As of August 17th, Roblox has officially enabled the ability for UGC creators to upload avatar bodies to the marketplace. This empowers creators to upload bodies that can be mixed and matched with eachother so that anyone can create any avatar they want, fueling positive self-expression on the platform. Self-expression is a huge priority for Roblox, which led to the creation of layered clothing, facial animations, the UGC program for accessories and clothing, and many other innovative avatar technologies unique to Roblox.
However, Roblox has recently made a change that severely impacts the ability for artists and players to create unique expressive avatars. When UGC bodies went live, Roblox changed the size restrictions of the body meshes to the following (measured in studs):
Body Part | X (width) | Y (height) | Z (depth) |
---|---|---|---|
Head | 1.5 | 1.75 | 2 |
Arm | 2 | 3 | 2 |
Torso | 3.5 | 3.25 | 2 |
Leg | 1.5 | 2.75 | 2 |
Some of these values are too small. It makes non-human characters extremely difficult, if not outright impossible to create. You cannot make dragon heads, goblins & cats with big ears, horse heads, round robot bodies, turtles, and so much more. These new restrictions also make existing Roblox bundles impossible to exist. Roblox’s own marketing materials are completely false:
The characters circled above would not be allowed with the current restrictions, and only exist because they got “grandfathered” into the catalog. This directly contradicts with what Roblox previously stated on how the size restrictions would be:
Supporting the above with evidence, here’s detailed examples of Roblox-created avatar bodies not being possible due to the new size restrictions:
Examples of Roblox-created bodies that are no longer possible due to the size restrictions
Elemental Stone Golem - Roblox
Creature From the Blox Lagoon - Roblox
Crimson Claw: The Vengeful - Roblox
Lizard Man of Globslang Swamp - Roblox
Oinan Thickhoof - Roblox
Triple-Headed Trouble - Roblox
I kept the above list of examples relatively short because I think the it gets the point across. There are so many more examples like the above that I haven’t even listed.
In addition to existing bundles not being possible to create under the restrictions, how are we supposed to see facial animations if the heads are incredibly small? With these size restrictions, you have to essentially press your face against your device’s screen to see any of the facial movement happening:
To conclude : Roblox’s UGC body size limits need to be raised by a bit, such that previously existing avatar bodies would be possible to make by UGC creators. Doing this alleviates all of the creativity problems listed above. If the concern is about absurdly large avatars ruining games, this is solved with a feature called “avatar scale normalization”, which can either be implemented by devs in ~300 lines of lua code, or it can be implemented by Roblox. In fact, Roblox was planning on having this as a built-in feature for a while (it was being actively looked into during my internship), but it seems to have been dropped:
Links to Roblox's avatar scale normalization demos
Avatar Scaling Showcase 2.0 - Roblox
Avatar Scaling Showcase 3.0 - Roblox
Avatar Scaling Showcase 5.0 - Roblox
Overall, the current restrictions make it nearly impossible to create anything that isn’t a human. Please raise them.