Visual effects and animations are an integral part of making any game. However, one will quickly find out that creating such effects (such as abilities, attacks, impacts, spells, etc.) can become quite tedious. Creating effect props and brute force testing animation code is an excruciatingly slow process. Complex effects can be a couple of hundred lines of code! Let’s make this process more interactive! No more banging your head because you’ve been looking at the same 26 letters of the English lexicon trying to fix a pesky issue with your code!
The Visulie plugin comes with an editor and a player:
The editor provides a straightforward approach to creating animations, editing existing animations, and serializing the effects into data modules. This data can then be read on the fly during runtime and translated into a real-time animation.
Here’s a little showcase of what this plugin can do:
Runtime Playback
(excuse my mediocre animation expertise)
More examples!
Bob eats Taco Bell 3 miles from the nearest washroom:
Editor
Animating Rigs*
*Visulie uses a different system of rigging. Motor6Ds are not used at all. See here for more details.
The animation player supports playing at all framerate and playback speeds. You can also dynamically configure how the animation plays during runtime! You can create both 2D and 3D animations with this plugin. Traditionally unanimatable data types, such as ColorSequence, are supported with Visulie!
A tutorial is planned, but there are tooltips built-in to the plugin to help you navigate and use the editor. Functionality is similar to the built-in Roblox animator.
FAQ
Why not use the built-in animation editor?
The built-in animation editor is meant to animate rigs. The Visulie animator does not require any rigging to work.
Isn’t Moon Animator the same thing?
Moon Animator is used as an alternative to the built-in editor. Its purpose is more suited to create video content, rather than executable content during runtime as runtime playback faces the same limitations as Roblox animation.
Can I share my creations?
Yes! You can share the animation exported from Visulie. You can also freely distribute the Visulie Player’s source code (not the plugin source code! Just the player!).
I’m not hearing any audio in studio, is that a bug?
Currently, plugins are limited to where they’re able to play audio within a studio session. This issue will be immediately fixed once this feature request is resolved. For the time being, you must export and play your animations during runtime to hear your audio play in sync.
Example Place File
Animation Example.rbxl (60.0 KB)
Run the game and hold down the “Z” key to set the animation origin.
Get Visulie here:
NOTICE
Game SignalBehavior must be set to “
Immediate” for the plugin to work properly! You can find this property under Workspace.
Tagoption will be removed in the next revision. Please do not use it for new work.
Visulie’s update schedule is currently paused. I alternate between different projects every so often for higher work efficiency (it gets a little mundane working on the same thing for such a long time!). Thank you for your understanding!
Here are some planned updates when the update schedule is resumed:
UI refresh (possibly matching the new studio UI!)
Tabs (editing audio, effects, and other visuals in a separate tabs)
Video-editor-like workflow for audio editing (as well as audio automation)
Undo/Redo (this is hard, might take a while)
Compatibility (immediate signal behavior is no longer required, version handling for data instances)
Performance (multi-threaded animations)
CFrame versatility (>180 degree rotation)
