@vMalware Animations can be blended/weighted. Eg. tail left / tail right ?
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@M_caw “Could this be made non-visual in the future?”
It is being thought about, and that is the hope.
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This is amazing! My Upcoming game heavily relied on skinned meshing/mesh deformation with our animations while in beta and now with its release it will making testing and release of the game so much faster and easier. Roblox is evolving day by day and i’m excited to see the future of it especially when pbr releases.
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I’m so pumped, I’m gonna go crazy with this 
Although one question, are there any plans to support Shape Keys and such and such?
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What are the performance implications for using skinned mesh parts ? Rather, should they only be used sparingly?
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GPU cost is an extra 10-15% depending on platform.
CPU cost is less than that, and depends on how much is skinned to Bones vs Parts.
If you are currently intersecting many rigid meshes to get a smooth effect, then skinning will be cheaper.
Certainly don’t want to be skinning if not needed.
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Are there any tutorials for using this? I’m not sure how to start using this feature.
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This update definitely can be a pro, but I think a main con is that lower-tier computers will have a hard time with running games full of very realistic things like this.
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The only part that would struggke with weight blending is the neck moving vertically and horizontally at the same time.
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Looking forward to what vfx artists do with this.
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@Mystifine What are you aiming to do?
The first step is getting familiar with a content creation package like Blender, Max or Maya.
There are many online resources for learning how to make skinned mesh using these tools.
From there you’ll need to export in .fbx format. Standard settings seem to work fine. You many need to change the export scale - depending on how big the object is.
Then, using the AvatarImporter you can import the mesh for use as you would a standard MeshPart.
Except you may have addtional Bones in the Studio explorer window that can be used to deform the mesh.
It’s a similar process for animation.
Does this give you a place to start?
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Looks like I’m learning blender. Is there anyway to have an existing meshpart and then rig it in studio and animate it from there? It’d be nice to stick on the Roblox Platform. I was informed that the model needs to be rigged inside of Blender.
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I’m sure those games will have built in settings to help with performance!
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You will need to build and rig the character/model In blender then export it as FBX then go to roblox plugins and avatar importer and Import the FBX file. You can then go to the Animation editor and configure all your animations inside the roblox studio if you prefer.
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Mesh deformation’s been a thing since the late 90’s in video games and when I checked out the beta post, they stated that its purely visual so it wouldn’t really have an effect on collisions and such.
Not to mention that Robie said that it’d use less CPU for games but would increase GPU usage a little.
Going by that, I’d assume Motor6Ds and Parts are more intensive on hardware than a single mesh using purely visual effects.
It seems that It’d be up to us the developers to optimize our games to give lower-end PC’s less of a hassle.
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Can someone show me how to do this? Like a video or something, I’m pretty new to this.
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I have a few questions.
Q: Does Roblox have any plans to implement UDIM support for meshes (or is it already supported?)
Q: Does Roblox have any plans to remove the 1024x1024 image resolution limit for characters? (This limit makes it very difficult to create even somewhat detailed characters. If Roblox does not support UDIMs or 1024x1024 textures, I would consider this update almost unusable because my characters would really really blurry and undetailed, which would look weird compared to parts and textures/builds made right in Roblox which will have crisper and clearer graphics. If I can’t keep the game style consistent, custom characters would probably hurt my game more then improve it.)
Q: When does Roblox plan to release PBR textures? Artists may need normal maps to fully take advantage of custom characters. I am a bit disappointed that Roblox released this update so suddenly without any information before. As a developer, I would like to have more information about these updates so I can plan better.)
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This feature was automatically enabled for some of the rigs used in our game. Skinned meshes don’t work well with our rigs. How do we disable skinned meshes on the characters we import using the Avatar Importer?
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Question, can GFX artists use this new feature to pose R6 avatars in Studio instead of using rigs in Blender? ( i.e can we bend limbs on R6 packages? )
It would really change and improve the way people make graphics if we can.
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Technically yes, however, the graphic quality won’t be as good as a path tracing render engine or even a more developed real time render engines.
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