Hey Developers,

If you attended or watched RDC 2018, you saw David “Builderman” Baszucki’s presentation on some of the exciting features and updates coming to Roblox in the coming months. With great delight, we are happy to announce a major update to the look, feel and customization options on Roblox: introducing Rthro for avatars!

Avatars are central to the Roblox experience, as they provide an avenue for players and developers alike to express and represent themselves in a personalized manner. Now players can bring their avatars to new heights with all new scaling and sizing options! Rthro character scaling options maintain joint placement and will allow most previously created animations to work seamlessly with new avatars. But it doesn’t stop there! Roblox took it one step further: imagine being able to mix and match all different avatar styles in one universe, so that the classic R6, R15 and fully Rthro avatars all interact seamlessly in the same game. Alternatively, you could have a game where all avatars take on a consistent look, regardless of the variety of styles these avatars might have entered the game with. You can use this new technology for this and more: the combinations are endless, and this new suite of choices will allow avatars of all generations to refresh their look!

As of today, we have released this feature to developers exclusively in order to give you the chance to explore the new scaling options and experiment with them in game. For now, this feature is not available for players to apply to their avatars to give developers a chance to check things out. We will soon be unlocking full scaling options for players to experiment with their avatars and releasing a series of avatar bundles that were designed with Rthro in mind. These bundles will scale gracefully in both directions; from Classic to Rthro and back. Alternatively, classic avatars now have the ability to scale up to 100% and can interact in the same universe as the coming bundles.

We will be offering an opportunity for developers to showcase their games with full Rthro enabled on a dedicated events page. To submit your game for consideration, please complete this short survey: https://survey.roblox.com/s3/Roblox-R-Thro-Game-Spotlight-Sign-Up

What does this mean for developers?

We have previously unlocked scaling to allow enhanced avatar customization options which we announced in this Developer Forum post: https://devforum.roblox.com/t/roblox-enhanced-avatar-scaling-options/130776). In the next few days, the full capabilities of the custom avatar engine will be unlocked and players will be able to scale all the way to 100%.

Developers will have control over the scaling abilities in their games using the new Morph Panel in Studio. This panel will control the percent of scale developers allow players to exhibit in their game. For example, developers can restrict players to scale to a certain percent range, completely disable this new scaling feature, or allow players to choose what they’d like to see in-game. Presets are provided for common cases such as “Classic Roblox” (including enforcing a classic head), “Full Rthro”, and “Full Player Choice”. You can see a screenshot of what this panel will look like below:

In addition to this morph panel, we are going to release “artist intent” assets which will leverage the custom rig feature that was recently enabled and allow developers to program custom joints. This is currently referred to as “costume based” joint positions in game settings, and should address the previous restriction where developers were unable to edit joints which constrained avatar movements to the pre-determined joint placements by Roblox.

We’re excited to see how you continue to push the bounds of creativity and to see the Roblox offerings grow and expand into new, exciting looks. As you start to use these new features, we’d love to hear your feedback. Below are some commonly asked questions on this topic.

FAQ