Press F to pay respects.
Also, it doesn’t make sense to have this be a toggle per part. I would argue there is no use case for leaving this visible while you do other things. Just enable it for the selection according to a global bool.
16 Likes
Re-opening studio normally is not causing an update. However, opening it from the website (game page → Edit), forced an update, and the issues is solved for me after doing that.
I agree. I only need to know this information for one part at a time; the selected part.
FYI–we are temporarily reverting this since it looks like not everyone is getting the latest Studio.
7 Likes
I have been using a plugin for quite a while that implements this feature into Roblox Studio. A bit more customization to suit people’s tastes would be nice for this feature, as one of my favorite parts of the plugin is that any selected object has face indicators automatically on.
Noted, and thanks for the feedback. Just so you know, when we were doing our UX research around this, we found that selection was less useful to most devs than specifically toggling this for a part, which is why we went this direction. But a great thing about Studio is that we do allow plugins to provide sophisticated interaction, and this is a nice example where a plugin addresses your particular need better than our native tools.
2 Likes
I feel like your user sample was biased, or something went wrong. What are the use cases for toggling per part? I have a hard time imagining this being faster or more useful and I am curious if there’s some magic trick I’m missing.
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I have a suggestion, instead of toggling the feature on/off at a part-to-part basis what about only showing the orientation based on the parts selected? This would make workflow much faster compared to manual toggling every part. Users should still be able to enable/disable similar to how showing constraints works, though the orientation only shows when you have parts selected.
From my own opinion this would be much better than toggle per-part
At the time I’m making this post, this new feature was disabled and I never got around to using it myself. Everything I constructively say about the feature is judged based on screenshots alone.
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From my knowledge, there is no button to activate the indicator in the toolbar, which is very bizarre, considering how important knowing what the front of a part is (mainly with working with CFrame in my experience). The lack of a button to toggle the indicators is very inconvenient, and I guarantee you most new users would not know how to use it due to how somewhat obscure the method to activate it is. While you can remedy this issue by adding it to the quick access bar, that’s still not a excuse for the lack of a easily accessible button.
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Judging from other people’s screenshots, indicators should not be automatically activated for every part in Workspace (especially due to the bad performance when rendering many indicator billboards). I don’t exactly see a benefit to being able to see the front surface of every part currently in Workspace, as the screen gets cluttered very quickly when you have many of the indicators going around. (This appears to be a bug, but nonetheless, still irritating.)
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Having to toggle it per part is annoying and slow and generally bad for workflow, other people have said it better then me, so I’ll keep it at that.
While I welcome the addition of this, I do think that it was way more convenient and easier just to look in the properties of the part, select one of the surface properties and see which area of the part gets outlined. I have no idea why it was decided to phase out the surface property without supplying a reasonable alternative that isn’t installing another plugin or inserting something like a Decal into the part.
3 Likes
Essentially:
- Nearly every dev we talked with had use cases where they needed it to be persistent, even if they initially thought just using selection was sufficient. The exact use cases varied, but the need was consistent and clear.
- Selection can be tricky, between selecting nested parts within complex models and actions that change selection.
We do have some changes we intend to make with the draggers that should provide you with orientation indication and will be based on selection, so that could mitigate your need for this feature.
And we do listen to dev feedback and revise our tools to make them more useful to our community! In the meantime, it sounds like there’s a plugin that better suits your needs.
3 Likes
I hope that once you have a chance to try this yourself, your feedback will be different. Please let us know!
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Gone are the days of me using decals to figure it out
I mean, after all what vast majority of users have suggested here and what that specific individual have said, they do have something that is proving enough, are they lying you say?
Terrific!
I can now know where parts face!
Such as seat parts! 
Studio Tweaks already does this (I’m pretty sure you have this, and that’s where you got the suggestion from), if you want this behavior just stick with the plugin.
I’m sticking with the plugin myself for that and the other features it has, but this is still a good feature to have in general.
It would be good for making seat and surface/billboard guis. Whatever it’s a good one update
Yeah the selection box is one of the worst thing about building/modeling in Roblox.
Thank you for this feature. I feel that a feature like this is needed so many times in so many different situations when building, and honestly, I was a little frustrated to see Roblox remove the simple way of highlighting a specific surface without providing a good alternative. While I appreciate that this feature is here, next time Roblox decides to remove a fundamental feature, I would prefer to see an alternative planned and ready for release on the same day, not months after.
Knowing the Surface Orientation of a part is a very basic thing someone may want to do, and it is a very basic feature. It is a little bit ridiculous that for even a small amount of time, Roblox Studio did not have a way of simply checking for the surface orientation of an object without a weird workaround even though Roblox Studio is at a more mature point in development right now and even more advanced features then this are being added.
2 Likes
Even though this is disabled for now, I’m so glad there’s finally a feature for this… I finally don’t need to use a decal or plugins to figure out the front direction. Now all I’d ask for is a way to manually change the front direction of a part (Surface Orientation Changer), this would make it super easy to tell imported objects that happen to be facing the wrong direction to manually change it without going back to the modeling software to change it and re-import into Roblox (Yes even though most top contributors are against my idea). Thank you so much for this.
1 Like