Skinned MeshParts are live!

Do I Import the armour and such regularly or through the rig importer? :thinking:

Edit:


So the animation works fine on the rig itself, but I have tried using WeldConstraints, the legacy Welds and even Motor6D’s to connect the armour and weapons. Sadly it appears to be unsuccessful.

Weld Constraints & Welds just put the armour in the center of the character and won’t deform nor move along in the Animation Editor.
Multiple Motor6D’s from multiple meshes attached to 1 mesh throws an error.

It also appears that certain bones are missing. In Blender I also have Grip bones for the weapons, parented to the hand bones but they’re non-existent in studio. How can I fix that?

What do I do?

Data

Rig Build-up:
RobloxStudioBeta_2020-11-06_10-42-20

Armour Setup:

HumanoidRootPart:

9 Likes

I may have encountered a few visual bugs with skinned mesh rigs suddenly disappearing when changing either the FOV or the cframe of the camera, to a certain extent. I have not done anything besides playing animations on the rig. Here’s some footage my friend has collected.

Computer Specs

Operating System: Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
Processor: Intel(R) Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz (8 CPUs), ~4.0GHz
Memory: 32768MB RAM
Available OS Memory: 32706MB RAM
Page File: 18649MB used, 30057MB available
DirectX Version: DirectX 12
Card name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080
Manufacturer: NVIDIA
Chip type: GeForce GTX 1080
Display Memory: 24432 MB
Dedicated Memory: 8079 MB
Shared Memory: 16353 MB

5 Likes

Sadly this is over my head, thanks for the explanation I may just have to hire an animator lol

Hey there, It seems that whenever I try and import a FBX animation the armature / skeleton increases in size. eventhough in blender its the correct size?
See attached Screenshot:

5 Likes

Im not sure if anyone stated this problem or got a fix for this but I had a problem with the end timeline if I import my .FBX animation in studios to my fully skinned model it doesn’t add in the ending frame. In studios the ending frame is 30 frames. But in blender it should end at 70 frame.

pictures for reference
In studio v


In blender v

With skinned mesh parts now live, when can we expect to see the Levitation and LinearVelocity constraints come? :smile:

@RobieTheCat so how would i go about making this actually work as a character? i have made the character its rigged in blender but when i name it StarterChracter and test the movements broken it can barely move it cant jump and im wondering is there something i have too do to make it work and can these hold tools and do everything the roblox avatar can?

Can’t wait for the following to be implemented:

  • Multiple animation importing

  • Automatic collision geometry generation between joints for things like character ragdolls with some sort of capsule collider, and allow bone adornment so they can be attached to those objects rather than their bone parent and vice versa when un ragdolled

  • Blend shape / Shape key support so you can make characters blink, speak, and more with far less effort required than rigging those parts of the body and animating them

  • Ability to animate the above data with Animation files (even imported ones) so you could record something like lip synced data and map it to the shape keys

  • Some sort of Viseme detection plugin for audio kinda like what is used in VR games to detect “speech sounds” in any playing audio and map it to a set of shape keys to control the mouth shape (good for automatic lip syncing to audio, and even more useful for the up and coming voice chat features apparently hinted at by roblox!)

  • Hopefully uncapped blend shape values so that they can be exaggerated past their limits

  • Fixes for the rendering of unions and meshes because in some cases they stop rendering too quickly, usually happens when they were attached to a model that has a primary part and move far away from it

  • Import automatically with Surface Appearance based on the textures required by the FBX files

  • Give Surface Appearance the ability to reference a specific material of the object so that objects with multiple materials will not have to be split into separate meshes or atlased into one material

  • Allow Vertex Color groups of the mesh to be manipulated so you could make for example cars that can have different colors

  • Give Bones a Scale property (which they are surprisingly missing!)

  • Add Auto IK for bones in the animation editor, much like Blender’s Auto IK system

  • Allow the user to select which animations to import when importing an FBX file with any

  • Allow the user to import animations from an FBX file that contains a mesh (i.e. when importing new character animations)

  • Improve the animation editor with curve / bezier manipulation for better tween and easing control, much like the custom animation editor toolkit used by the developers at Stylis Studios

  • Some sort of stable spring bone joint constraint to enable physically simulated “Jiggle Bones”

I hope these suggestions are helpful and can provide some insight into some of the missing but potentially groundbreaking features that can take development to the next level!

11 Likes

Cool feature honestly, but are there any plans to allow constraint influence for things like ragdoll or hair physics?(in the case of s1 type rigs)


I’ll just leave this here

2 Likes

just use blender’s decimate modifier to lower the count of vertices or triangles or whatever it did :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like

@Wunder_Wulfe This is a great list. Thanks for taking the time to put it together.
A couple of comments on individual items:

  • Allow the user to import animations from an FBX file that contains a mesh (i.e. when importing new character animations)

This should already work. You can import the mesh and animation from the same .fbx file. Verified for Custom skinned mesh at least.

