Roblox. Working late nights cutting/rounding hundreds of limbs for hours is exhausting, and this is a breath of fresh air.

Plus physically based rendering can make characters look so much better!
Before:

With normal map:

I wouldn’t mind a SurfaceAppearance.EmissionMap property for meshes with glow/neon, but otherwise the only rendering feature we’re missing is “cutout” rendering for realistic fur and foliage:

Texture Translucency Controls

Currently on Roblox, it’s impossible to indicate how texture translucency should be handled, which means games often lose out on large amounts of performance and have to deal with depth sorting errors unnecessarily. (disclaimer: I’m not a graphics engineer, so everything in this post is based on my (limited) understanding of how the Roblox rendering system works based on my own observations. If any Roblox engineers are here, feel free to provide or correct any details if you’d like!) This will…

As I posted before, bones would benefit from support for scaled/non-orthogonal CFrames. Multiplying a bone’s cframe by CFrame.new(0,0,0, 4,0,0, 0,4,0, 0,0,4) could result in seamless per-bone scaling similar to this:

It would also be possible to animate the stretching of foliage using shear transformations. Skyrim uses transforms like this to achieve a seamless werewolf transformation animation by stretching the character into the new proportions, and there are many other applications. These transformations can be easily applied on RenderStepped without the huge performance cost and complexity that comes with updating the size of many parts along with bone offsets.