As a Roblox developer, it is extremely difficult to have full control over facial expressions and lip movements in story- and roleplay-oriented games. With current features, the only options are not doing anything at all, leaving characters with blank lifeless expressions in serious scenarios; tediously drawing the face moving frame by frame; or segmenting models into many many tiny hard-to-animate parts that more often than not make them look like ugly creepy wooden puppets. Nobody would play a game with creepy wooden puppet characters, drawing the movements frame by frame takes days of human labor, and with blank expressions the player cannot see if a character is happy or sad or angry or afraid.
In addition, as a Roblox developer, it is very hard to make a non-Robloxian character game, such as a roleplay game, that allows players to customize small details of their characters–such as the position of the eyes on the face, the length of the chin, and other such things that grant full freedom in the character’s appearance that cannot be achieved with color and textures alone. As a result, we have no choice but to either make all of these features static or force players to only use a preset selection of these features–ultimately making most people’s custom characters look the same, with almost no way to make one that is truly unique. What fun is a roleplay game with no diversity?
Both of these problems are addressed in other engines using Shape Keys, which allow a mesh to smoothly transition between two shapes. Here is a gif I recorded showing a single shape key that allows a model I made to open and close its mouth: https://gyazo.com/6887d5512da7c4e09266b8f1578214d3
With shape keys, us developers would have more control over our custom models in story and roleplay games. We would be able to make those expressions and lip movements happen without making our models look creepy or lifeless. We would be able to let our players change all the little details of their character to set them apart with ease.
The best part is, it’s supported by FBX–a format which Roblox already supports and recommends for uploading meshes.
My only specific request for how it’s implemented is that this be a feature for both MeshParts and SpecialMeshes, simply so that developers have the choice of using it with one or the other.
I hope that this idea is considered.
Edit: I cannot reply to this thread, so I have to say this here. This is not the same thing as the threads regarding “vertex deformation”, which all refer to bone deformation specifically. This is not related to bone deformation or the existing animation system in any way, it is literally just shifting some corners in a straight line.
Edit 2: Yes, I am fully aware that this is in fact a form of vertex deformation. But so is scaling an object. Shape keys are more similar to scaling an object than to bending an elbow, and my searches did not bring up any results for any past feature requests for shape keys. Please keep this in mind when considering your support.
