It looks a lot better— and much more mystical and atmospheric. If we wanted to go farther, we could change the bricks to be snowy, and white, and play around with the colors of the game to match the purple hue better. At this point though, it should be clear now just how powerful of a force lighting is in the aesthetics of your ROBLOX game. I changed the following values below. Seven property changes, and one new object — a skybox, two minutes.

The lighting configuration that I choose in a few minutes.

I’m not sure if you have noticed, but point lights and dynamic lighting can be extremely powerful in building your game’s aesthetics. Their full use is complicated, and I will not discuss them today, but be sure to take full advantage of them.

Hopefully by now you understand what affects the aesthetics of building on ROBLOX. If anything though, you should remember that building is infinitely easier with plugins. They will do the heavy lifting for you.

Heavy lifting plugins

I have a few small suggestions of useful plugins, plugins I can barely build without, after using them.

Oozle Draw lets you draw some beautiful curves that take hours to do “by hand” (and “by hand” I mean with qCmdUtl — doing it with ROBLOX Studio’s tools, as powerful as they are, would take even longer. The effect is illustrated below:

Try doing this by hand

I’m a bit biased here, but I love qCmdUtl. qCmdUtl lets you resize, drag, and in my opinion, the most important — rotate around an axis. I’ve integrated shortcuts too. A lot of these features can be found in Build V4 and F3X, but of course, I use my own plugin because if it breaks, well, I can only blame myself. Below is a use of select edge.

Rotating around an edge is really really really useful.

Using the select edge feature on qCmdUtl is key — everyone in EBR can attest that abusing the select edge feature is the way to go. You hold down alt and a little icon appears that lets you select an edge. I believe Build V4 has this feature too (at my request). It’s a bit off tangent, but I’d really like to thank Blobbyblob — the creator of Build V4, for his inspiration and mentorship over four years ago, when I was first learning to script. Today, it’s fascinating to see my mentors and idols working alongside me on the same things.

For builders on top of the plugin market (and certainly programmers too), There’s a new tool to abuse. It is stravant’s GapFill plugin, and I use it daily. It does have a small glitch in it that generates a small triangle that is sized 0,0,0, but I have reported it to stravant, and my own version is fixed. Gapfill is fascinating and amazing. No where else can you expect to get these results — and I’d like to say proudly that not only do I abuse stravant’s building tools, but as a programmer, I also over-utilize his useful code modules. He made the standard airplane rig on Roblox, he designed some of the standards of Roblox. Below is an example of gapfill being used to make… I’m not sure what, what building this by hand would have been horrible.

I do not know what I just made with Oozle Draw and Gap Fill but I would like to see someone make this by hand.

Yeah, gap fill is incredibly useful. The last plugin I would like to recommend is one I rarely use, but when I do, I’m always delighted. Command panel has many features, but I use it to select similar objects. Based off of Sublime Text’s standard control panel which uses fuzzy searching, one of the best features of Sublime Text (you should definitely look into Sublime Text if you are a programmer), it makes commands easy to execute.

Trying to change the color of these parts? This command will select all similar parts within 10 studs.

A few second later and I have selected and recolored every similar brick within 10 studs of my current selection.

Command panel is incredibly powerful. And remember, there are plenty of great plugins out there, I would highly recommend Build V4 by BlobbyBlob and F3X by the F3X team. Find what works for you.