dash or roll, both are pretty cool
3 Likes
An auto-animator for custom characters.
You select the body parts aka rigs and you get to choose either the default R6 anim or the default R15 anim.
I don’t wanna recreate those animations.
2 Likes
UGC R15 Animations. I believe this is a good feature because:
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It does not require Blender, and instead requires animation abilities.
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It’s one of the only sections left that do not have UGC.
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It gives animators a new way to make income than just game contributing and content creating.
Overall, UGC R15 animations give new possibilities for creativity and monetization!
1 Like
Additive animations / blending
Currently animations fight with each other, and whichever animation has the highest weight/priority is the one that’s most “visible”. This isn’t ideal for certain types of animations, and the workarounds are very bloaty.
For example, it is currently difficult to do “flinch” animations. A good flinch animation would impose itself ontop the currently playback state, but that isn’t currently possible with how animations layer and blend. If my character crouches and stands, I now need a flinch animation for both (any) move state(s). Without multiple animations, my character would go from crouching, to standing and flinching, back crouching.
If we had additive animations / blending, I could just make one flinch animation, set it to a high priority, and play it regardless of character/animation state. My character could then visibly remain crouched (or in any state), and then have the flinch animation imposed over it, preserving the original pose.
Public publishing and versions
Animations being bound to the “game owner” has been a pain point with animations for as long as we’ve been able to make them. It makes quickly prototyping difficult, it hinders collaboration with devs/contractors outside of your project, and it forces animation ID to double as a soft version control system.
I wish I could just make an animation public, or give certain groups/users/games access to it. It sucks that I have to re upload them and change ID numbers on objects just to share them in a “working / live” way. I wish I didn’t have to hang on to the keyframesequence objects for every animation I have and could just let people import and play/modify from a single animation ID.
Animations let us publish new versions to the same ID. That new version is, as far as I know, not tied to game/server version, meaning two+ different clients could see too versions of the same animation depending on when they joined the game and when an animation was updated. This isn’t ideal, especially if the animation has some keyframe event or length changes. The only workaround is to create a new animation with a new ID, and then replace all your IDs in your game(s).
I feel like using animations in game/code is in a decent spot. Barring some API, once you have the logistics of creating, publishing, and inserting animations sorted, then using them for gameplay is generally a fine process.
It’s getting to that “I can actually use this animation now” stage that is IMO, super tedious at times. All the work involved in actually being able to use an animation you create poorly contrasts with an asset type that typically benefits from a lot of iteration and ease of use.
10 Likes
I’m mainly looking forward to this 8-year old bug being resolved, as it prevents some implementations of animation blending:
4 Likes
Addressing this would be highly beneficial for improving memory sizes of some animation tracks, as highlighted in the thread.
Additionally, root motion is vastly underrated IMO and would eliminate a lot of pain points for developers, making visual effects and hitboxes way easier to sync with animations.
3 Likes
I’d really like to see automatic and automatic clamped Bezier curves. Not sure what it is but something about the keyframe/graph editor on the default Roblox Animator just feels really cumbersome to use. Maybe the way it’s laid out or something.
2 Likes
Thank you all, your feedback has been noted. It seems there are a few clear areas where you’d like improvements. Keep them coming!
4 Likes
I have a VR headset. It would be awesome to be able to use its motion tracking in combination with IK to use motion capture to record my own animations. That would save a ton of money for a full motion capture suit (especially with the low price of the Quest), and remove a lot of tedium when it comes to making animations as a non-animator. It would be good to have support for multiple trackers like the 3rd-party full-body tracking (slime VR) or attaching it to objects to animate (e.g. Vive trackers).
also, stop working after work hours
5 Likes
How are you suggesting they accomplish this? For example are you saying that the headset would act as the head to a r15 character, and the arms would move with IK in accordance to hand tracking position?
Let me make it clear, I’m not against this idea, I actually support it, but there are quite a few hurdles that need to be jumped before this could ever be a feature. For example, motion capture tech almost ALWAYS has to be cleaned up after the fact as the rough data gained from even the most state-of-the-art MoCap suits is still relatively crude. The problem with this is, if Roblox implemented this feature, there is little to no chance that you would be able to alter this animation yourself after capture (See the video to animation beta), IMO that would render this borderline useless.
Not to mention with just a headset and controllers, the motion that would be recorded would be relatively basic, and only apply on a couple parts of a rig, making it look quite strange. The support of 3rd party full-body tracking could exponentially help this out, but the fact of the matter is, I’m willing to bet that < 1% of Roblox Developers are more likely to either own vive trackers or set up a recording workspace to begin with. This is because in the day, it’s cheaper and easier for developers to either animate themselves, or hire a talented animator to make these simple animations an easy task to complete.
