Ever since the Roblox platform was created, the majority of the avatars were created with a simple layout as with R6 (six rigs/six body parts) with shapes being blocky and round (precisely for the head area). However, as the years have passed, new technologies came out and avatars began to have new styles that could remind you few online games + new properties such as R15 (fifteen rigs/fifteen body parts). This helped to not only be stylish but as well as to make experiences look more modern and interesting to be playable.
Afterwards, as everything was going by normally, in 2018, we had a major announcement regarding the new release of futuristic avatars that we could potentially express ourselves way better and change their custom scales, etc, âRthrosâ:
Rthros (previously known as âAnthrosâ) are characters with an appearance much more as human-like compared to the traditional âblockyâ form. With their deliverance, Roblox continuously proceeded to expand working alongside the bundles creating contests, promoting through trailers (as well as for the platform) animations, and so on.
Now, as the development community received advanced features that were shared on Developer Forum and RDC (Roblox Developer Conference) 2022, this contributed incredibly to the engagement and improvements such as Facial Animations (formerly known as Dynamic Heads), where your Roblox character can make expressions while emoting + capturing your web camera once talking through Spatial Voice.
As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to understand how come these resources are not capable of current Rthros that are available through the Avatar Shop. It quite shows an odd as well as a disjointed vision that ever since we had them, it could only be possible to see their emotions exclusively through Roblox concerts + recently uploaded ones, making them limited and not available in a general aspect. Furthermore, it is possible to notice that they also use other heads of open bundles and replace them with a new one that supports the recent updates.
(Photography was taken through the experience of Elton Johnâs âBeyond The Yellow Brick Roadâ)
As you can see from the image above (as an example), the production team used the human character âLinlinâ with a modified head compared to the original:
â The avatar used for the Elton Johnâs concert does not have eyebrows, it is possible to blink, and open your mouth and the eyes can turn left, right, and diagonally.
â The avatar Linlin on the Avatar Shop has eyebrows, cannot blink, open her mouth or look at any area using her eyes. It is only possible to commonly look at sideways as being a traditional idle animation for bundles. (This applies using Roblox experiences and/or animating using plugins such as Animation Editor.)
If this issue is addressed, it would improve my development experience because not only developers and regular players would have the capacities to have future avatars with the possibility to interact orally, and yes it would make Roblox easily able to use them without having to constantly take it and duplicate its systems and properties any longer. Making it possible to use facial animations at any time.