Officially allowing Transparent Accessories

[Blizzei]

As a Roblox UGC Creator, it is currently impossible to create accessories with transparency without workarounds. I’m aware there is an active bug going on that allows this to be possible, however this bug itself has proved people can make a lot of really nice things with this being a feature. Several examples are alpha hairs, half transparent shades, skirt ruffles, etc.
This i would not want to be a feature for bundles obviously because people would exploit it maliciously. For layered clothing this used go be a thing too before it got patched a very long time ago. However the HSR on the layered clothing would not toggle due to the alpha toggle; this would be the most suitable approach since this used to allow things like semi transparent gloves to be made or sheer dresses with multiple layers.

Previously before the recent glitch became known, people would use very thin lines to mimic transparency. While it partially worked, it is very expensive in the amount of tris used on a mesh. Bear in mind the limit is 4000 triangles which didn’t give much room to make much in detail.

I feel that if this were to be added officially with the surface appearance object and allow transparency to be toggled, this would allow people to make more types of accessories that were previously impossible or brought underwhelming results. This would benefit creators massively due to being more flexible on their creations.

[Pharao13 (PharOs)]

I agree ! We need it ! I need it !

[0RCL]

I totally agree. Transparency opens doors for amazing stuff to be created.

[Abcreator]

Going to re-post my reply to a similar topic here to raise a few concerns that’d need to be ironed out before this should be considered:

Ability to make Semi-transparent UGC accessories

Unfortunately, from how I personally see it. There are currently a few massive limitations that would either de-value this feature or cause issues with it: Transparent items would require essentially two review processes: Roblox doesn’t render translucent objects behind glass, so it’d very easy to hide violative content masked with a translucent layer; to prevent that, Roblox would essentially need to do two review processes; one supporting transparency and one without. Translucency on R…

[Blizzei]

I did in-fact consider some of these common complaints and i will address those I agree and disagree with since there’s quite a bit. I do feel as though these reasons shouldn’t fully prevent this from being a feature despite there being a couple valid points

@Abcreator

Translucency on Roblox is expensive:

It may be a bit more expensive by just a tad but this shouldn’t be a reason for it to be delayed imo. Its 2025… there’s already terrain with water that has opacity and a glass material that is made to work with translucency. In other words there shouldn’t be an issue.

@Abcreator

Roblox doesn’t handle translucent objects well for thumbnails:
If you’ve ever owned a translucent item and decided to wear it; you’ll probably remember the white background that appears behind it if nothing else in the render is visible there.

I got to admit the thumbnails for transparent items SUCK. This is one of those things that would of course need fixing and I really don’t know why this is still an issue on roblox’s end. There’s existant transparent items on roblox such as the Ice crown and a couple eggs from the egg hunts that have had this issue for over a decade.

@Abcreator

Some developers don’t want translucent objects on player-characters:
This may be a feature-request in itself. But, developers who don’t want translucent objects in their experience for some reason won’t be able to detect that your accessory uses translucency and even if they could, they would effectively have to delete your accessory from a player’s character. There wouldn’t be any way to retrieve a version without transparency in the case the developer would rather use that. Theoretically, a developer could use an external server to analyse images to detect translucent textures; however, it would still be less-than-ideal.

Let’s just say that is the case and a roblox developer didn’t want transparent items for whatever reason. The way Surface Appearance works is there is an alpha mode you can set. If this were to be an issue they can literally just run a simple script to scan a players accessories and change the alpha mode to overlay instead of transparent. In other words, this would be VERY easy to resolve

@Abcreator

Current translucent items will be worth less:
As a disclaimer here, I own a translucent item; however, I never directly bought mine, I got it from a ‘chaser’ gift code without even knowing about it until a few years ago.

Nah. Similar thing can be applied to items such as limiteds. Theres a whole lot of knock offs now however the value of the real item hasn’t gone anywhere down ever since due to the fact people like the REAL thing. The value of such items wouldn’t decrease over transparent items being possible.

@Abcreator

Of course, you could say this for limiteds when UGC went public, too. However, Roblox still protects the IP of those accessories.

HARDLY. there’s more of those items that come out than it getting deleted.

@Abcreator

Transparent items would require essentially two review processes:
Roblox doesn’t render translucent objects behind glass, so it’d very easy to hide violative content masked with a translucent layer; to prevent that, Roblox would essentially need to do two review processes; one supporting transparency and one without.

I’m a little confused by this. Technically people already do this without transparency so I feel this is a null argument.

[Arjn_Gl]

We should also raise the triangles limit tbh. 4@ is too less, need to take some inspiration from sims.

[livekorone]

Bump, hopefully staff discusses this. It would be such a good addition. Not only can new never-before seen items help creators grow but we can also optimize a lot of our items such as hairs, making detailed hairs would be way more easy and would cost a lot less triangles

[FastMagpie277 (WhatEpic88)]

Would love to see this happen. I bought a transparent hat (it was a Guardia inspired hat, one of my favourite hat series) and it was immediately deleted. Honestly was devastated. It didn’t even last 15 minutes

[FastMagpie277 (WhatEpic88)]

I could see this becoming a bad thing, it would make it easier to make ice crown ripoffs and “headless” scams and other such things