A slightly long rant about the motivation behind Visulie
Visual effects and animations are two properties that make or break a game. While Roblox offers a variety of animation tools as well as plugins created by the many talented developers on this platform, what has been bugging many developers the most (including me!) is simply the lack of a general-use, pragmatic animation software.
What has been one of the largest (if not the largest) consumer of my time when developing my games is simply creating the 2D and 3D visual effects. Not only do I have to code all the different interactions (which may take hundreds of lines of code!), but you also have to run the game to see how the animation plays out. On top of that, I’m forced to manage an overwhelming number of instances under my animation code, which isn’t very optimal.
(thanks, Code Stats!)
13 thousand lines of animation code and counting. That’s preposterous!
And this gave me enough motivation to create Visulie. Which I believe (as far as I know), is the first of it’s kind on Roblox.
Version History Quick-Access
Visulie versions are formatted as a.b.c
ais the working data version (the version used to export, import, and animation loading).bindicates updates related to new features.crefers to updates related to bug fixes or adjustments.
V1.1.1 — V1.1.2 — V1.1.3 — V1.1.4 — V1.1.5 — V1.1.6 — V1.1.7 — V1.1.8
V1.2.1 — V1.2.2
V2.1.1
V2.2.0 — V2.2.1
V2.3.1 — V2.3.2
V2.4.0
Visulie is a one-of-a-kind plugin that allows you to animate virtually any Instance! It supports animating values of almost all properties and datatypes, even ones that are not interpolatable using TweenService, such as:
Visulie also provides graceful support for method calls, such as Emit() for ParticleEmitters, and Play() for Sounds.
As an added bonus, Visulie also supports animating attributes, and toggle on/off instance tags! This is something that is unique to Visulie that you cannot find anywhere else!
Visulie isn’t just great for general animation — it also simplifies complex, often messy scripted game logic that’s hard to handle natively.
Animating
Visulie aims to deliver a simple, intuitive experience when animating. As such, most of what you can do with it is carefully designed around already familiar controls
Essentially:
- To create/load an animation, use
File > Create Animation/Load Animation. - When the editor has been initialized, you can freely add or remove parts to/from the rig, and animate most of their properties. All the Roblox gizmos work, so you can drag
- When you are done, use
File > Exportto export the animation.
It really is that simple. Here’s a demonstration video:
Runtime Playback
Through the Visulie Renderer, you can play the exported animations during runtime, supporting many useful animation features such as:
- Playback speed
- Framerate
- Animation events
…
The code to create animations is fairly short. For example, here’s a snippet on how to play VFX once, then automatically destroy the VFX:
local Visulie = require() --> path to Visulie
local yourAnimation = require() --> path to your animation
local NewAnimation = Visulie.new(yourAnimation, yourCFrame)
NewAnimation:PlayOnce()
I use Visulie extensively throughout my game, especially for atomic effects (effects that play once then destroy themselves), complicated animations, and even mob animations:
Here are some of the animations previewed in the video:
Open me!
“Rigging”
Visulie does not use the standard rigging techniques that you may be used to. Instead of using Motor6Ds, Visulie uses an arguably more intuitive approach of parenting instances, of which BaseParts parented to other BaseParts will have their CFrames transform relative to their parent. Here’s a quick demonstration:
The blue part initially moved relative to the origin. When parented to the red part, it now moves relative to the red part.
The origin is the part that looks like this:
The origin shows the up vector (green), right vector (red), and look vector (blue).
When you create the animation, make sure it is in the right place around the origin!
Version Handling
Through the natural evolution of the plugin, expect changes to how data is formatted, as well as the required Visulie version to read the new format. For version handling, make use of the “Scan for Outdated” option:
If you’ve already bought and used Visulie a few years back, this feature can help you update to the latest version!
Your purchase comes with the entire Visulie Suite, which includes the Editor as well as all versions of the Visulie Renderer.
. These plugins take a heck of a long time to make. The first and second revisions take hundreds of hours cumulatively. I think it’s only fair to earn a little from that.