This started happening to me a day after solid black textures got moderated and other UGC Creators reported the same thing happening to them so I had to file a bug report.
When I adjust the lighting of the UGCs in Roblox Studio they look like how I want them to be but when I upload them, their lighting comes from a different direction. I tried it on 2 plugins and the result is the same. Here are some examples:
Another problem I encountered is that, some of my accessories that had solid black textures are now back (except 12725655646 and 12725592591, still waiting for them to be fixed.), but their lightings have the same problem like the ones I try to upload. Their lightings used to be normal before but when moderation fixed them they broke the lighting. This is not a big deal for some, but my Void UGCs are now not looking like Void and this affects my sales. No one wants to buy a Void UGC that doesn’t look like Void in thumbnail. Here’s the accessories that got affected:
They used to look like this before solid black moderation happened:
Yeah, i have noticed this problem on many accessories tho.
I think its because of position and rotation facing to the sun in Roblox Studio, however i could be wrong.
Just experienced this today! The rotation that you add when creating a thumbnail doesn’t seem to apply properly (though zooming + positioning saves just fine).
This issue is still persisting over a week after it first came up. UGC creators are unable to see an accurate preview of their items prior to paying the 750 robux fee to upload the item, and being unable to effectively manipulate the lighting for the thumbnails of our items without trial and error via rotation in an external program is costing creators lots of robux on wasted upload fees / negatively affecting sales of items that have been uploaded with this bug present. Would appreciate hearing an update on this issue being fixed / see it fixed soon.
Anxiously waiting for this to be fixed so I can upload items I’ve been holding off on. A better, long-term approach would be giving creators the ability to “refresh” their thumbnails automagically. One can dream
As a temporary fix, you can rotate the model inside blender or whatever software you are using and later import it to roblox studio. I rotate my models in Z-axis 90 degrees then import them to studio and results are good enough for thumbnail. Thumbnail lighting doesn’t change in studio so you have to upload it to see how it looks. Give it a try and see if it works for you.
This workaround unfortunately has some adverse side effects for accessories that aren’t Hats, Hairs, or Faces. Rotating it 90 degrees in the modeling software will also switch the axes/direction in which the accessory scales with the depth and width Rthro scalings.
Further expanding on this topic, the thumbnails do not save the custom lighting the UGC accessory anymore. Rotation of the accessory in Studio used to dictate the direction of the lighting; this is no longer the case due to the bug.
UGC creators are able to set and see the custom lighting in our thumbnail lighting tools/plugins, but upon uploading to the Avatar Marketplace, the thumbnail on the website shows the UGC accessory facing a locked -Z direction no matter what orientation we set it to in Studio. Hence our UGC thumbnails display unfavorable lighting instead of our custom lighting.
For example, let’s say I set up my UGC accessory with custom lighting. Upon upload, the thumbnail would display as the following prior to the bug.
With the bug, the UGC accessory is locked facing the -Z direction in the thumbnail when uploaded which makes it look unappealing.
Something that hasn’t been mentioned before is that this bug is also expanding and starting to affect much OLDER items on the Avatar Marketplace by somehow refreshing their thumbnails. It has affected part of my personal UGC catalog and many other older accessories on the Avatar Marketplace as well.
This is one of my unaffected hairs that I uploaded about 2 years ago. This is the intended lighting and thumbnail I had set up for all of the hairs of the same mesh.
This is the same hair accessory side by side with the other colors that I also uploaded about 2 years ago. They used to all have the same thumbnail as the orange one. You can see that the lighting changed and UGC accessory is locked facing the -Z direction in the thumbnail.
We have identified the breaking change concerning thumbnail orientation and lighting and have rolled them back. We expect newly uploaded thumbnails not to experience this issue anymore.
In the coming days, we should also see thumbnails affected by this issue being re-uploaded without this bug. Thanks to all who participated in this dev bug report.
I believe the catalogue primarily, if not exclusively, uses sunlighting from the same angle for now. I would assume one could mimic this angle and put a clear white background to get it to a v close approximation. This’ll get you most of the way there today.
