[Studio Beta] Improved Constraint Tool

Updates Announcements
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#1

Hi Creators,

We are excited to announce a new Studio Beta aimed at enhancing the existing Studio ribbon Constraint Tool. These improvements address many pain points you’ve shared with us and introduce additional functionalities to streamline your workflow.

To enable this improved tooling, go to File > Beta Features and enable “Improved Constraint Tool”.

Let’s dive right in!

New Dragger Framework

The improved Constraint Tool utilizes the new dragger framework for grid alignment, snapping, and easy attachment rotations. This should make placing attachments in the correct position and orientation a lot easier right from the get-go!

Before:

image10

After:

image11

Now with Rotation!

image2

Enhanced Weld Tool

Pressing the weld button now welds all descendant base parts that are touching within the selected parts. This has been a highly requested feature, so please let us know what you think and how we can make it even better!

image7

Note: When only two parts are selected and the weld tool is pressed, the two parts will be welded together regardless of whether they are touching or not. This is persisting (not new) behavior.

Improved Undo Functionality

Undo while having the Constraint Tool activated will undo the last placed attachment, making it easier to correct a misplaced attachment.

image9

Undo after exiting the Constraint Tool will undo the constraint and both associated attachments, making it easier to get rid of an entire constraint configuration.

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Visual Feedback Improvements

We have added visual feedback to indicate whether you’re able to place the second attachment on the item your mouse is hovering over. A red sphere indicates it’s not a viable attachment placement, while a green sphere indicates you’re good to go!

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Note: when trying to weld two parts of a single assembly or two separate anchored assemblies, the improved visual feedback will be a gray line. This is because the weld will have no effect during physics simulation.

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Attachment Visualization

Attachments now show arrows for both the primary and secondary axes.

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image31999×912 1.14 MB

Part Passthrough

When building a constraint and after placing the first attachment, you can toggle Part Passthrough by pressing the “G” key to make the parent of the first attachment translucent, allowing you to place attachments through it. This should make placing attachments between touching or overlapping parts a lot easier!

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Hotkey Menu

The improved Constraint Tool adds a hotkey menu to the viewport when the tool is activated, making it easier to reference how to use the added functionality. This includes the hotkeys for exiting the tool, attachment rotations, part passthrough, hiding the hotkey menu, and enabling/disabling snapping.

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We hope that these improvements solve some of the key issues that many of you have pointed out and make building with constraints in Studio a lot easier!

Again, this feature is still in beta so we are looking for any and all feedback from all of you. Please keep in mind that we also may be making changes prior to a full release.

Known Issues

We’ll be adding any known issues here so that it’s easy to know that we are aware of said issues and are actively working on addressing them!

  1. Primary axis points in the direction negative of the surface’s normal (as opposed to in the direction positive of the surface’s normal like before).

    • Status: the fix is in and should be live in ~2 weeks :slight_smile:

  2. Upon first opening a place file and selecting the constraint tool, the hotkey functions don’t work until you select the viewport (via clicking in the viewport, panning with the camera, etc…). This is not an issue once the viewport has been selected at least once.

    • Status: we are actively working on this fix and expect it to be live in a few weeks :slight_smile:

  3. We recognize that there is a lot of room for improvement regarding welding workflows.

    • Status: We plan on dedicating time to figuring out how to best improve welds to support the diverse set of workflows. Please keep the feedback coming!

Happy building!

The Physics Team

238 Likes
Weekly Recap: September 23 - 27, 2024
#2

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

#3

The automatic weld tool will be a great replacement for having to use 3rd party plugins!

32 Likes
#4

sounds interesting, i might use that for my buildings.

13 Likes
#5

Wow it looks like a lot of effort was put into this, great work guys! Super excited about the improved weld tool and the part passthrough feature!

13 Likes
#6

looks pretty good ngl ,ill be testing it

12 Likes
#7

It’s broken.
{FF843F9F-4AB3-4BC7-A147-0AEC98BBDFE7}

My quick weld plugin does this but properly
{5930BCFA-290E-4228-B822-EE27651DF383}

16 Likes
#8

Without a doubt, I will miss the grid that used to appear around the objects, but it is definitely a good change!!!

image

12 Likes
#9

This new Roblox studio feature wave is crazy… So many updates and added features, Wow!

6 Likes
#10

Does the Weld all Parts when selected version still create more welds than it needed?

  • I tried about a month(?) ago and when I viewed it there were many gray lines indicating excess welds were not required. It would be great for organizational sake if we could select the first Part we wanted everything welded to, then the rest, click weld, and have all the welds in the first Part. That way if you remove Part #6 of a 40 Part model while building you don’t break the model because items welded to Part #6 are no longer attached.

Also is there a way to toggle OFF the surface alignment?

  • When putting an Attachment on a Part or a MeshPart that has non-flat surfaces it makes it extremely difficult to keep the alignment from going to the mouse position normal of the item. For example when creating a mechanism that requires the item’s main Orientation to be kept the “auto-align to normal” feature is horrible.
11 Likes
#11

SUGGESTION: add functionality to the weld tool that allows you to weld all parts directly into a model’s primary part, this would be useful in specific cases

10 Likes
#12

If this was released yesterday I would have saved about 30 minutes on something I was working on due to buggy undo actions. Has moving a welded object removing all the welds been fixed?

7 Likes
#13

Are you attempting to self-promote your plugin? I replicated what you did and it’s fine.

Edit: 2x more weld constraints for 5 parts is crazy because Roblox always had #parts - 1 number of weld constraints

Image:
image

9 Likes
#14

One basic thing that would make a lot of difference is when creating a part, it already has anchored equal to true. It’s very annoying to switch from anchored false to true, as most constructions use anchored as true

9 Likes
#15

Please add multiple part resize feature not only for scaling uniformly when multiple parts are selected.
Studio Build Suite plugin has this.


It just needs to work without buttons and by just using a shortcut key bind to activate.

20 Likes
#16

Ok but what if I want to weld things together that are not touching? Or what if Roblox doesn’t calculate the collisions of my mesh parts properly and ignores parts without me knowing?

5 Likes
#17

Any updates on the Rail Constraint and Splines Constraints ?

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image1822×837 60.5 KB

7 Likes
#18

This is an amazing change! For a while, constraint tools have been falling behind, and you guys just changed everything! The feature I’m most excited for is the automatic welding because it used to be a pain trying to weld things correctly; especially for destruction games.

10/10 :heart:

4 Likes
#19

Was this from a Hack Week video?

6 Likes
#20

Awesome! Could have used it 3 days ago :sweat_smile:

5 Likes