Starting today, we are beginning the process of updating our most popular heads to support expressions from emotes and, soon, real-time animation from a user’s movement.
These heads will be like the one you currently have - just with expression and animation. This update will go through to the end of the year with the intent that every head has the ability to animate. This process is automatic, and no further action is required. By the end of the month, heads will be updated for the majority of active users.
At Roblox, our vision is for everyone to be able to express themselves just like in real life. That means all avatar heads should be able to animate and express themselves in more lifelike ways.
Note: If you are over the age of 13 with your camera enabled, your avatar will mirror your facial expressions. If you’re under the age of 13 or your camera is not enabled, you can use emotes to animate your avatar.
As more users have heads with facial animation, it makes enabling features that support facial animation that much more important to your users. For example, you will soon be able to allow users to enable their camera in your experience to animate their avatar. This allows users to engage in deeper ways, better communicate with their friends, and express themselves!
How do you know if your head supports Facial Animation?
Look for a winking face icon on the head’s thumbnail that lets you know the head supports Facial Animation.
Left to right: Facial Animation Icon, Head that supports Facial Animation
You will see this on the Avatar page by navigating to Customize, then select Heads and Body. Under the Style section, you will see heads that support facial animation.
To enable heads with facial animation in your experience – learn more here. If you want to switch back to an unanimated head, you can find your previous head in your inventory under Classic Head.
As always, we’d love to hear your feedback as we’re constantly working on providing our community with better ways to express themselves and their avatar identity on Roblox.
I’m not sure who on the “bad ideas board” approved this idea this time.
Please, rethink this. I really don’t like the “dynamic heads”. I don’t like the movement, and the entire face tracking thing is outright a privacy violation. I am very serious over my privacy and I do not want to give Roblox live access to my camera of all things to make my face move.
Please do not start taking classic faces off sale because you want to force these dynamic heads. I don’t want my head moving even with my camera off. Even worse, the camera part. As I previously stated, I will not be giving Roblox of all things access to my camera to mirror my irl face in a Roblox game, no thanks.
I think I speak for most everybody when I say this is a bad change. The same thing was tried with Rthro but worse, and look at how that went.
Is this performance-taxing for mobile devices?
I can imagine it would drain the battery quicker to have the camera constantly recording. Especially for lower end devices.
I assume the camera will be a toggleable setting (please OFF by default…), so what if the camera is disabled? Will the face still be animated?
When I first heard of this feature, I thought it was a little silly to put so much resources on such a small detail of our avatars… But seeing it on some of the heads designed around animated facial expressions, such as the Galloping Gecko, I think it has a lot of potential!
However, I’d say the biggest sting that comes with this shift is the lack of mix-and-match that classic heads/faces provided. An animated face is tied to whichever head shape Roblox decided fit best, but that limits creative freedom from the users.
As an example, my current outfit uses the original Block cylinder head with the classic Squiggle Mouth. Here, the eyes of the face line up with the goggles I’m wearing, while showing an adorable mouth!
Now, the new Squigglin’ Out animated head, which is based on the Squiggle Mouth face, has a different head shape. The chin is extended, and the face is pushed inward. When used with my avatar, the eyes are underneath the goggles, and could even be mistaken for nostrils from some angles! If this were a classic face, I could keep trying other head shapes until I found something which fit better, but there’s only one Squigglin’ Out.
If we had the freedom to choose which head we could use with these retro-styled faces, I think the transition to animated faces would be much smoother.
Generally I am happy to see the general progress of the Facial Animations, though
Are Developers able to create their own content ingame accessory that has the function of the facial expression from now on or just the accessory part is only thing available?
Perhaps we can see a cool game concept using the idea of the expressional faces.
This is a great change, and I am looking forward API’s that could possibly come in the future. But… what’s about putting the good ol’ faces offsale? Why not keep these onsale? There obviously is a classic faces tab for a reason.
I think the lesson we should learn here is that buy as many classic items as possible before, well, I don’t know, shirts become dynamic shirts!
2 good ideas I would like to share with the Avatar Team:
Obviously… put the classic faces back on sale. Better yet, make them bundles with dynamic faces. For example, I get the Winning Smile and also get the dynamic face version of it.
Make the classic faces fit like the old ones. You can’t expect us to use these faces at all if we can’t even use them properly with pre existing accessories.
We’ve been going in a good direction as of late. Listening to feedback and all. But what’s happened in the last 2 months?
While it’s great that Roblox is creating more innovative ideas, I’m not a fan of them removing pre-existing features that the community already loves (I am noticing a pattern here).
Currently, there are 12 existing dynamic heads in the marketplace, using faces that currently already exist in the marketplace. However, these faces are not exact replicas of the classic faces that users are already familiar with. Will users now have to “get used” to this new era, or will these classic faces return on-sale until you have their equivalent dynamic head counterparts?
