UGC Avatar Bodies [Guidelines]

Hello Creators,

As we mentioned in last week’s Creator Roadmap post, we are building features to enable a community-led Marketplace where any creator can make an avatar that is more expressive, communicative, and personalized. Therefore, we wanted to take this opportunity to share more about our work here.

In the coming months, we will be enabling members of the UGC Program to create and sell avatar bodies and, soon after, standalone heads. There are a few bodies already on the Marketplace that were created by members of this program - the next step is to enable you to upload and sell them directly like accessories and clothing items today.

Even more than accessories and clothing, bodies and heads are complex to create. As we get closer to launch, we want to give you the guidelines for how to build bodies so you have time to create functional and safe content for launch.

Guiding principles:

We used the following principles to craft the new content guidelines around the avatar bodies and heads:

  • Give transparent parameters to creators
    We will strive to provide clear and actionable guidelines to set creators up for success.

  • Prioritize inclusion and creativity
    We will ensure creators’ ability to develop expressive and representative avatars that fulfill their creative vision.

  • Keep Roblox safe without limiting expression
    By balancing safety with appeal and creativity, creators will be able to safely access and develop content that is both interesting and appropriate for all ages.

Content guidelines:

  • All bodies must adhere to Roblox’s Community Standards.

  • As stated in the Community Standards, bodies should not be sexually suggestive and should be appropriate for all ages.

  • Some bodies, including those that resemble human figures (and don’t include any fantasy elements like horns or antennas) and those that resemble minors, will require a modesty layer, as seen on some of the character avatars in the Marketplace and the examples below.

  • Avatar bodies that resemble human figures should include skin tone mutability, the ability to change an avatar’s skin tone, so that people can make an avatar personalized to them.

Additional limits & best practices

This section describes some requirements and some recommendations for your avatar bodies. Some of the checks here will be automatically validated on upload. The others are strong suggestions so your avatar will work best in experiences and with other avatar items.

  • Bodies must have a dynamic head, a torso, a right arm, a left arm, a right leg, and a left leg. They can optionally include eyelashes, eyebrows, and hair as separate assets - none of these should be built into the head itself if they are present. All other items such as equipable tails, wings, glasses, tattoos, makeup, clothing, etc. have to be sold separately.

  • Bodies that don’t include any separately equipable parts like clothing (so all of the bodies you will be able to create at launch) will have a minimum price of 0 and a maximum price of 10,000 Robux.

  • If you are familiar with dynamic heads, you may know they can use MoodAnimations. These will be automatically generated for you - you will not be able to provide your own. For your head to look its best with all face animations, you should build it to have a neutral expression.

  • There will be a minimum and maximum size for each part. The exact measurements are not finalized, but they are based on an average of the bodies available in the Marketplace today. It is probably safe to assume you won’t be able to make anything with more extreme dimensions than you see there today.

  • Like clothing and accessories, there will be automated validation during upload, but it’s up to you to QA your creations before upload. Bodies (and especially dynamic heads) do a lot of things - make sure you are happy with how they look in lots of contexts!

  • Bodies will be uploaded as a single action for all parts. There will not be a way to combine already-uploaded assets into a bundle. Hair and other parts uploaded as part of a body cannot be sold separately.

  • Bodies cannot be created and sold by groups.

  • Bodies cannot be Limited.

Note: Many of these constraints may change in future updates but will be in place for this initial launch.

What’s next?

  • A set of template heads and bodies with documentation on how to use them will be available soon. We hope these will make creating bodies even easier and we would love your feedback on them.

  • A staging environment to help you QA your avatars with clothing and animations will also be shared in the coming weeks.

  • The full guidelines and full technical requirements will launch soon. Stay tuned!

Ready to apply to the UGC Program?

Please submit your application through this link or learn more about the UGC Program through the Marketplace Requirements and Publishing to Marketplace pages of the Creator Hub.

Examples:

Example #1

Requires modesty layer | Skin tone mutability is encouraged | No extra items included :white_check_mark:

Example #2

Requires modesty layer | Skin tone mutability is encouraged | No extra items included :white_check_mark:

Example #3

image6

Requires modesty layer | Skin tone mutability is encouraged | Clothing is included :x:

Example #4

Requires modesty layer | Skin tone mutability is encouraged | Clothing, accessories, and tattoo are included :x:

183 Likes

This topic was automatically opened after 10 minutes.

Will this be changing in the future? We sell our UGC items from our group for a long list of reasons. UGC limiteds are also not allowed in groups right now, and it makes profiting from them extremely difficult if not outright impossible…

Will they be able to be limited in the future? Limited bodies (technical constraints aside) would be a great opportunity for a lot of UGC artists.