But honestly, it kinda seems like Roblox to develop this random gimmick feature that hardly anyone would be able to use lmao, that’d be hilarious.
(For reference I do own these methods, it’s just I don’t think enough OTHER people have access to these devices in order to make this a worthwhile investment vs. the ease of just making an animation yourself.)
1 Like
Love and agree with the suggestions people have already made! A couple of extra I would love to see are:
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Official R15 rigs for all body types OR a way to more easily export rigs from Roblox to enable R15 animation in external programs like Blender/Maya. Currently I’m only aware of the mannequin rig, which we used to manually create R15 rigs for other body types, but it’s a big hassle currently.
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Ability to keyframe all controls in the animation editor. Perhaps if you have multiple controls selected and press “…” → “Add keyframe” it could keyframe everything you have selected.
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Enable copy/paste of keyframes between different controls. If I have animated one arm and want the other to do the same exact movement I would like to be able to copy the values from one to the other.
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Add functionality for weighted tangents.
Thank you for the opportunity to give suggestions (and please let me know if any of these are already possible and I’ve just managed to miss them 
)
1 Like
Please fix animation events. Currently you have to call :disconnect every time a animation event is fired and its frankly annoying. It would also be nice to have all the easingstyles in the animator.
There are 2 huge longstanding issues with animations right now.
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Sharing Animations across projects is extremely tedious due to them being locked per person/group. There’s hardly a need to have Animations have the privacy settings they do, they end up causing way more issues of wasting time.
There’s an entire project dedicated to moving your animations across different groups you own from how much of a problem this is:
GitHub - evaera/roblox-animation-transfer: Transfers Roblox animations from one owner to another.
There’s feature requests about this issue for almost a decade now, so it would be really amazing if we could remove the place restrictions for Animations and make them usable in any experience.
Here are some long standing feature requests asking for this:
Allow us to make our animations usable in any game by configuring it and add a library section
Public Animations
Unlock Animations!
We NEED the ability to control who has access to private assets -
There’s a huge amount of time wasted having to publish animations every time you make a change to test if they work. Luckily there’s an API to load keyframes into animations, but this only is allowed in studio and not in live games. You still have to publish all your changes into Animation Instances at the end of the day. So you’re forced to constantly juggle keyframes and animations. And since the Animation overwrite UI in studio is really not good at showing all your animations conveniently, it’s far easier to just publish new animations instead of bothering trying to overwrite originals.
That’s all to say, it would be really nice if we could just turn keyframes into Animations in live games as well. I know that animation keyframes can take a lot of memory, and compressing them from 100’s of instances to just raw memory is way more efficient. But something like this could also just as easily be baked in studio as its own data model.
Anyways, this was a huge wall of text, thank you for hearing us out,
Regards,
Aaron Mccoy
2 Likes
Hi, could you please explain what you mean by this a bit more? Thanks
You mean that if you publish a modified animation with the same ID, existing players in a server won’t see the updated version until they or the server restart?
Yea, I’m fairly sure that’s the case but its been quite a while since I’ve tested it.
I tend to avoid updating animations in favor of making new ones too since I have to shutdown my game to work in game logic for the change in animation. It is fairly rare in most of my animation use cases that I need to publish a non-critical change to any animation already live in game. It’s still not ideal to have visual discrepancies for players in those rare circumstances though.
1 Like
Ah, my bad. Basically I was talking about rFrameAnimator’s graph system which helps us to customize and take our tweens to the next level. Here’s a pic:
(Sorry for the lack of clarification before)
1 Like
Lets see…
The program I use for animation is Cinema 4D, what I like is you can animate any 3D object and rigs are only needed when something bends. Setting up rigs on roblox is… tedious. Many a rig I have had to abandon. Just the ability to move any object without a rig or motor 6d would be super helpful.
Also humanoids are laggy in bulk.
Also I really dislike the auto keyframes.
(maybe skinweighting would be cool too but thats low priority)
Also a way to change the pivot thingy to object pivot or world pivot:
THANKS SO MUCH!
1 Like
It would be nice “preview” or to see my IKConstraints active while using the Animation Editor. This would make animating custom characters with Inverse Kinematics a lot easier without the use of external programs like Blender.
Current Animation Editor
With Constraint Preview:
Obviously not a perfect example, but a feature like this would save a LOT of headaches when using the IKConstraint in animations.
1 Like
OH WAIT, I FORGOT THE MOST IMPORTANT THING!
I don’t care how basic or rudimentary it is, please please please add the ability to line up a sound with an animation, animating to dialog and music is SO hard!
Mostly because this:
1 Like