Unions have been an easily accessible way to create complicated shapes without needing to learn how to use dedicated software such as Blender, but in the seven years since they were introduced, there hasn’t been an accessible method to manage your Unions. They don’t have a page on the Creator’s Dashboard, they can’t be inserted from the Toolbox, and you can’t change their ID from within Roblox Studio.
Right now, if you want to be able to insert Unions you’ve made in the past, you need to use the ItemConfiguration API to dig through a list of unlabeled SolidModel IDs, and add those into a .rbxmx to load them into Studio. It’s tedious, and many users don’t even know that it’s an option.
How to recover invisible / corrupt unions
Allowing developers to insert Unions easily, such as through the Toolbox, would make re-using Unions a lot more accessible. Rather than sifting through old creations, or using cumbersome API, devs would be able to reliably reuse resources they’ve previously created towards new objects and structures. This has the extra benefit of potentially cutting down on the amount of assets the game would need to load, if the dev would otherwise be creating a new Union without this feature.
10 Likes
I believe the issue with this is that they are not meant to be browsed, there is no “final” version of a union; IIRC every intermediary union you generate is uploaded in this manner, which is ridiculously noisy to browse from a developer point of view.
7 Likes
SolidModel assets were never intended to be user-facing. They only exist because saving Unions in your place file a few years ago had a significant impact on file size and place load time. We moved the Union mesh data out of the place file into an auto-generated asset so clients can download it separately when they need it.
Right now, if you want to be able to insert Unions you’ve made in the past, you need to use the ItemConfiguration API to dig through a list of unlabeled SolidModel IDs, and add those into a .rbxmx to load them into Studio.
Why don’t you publish your Unions as Models?
5 Likes
Part of it is the fact that a lot of simpler shapes are ones where you wouldn’t think you’d need to access them again until you get to a point where you realize a similar shape could be used in another thing you’re making, and publishing every Union you create just in case you need it later would be a tedious process.
Even with that though, I feel like using Models to do that could be a decent option to provide quick access to our Unions if we had a good way to organize our Models. Right now if I were to use Roblox’s Model system for Unions and other assets I’d like to publish to the site, that’d build up into a cluttered mess rather quickly.