27 Likes

I am pumped, I can’t wait to see what people make. Looking forward to getting even cooler robot legs. :wink:

WRT the requirement to separate out clothing, accessories, tattoos, etc. this seems a bit odd with the mention of tattoos. This is a texture element and not often separable?

22 Likes

we will be able to make bundles for free? if so, is there any incentive for creators to do this outside of the kindness of their hearts?

and again if so, does this mean we could see free, non-limited accessories in the future too?

21 Likes

Hello,

I am excited for the future of the marketplace and the release of bundles! I do have a concern, however.

Why is the price floor for UGC bundles 0 robux? Bodies require a lot of work from the creators and this is a dangerous price floor to set. Being able to create free bundles will encourage a race to the bottom and creators will begin to price cut each other.

32 Likes

Looks like there could be a lot of possible and potential problems with this.

If this is out, we could be getting a cheap headless or even other famous expensive bundle… As well as many other copies of bundles :thinking:

24 Likes

May it be explained why dynamic heads are a requirement? I turn off most additional avatar features in my experiences beyond the base level of customisation (body parts, accessories and classic faces). This would allow creation of preset avatars similar to older ones where a dynamic expression may not be compatible or otherwise ruin the appearance (see: Orinthian Soldier, which does not include a head, because the head is covered by the helmet accessory provided in the purchase).

20 Likes

Why are eyelashes and eyebrows considered separate assets that should not be built into the face? Are they swappable, and if so, would that create any issues with how the creator wants them to be controlled?

11 Likes

Plans may change, but yes, currently we intend to allow both group-created and Limited bodies and heads in the future.

13 Likes

Is there a particular reason the application process is being promoted if the UGC Program is to go public as stated in the roadmap for late 2023?

7 Likes

Although painted-on tattoos and makeup are the current norm, we want to change this. The idea is for these things to be separately equippable to any body, like an accessory or clothing. This should be sort-of possible now with layered clothing although there isn’t a logical category for them…yet…

21 Likes

Cus the program is still technically on-going. Why shut down the program now when the date is currently a little arbitrary.

9 Likes

The minimum price for these bodies/heads is 0 because we believe that a base body that represents you is something every Robloxian should have. When we enable bodies to be sold with additional parts like clothing or accessories, we will implement separate pricing rules.

Likely not, but plans may change!

18 Likes

Stay tuned for an upcoming announcement that will mention some of our progress around policing copies of content like headless. We definitely are aware of this concern.


[adding on to this because the forum is pointing out I can reply to many posts at once :slight_smile: ]

There may be more about this in other announcements about the overall Roblox roadmap and vision, but the short answer is that heads and faces that can animate are the future we want to support on Roblox. We do want creators to have control over how the face animates and interacts with other content.

Eyelashes and eyebrows are swappable, but again we do want creators to have control over they can be used and combined long-term.

This is included so you know if you want to get started creating sooner, this is your path to do so! Otherwise, you’ll have the ability to create this content when we open up to everyone later this year.

The ability to create standalone heads/faces is also coming soon! The policies will be largely the same, and heads are a subset of bodies, so we are starting with the whole thing and will open up other options later.

18 Likes

Nice to see the expansion of what UGC creators and publish and create on the platform but I’d love to see UGC faces be priority over bodies. It will allow creators the ability to create custom faces without having to use cheat workarounds publishing 2000 face accessories for all the body colours or having to wear those blank masks to cover the regular Roblox faces.

11 Likes

Can’t wait to see devs making UGC bodies based off their game characters.
I would personally like that.

7 Likes

Am I crazy for not seeing a reason to spend lots of time creating/rigging avatars for no revenue?

Sure you can choose to price them, but if avatar bundles have a floor of 0 why would players choose to pay for them when there’ll quickly be hundreds of free ones

12 Likes

Was just about to make a reply about this. From what remember, it is either discontinued, or in a state of limbo. Take this with a grain salt though, as this was a while ago, so it might be different now.

EDIT: Turns out we likely will get them. It’s just a matter of when. Very glad that it wasn’t left in the dust.

7 Likes

If I were to make UGC and upload it, would I have to buy my own UGC in order to use it on my account or would it be free to me since I made it?

If it’s free for the person who created it, what would prevent me (if any) from slightly altering a UGC item such as a valk, dominus, etc and using that on my profile? Altering in this context could be as simple as wrapping my own texture.

If I can do all that, wouldn’t the scale of users who can upload / create UGC directly impact limiteds and that market through saturation? Valk, dominus, etc are prized because they’re nearly impossible to get for most users.

I’m honestly in favor of being able to upload my own valk, dominus, etc. I’ve been wanting those for so long. I made my own custom ones over the years that I used in various games to override my default appearance. Just curious about limiteds and how that’s going to be handled later down the road.

5 Likes