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The Future of the ROBLOX Avatar

March 12, 2016

by Sorcus


Archive Announcements Creators Developers News

ROBLOX is built on the vision that our growing and vibrant community can create incredible content (games, clothing, groups) to power the imagination of millions of players around the world. We are constantly looking for new ways to empower the community. One area where the community is not currently involved is in the design and sale of key parts of our ROBLOX avatar. This includes body parts, hats, and gear. We have big plans this year to bring more community creativity to ROBLOX.

The ROBLOX avatar represents your character across many ROBLOX games and adventures. You can customize your avatar with clothing, hats, body parts and gear. Going forward we plan to enable a 100% community-created avatar system. As part of this, over the next year you will be seeing the avatar evolve in incremental, but exciting ways:

  • The avatar will have more joints, enabling better articulation (and expression)
  • We will be expanding the types of accessories that you can wear on your avatar, and you will have more customization options
  • Community-created assets for sale in the catalog will include packages, hats, gear and animations, in addition to shirts and pants
  • ROBLOX studio will fully support the new avatar and aid in the process of creating new body parts and animations (we will be announcing this in the first half of 2016)

The newly articulated avatar will be called an “R15” avatar, because it will have 15 body parts (instead of the current avatar, which has 6). For those of you who love our current avatars (R6), you will be able to continue using these as long as your wish. Every player will be able to choose whether their default avatar is represented by R6 or R15. And, all hats, gear, packages, shirts and pants you already have for your avatar will work with the new R15 avatar. If you choose R15, your avatar thumbnails will show your character as R15.

Game developers will have several options as to which avatars are present in their game. These options will include:

  • As chosen by the user
  • Morph all avatars to be R6
  • Morph all avatars to be more articulated, as R15

This will give all developers full control over their game and how the ROBLOX avatars interact with their games.

Developer Beta

R15 avatars are currently in developer beta right now (see screenshots below). Additionally, we are testing R15 internally with various games that are currently popular on the platform.

Your accessories such as hats won’t work during the developer beta. We will be making them available for use with R15 avatars shortly. This will be followed by allowing all of you to choose R15 as your avatar.

newavatar1

newavatar2

For now checkout this live demo of R15 here.

 

FAQ:

Q: Will I be able to use an R6 avatar forever?

A: Yes, you will always have an option of using R6 avatar.

 

Q: Will I be able to use all of my current assets if I choose to become an R15 avatar?

A: Yes, you will be able to use all your current assets with R15 avatar. However, current assets may not fit optimally as the evolution of the avatar continues.

 

Q: How do developers set the switch – where is it?

A: There’s a toggle in the game settings page that allows you to switch between R6 and R15 avatars.

 

Q: When will I be able to create and sell avatar items in the catalog?

A: We will be rolling out a new process for community asset creation soon, so stay tuned.

 

We look forward to hearing your feedback and see what you make with it!