  • Some sort of stable spring bone joint constraint to enable physically simulated “Jiggle Bones”

You can use any of the existing Roblox physics connections between MeshParts with Bones under them.

5 Likes

@RobieTheCat so how would i go about making this actually work as a character? i have made the character its rigged in blender but when i name it StarterChracter and test the movements broken it can barely move it cant jump and im wondering is there something i have too do to make it work and can these hold tools and do everything the roblox avatar can?

@lootlamabud As long as the StarterCharacter Model has the R15 Humanoid structure, and there are either 15 MeshParts with the correct names, or 15 Bones with the correct names, it should work.

4 Likes

I mean more so like you could do something such as add a “BoneConstraint” or something and attach it to one bone and it will be configurable with limit settings, damping and stiffness settings, and maybe should react to other objects physically. This would let you create anything from ragdolls to something like a dynamic animal tail

1 Like

Is there going to be any updated or new documentation for this yet? I know how to use Blender pretty well, but it’d be nice if all steps were visually laid out so that we can be sure that we did things correctly, as well as pinpoint any possible bugs.

Readying documentation before releasing a feature should really be the norm so we don’t have to sift through a couple hundred replies on the announcement thread to find solutions or extra considerations.

1 Like

All that is currently possible. Just put the Bone under a Part. The Part can then be connected to other Parts. You can think of this as the Bone being constrained to the Part. The Bone will allows be a fixed offset and orientation from the Part.

5 Likes

Ayy is this using a humanoid? i want to make a game where you can play as creatures and i was wondering how you could play as the mesh deformed character.

So I plan on using Skinned Meshed characters for my game that I’m working on but I haven’t found a method of switching between the character models. What would be the best way/most efficient approach?

@RobieTheCat Hi Robie,
I am working on a project that uses Skinned MeshParts with 3 other developer friends. And we are running into an issue that we haven’t been able to resolve in over two weeks now. Hopefully you can help us.

Problem Summary:
One of my team mates experiences a very severe frame rate drop whenever we import some Skinned MeshParts. However, the other two developers and myself do not experience any frame rate drop whatsoever.

*Problem Details:
We have some Skinned MeshParts that contain 20 or more bones, such as the root model shown in the following image. https://gyazo.com/0a7251c4b99a5abc74cf0b93de083d18

Two of the devs in my team and myself have no problem moving around and doing stuff with such models, as shown in the following gif: https://gyazo.com/5471f671bdb134066c503d71c46eb304

However, one of the devs in my team has trouble moving inside the place when we import and have those models in there, as shown in the following gif:
https://gyazo.com/b9705af37175d1862005ac0578b4f645

When he moves the bones out of the MeshPart, or deletes them, his lag stops. As shown in the following gif: https://gyazo.com/bf551c9d7b90beda57c720dd9f13aa9b

Worth Noting that he does NOT lag when he clicks Play/Run. Only when the game is not running/playing.

He also does not lag with some other Skinned MeshParts that have fewer bones, such as the one in the following image which contains only 4 bones: https://gyazo.com/afb2be5540c5a995ea09da6191d76ab9

We’ve tried the following:

  1. We created two test models, both with many bones, but one had no vertices along its body. To test if the issue had something to do with bones not having vertices near them, or multiple bones fighting for the same vertices. Both models caused lag to my developer friend. (didn’t cause lag to me or the other 2 devs) – so we discarded the vertices as being the issue. https://gyazo.com/32e31a6f44bd859836c5c90cc28864f6

  2. He uninstalled and re-installed the Studio. No success.

  3. He uninstalled and re-installed the Studio, removing all his Plugins. No success.

  4. He turned off constraints viewer in the editor menu. No success.

  5. He disabled VSync in his GPU. No success.

  6. He imported the problematic models into an empty place with no other assets or plugins. No success.

  7. He erased his machine Cache. No success.

Also worth noting, his computer specs are not bad. In fact, he has better specs than one of the other devs in the team, who does not lag at all. The following are our PC specs, Team Mate 3 is the one experiencing the lag issue with the Skinned MeshParts:

Mine:
CPU: Intel i7-7700K 4.20GHz
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
GPU: GeForce GTX 1070

Team Mate 1:
CPU: AMD FX-6300 3.5GHz
RAM: 32 GB DDR3
GPU: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Team Mate 2:
CPU: AMD RYZEN 5 3600X
RAM: 16 GB DDR4
GPU: AMD FURY

Team Mate 3:
CPU: i7-4770 3.8 GHz
RAM: 12 GB DDR4
GPU: GTX 1060

We have spent a lot of time trying to solve our team mate’s lag with Skinned MeshParts, and we are running out of ideas. Any help would be appreciated.

Regards,

5 Likes

i some times lose connection, when i look at the bones or the values that come with the rig when you import it.
and is not only in roblox studio, roblox studio take my whole internet and drain like 99% of it.
it dont stop until o close roblox studio.

when this happen i cant use internet unless i close studio.

1 Like