Currently, dynamic heads are sold for a very expensive 100-200+ robux average, while classic faces were able to be purchased for as little as 10 robux (Freckles | Roblox Wiki | Fandom). Will these dynamic heads be lowered in cost to ensure mass availability now that you have taken these classic faces off-sale?
It is unfair to ask the community to purchase these new items, when they cost 20x as much and do not support all of the existing classic faces.
Please put the classic faces on-sale until you have converted all of them to dynamic heads.
While I respect the thought here and with the update as a whole I do not believe the way Roblox are going about this to be very good. Today you have taken a handful of classic legacy faces offsale, presumably in favor of this update but this only limits expression. If this is done for all legacy faces it would mean newer users to the site are unable to access the legacy faces at all which does not feel like giving them the opportunity to express themselves properly to me, furthermore these new heads require users to use a certain head shape in order to wear a particular face which is further limiting expression.
For Instance what if I wanted to wear the “Freckles” legacy face which was just taken offsale, I could buy the matching “Sun Kissed Freckles” dynamic head however this head is a feminine shaped head and although most users of the face would likely be female, it is unfair to essentially roadblock people from wearing these faces how they want to, it is limiting them not allowing them to have more freedom.
Please reinstate all the legacy faces which were taken offsale today and allow these to be used by people who don’t wish to use dynamic heads. Allow people to pick which they want to use, don’t force this upon new users some of whom may find the new heads a bit uncanny.
There may be others I missed and if there are I would like to see those reinstated too if possible, though I doubt this will even be listened to anyway I would like to raise my point here.
Hi @SergeantBlocky! When I spoke to David on the avatar team as well as another product manager, they stated all existing bundles would be getting updated to include facial animations.
Is this still the case? Will bundles such as the Crimson Claw be updated to have proper heads & facial animations?
It would be unfortunate if users of various packages couldn’t express themselves because the meshes were never updated.
There is also a point to be made regarding privacy, while I understand that Roblox probably isn’t sending snapshots of my face to wherever, but without camera acces they couldn’t, that wasn’t even possible. But having my camera light turned on all the time is not gret for privacy.
I’m hoping this is optional. I do see this being useful for games that overwrite the player’s avatar and/or have NPCs that developers want to give facial animation too. But this definitely should not replace what already exist.
Classic faces should still be made open to UGC though.
Rest of the post that's no longer relevant as this appears to be optional:
I, and I’m sure at least 90% of the Roblox community, would prefer to keep their classic head in order to continue using faces. Some faces are even limited. I think a better idea would me to open faces up for UGC, so people don’t have to make masks that pretend to be faces.
Speaking of limited, I have a face worth 62,900 R$ ($220.15 USD w/ DevEx) at the minimum right now. Will I get paid that much when it becomes impossible to sell? Overall, I think this is a really really bad change that, yet again, not a soul asked for. This is the issue we have with Roblox. I would kindly ask that you stop making choices without the consent of the community. All new things should always be optional without exception.
I would like to remind Roblox of one of its original core principals. That being about allowing creativity without restriction (with obvious exceptions like TOS violations). Roblox was meant to be as open as possible. With all of these changes, we were promised that developers could make games of every style. We were promised that we could express ourselves freely with limitless avatar customization.
So why is it that we’re going backwards and becoming more restricted? What are you doing Roblox? I’m not even upset about the new heads, it’s that you’re forcing it on people. Everything should be optional and there is literally no reason why it needs to be forced. You can make it the default, that’s perfectly fine. But don’t remove options to force something, especially when that something isn’t want most people want. I would also once again suggest that you open up classic faces for UGC
What’s most disappointing is that Roblox said they’d be more transparent. There are posts essentially apologizing for the lack of communication. Even going as far as to publish a road map, albeit somewhat vague. Why are we going back yet again to this behavior? I thought we had learned from this. Is it really so difficult to communicate things beforehand? Why do you feel the need to force certain things? I can understand if it’s required by law or something along those lines, but this has absolutely no reason to be forced.
Today, a bunch of Classic Faces that were published onto the avatar marketplace by Roblox went off-sale, is this related to this change? If so - will be see these faces come back in the form of dynamic heads? Or are they gone forever.
By having the “camera enabled”, do you mean a setting from Roblox or the settings inside the device we use to access Roblox?
A feature like this should be entirely togglable no matter the users age.
Edit: This feature can be toggled in the settings on the Roblox app/website. It is off by default.
As always, we (the community) would love to hear back on the feedback we give. We don’t know if we are heard if there’s no response or action that we can see. I hope the concerns of the community are not just ‘heard’, but rather are listened to. There is a difference.
Roblox asking for I.D for Voice Chat, Email for verifications, Phone number for 2FA , Location on every device and Camera Enabling for in game face animations and not to use my data for other purposes moment
Cant wait for some more uncanny valley territory, rthro was bad enough but now its time to hide because this is just full out creepy.
There is many other ways to innovate roblox and adding creepy animated faces isnt the way to go.
