Migrating Heads and Accessories to be MeshParts

Updates Announcements
#1

Hi Developers,

We are going to be migrating the full catalog of Head and Accessory items to use MeshParts instead of SpecialMeshes inside of Parts. The migration will help us enable future technologies and features!

This change is not live yet, but will be in the near future.

Since this may break scripts that depend on the existing structure of heads, we will introduce a new property to Workspace called Workspace.MeshPartHeads, as a way to opt-in to this new format.

Again, this is NOT live yet, but here’s what it will look like once it is enabled:

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At release, the “Default” setting will have the same behavior as “Disabled”. At a later date, we will change this behavior so that it matches “Enabled”. This will allow games to opt-out if necessary to fix broken code (if they did not opt-in and fix that code previously).

In addition to this, all legacy heads which point to local files distributed with the client will now point to cloud-based asset ids.

For example, Blockhead previously pointed to "rbxasset://avatar/heads/headB.mesh",
but instead now points to "https://www.roblox.com/asset/?id=5560742512".

Accessories will be updated at a later date and use an additional setting.

We will update this thread once the migration occurs and this setting is available.

Thank you

223 Likes
Action Required: MeshPart Heads & Accessories (May 27th)
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#2
#3

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#4

This is really awesome! This is gonna be very better for changing the material of heads! We used to not, but now we can! Keep it up Roblox! You never let us down!

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Right now the head is not rusty, but soon it shall not!

And SpecialMeshes should be deprecated since Heads are gone, so all SpecialMeshes would be used for is making a block a cylinder, a block a sphere, which people like never do.

7 Likes
#5

Amazing. I’ve always preferred MeshParts over SpecialMeshes, so this is obviously for the greater good. So, are SpecialMeshes going to be deprecated? They seem really not that efficient as MeshParts because, for example, there needs to be a child for it (which gets annoying in nesting). If not, what are the plan for it in the future?

Also, I feel like this should be a Beta Feature TBH, so that we can test our games to make it smoothly migrate when its live.

12 Likes
#6

So that’s why all those old heads were updated…

Will this option be available well before the update is pushed? Giving people the option to disable before they have to worry about their game breaking would go a long way to easing worries about this update.

9 Likes
#7

what type of technologies :o

So will this be forced or will it always be opt-in?

Nonetheless mesh part > special mesh since i can change material better :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
#8

Since this marks the end of SpecialMeshes being used for character stuff, is there any chance we could get MeshPart.MeshId to be writable?

30 Likes
#9

I’ve been waiting for years to change the material of heads. Finally. Looking forward!

5 Likes
#10

More than likely skinned meshes and layered clothing.

5 Likes
#11

Does this mean we can expect the removal/lowering of the minimum size for parts/meshparts? Since the headless horseman head is actually just a very tiny sphere

36 Likes
#12

Sweet update, I have some thoughts or questions about this:

So, when do you think like an estimated month/day that we will see this live? Like in the fall or next year if we don’t experience bugs and such?

Neat, this will surely help me out a lot as I usually use a lot of hats/head shapes for a project of mine using old heads and hats such as clockwork and a chef hat. :+1:

Material for heads was my first thought of this update, now seeing the replies it has finally being a thing! Looks like I can finally Materialized my noobs!

Wonder if those old heads come on sale, they seem cool to get and why this update was made…

2 Likes
#13

This is going to be great for certain games! I pefer mesh parts over normal meshes and specialmeshes, plus, I’ve always wanted to put materials on heads. Very excited for this to be a feature.

#15

Thanks so much for this update!!!

#16

Fantastic update! Because of the recent update to heads, many have speculated that the old classic heads will be going back on sale again for people to purchase. Any possibility of that happening?

27 Likes
#18

Doesnt this mean roblox heads are going to be larger? The original specialmesh head was scaled up by 25%. So are the meshpart heads also going to be bigger?

4 Likes
#19

There are still relevant uses for SpecialMeshes beyond just making head shaped meshes or cylinders.

  • BasePart.Material displays correctly on the mesh when using a MeshPart and not when using a SpecialMesh
  • MeshPart s include the MeshPart.CollisionFidelity property, meaning the collision model of a MeshPart can be set to resemble the geometry of the mesh. The SpecialMesh object by contrast, uses the parent BasePart s collision model
  • The mesh of a MeshPart scales on all axis depending on the Size property of the MeshPart , the mesh of a SpecialMesh does not
  • The SpecialMesh object includes the Offset and Scale properties whereas MeshPart s do not
  • The MeshId property of a SpecialMesh can be changed by a Script or LocalScript during runtime. The MeshId property of a MeshPart can not.

(quoted form dev hub)

There are still quite a bit of practical uses for SpecialMeshes that you simply can’t do with MeshParts, so I disagree and feel they shouldn’t be deprecated.

14 Likes
#20

The option will default to “off” so it will not break any scripts without you intentionally choosing to opt-in.
Most games do not have scripts that will break with this change. It’s only a problem if you’re doing something like this:

local mesh = game.Players.LocalPlayer.Character.Head.Mesh --> Error Mesh does not exist!

Assuming everything goes well, within the next couple of weeks for heads, and soon after that for accessories.

The heads should look and feel identical to the old versions from the perspective of a player. We’ve taken scaling into account.

11 Likes
#21

Excellent update! Have been hoping for heads to become MeshParts for quite a while now.

1 Like
#22

How are faces being handled with this update, given the existing surface projection behavior they have on MeshParts? Will some dark magic be applied to the Humanoid’s texture composition or will we be getting some sort of feature to control it?

Have the rbxasset:// urls been remapped to account for this? I saw the assets were updated on the website to point to their direct assets so I was wondering if this is compatible with meshes that are still pointing to those older assets.

16 Likes