Character Design
This doc goes over some elements of creating a custom avatar in Roblox from its purpose, style, color, and limitations to name a few.
If this is your first character or you already have a character in mind, then you could skip this page. I find character planning a good step in order to make the best characters however. Let's look at some of the considerations for Character Design.
Purpose
There are different directions you can go and one of the main ones is why are you making it? If you are making it for your own game the design is purely what you want to make. If you are making it to sell, then the design is what other people want to use. There is of course a huge spectrum between these two points..
If you plan on selling your assets, it is a good idea to also look into the following -
What avatar assets are popular?
What brands/trends/styles are people talking about?
What price are elements selling for, as this may adjust how much time you spend on your creation.
If you are creating your own game, you will need to consider the needs of your characters and experience. Some of these are covered below.
Reference
Reference is probably one of the most important steps in creating anything. It gives you a springboard to get started but also offers resources to improve your creation, technically or otherwise. There are several main points of reference when it comes to character design.
Style
There are so many styles available to use as reference it is sometimes hard to decide on the best one to go with. That said it is also fun to mix styles in order to make your own. I'm sure it is possible, but you could also create your own unique style that has never been seen before! Although I do think this is getting harder to do.
A key part of this however is do you want to feel like your experience is part of Roblox, so that players can use their own avatars in the space without looking out of place. The other option is to make an entirely different style and experience, this will require a lot more work however, but also maybe alienate some of your players.
Each style may have a different technique to create it, so not only will you need to consider what style you want to create, but how you create it. There might be experiences that would suit that style better than others.
The simplest approach to this is to create a reference board with inspiration for your character from whatever source you are referencing. PureRef is a fantastic application that allows you to easily take images from around the web and use them as reference in one place.
I think one of the more ethical approaches to using AI is using it to create reference as inspiration be it 2D or 3D. Copyright issues and entire shift in economy and society aside, AI is a fantastic tool for creating reference images or assets that align more with what you are trying to create as this is more an extension of what we already do.
There are many AI tools for creating images such as Midjourney, Microsoft CoPilot, Stable diffusion etc. I'm sure there are plenty more being released every day.
Proportions
Proportions play an integral part in creating appealing character. Is your character realistic, stylized, or just plain cute? On top of that you can exaggerate things like a strong or fast character through interesting use of proportions. It can also be fun to use stereotypes to play against people's expectations.
Color
Color theory is a fantastic tool to make your character look appealing to others, or not appealing, if that's your vibe.
You can use certain tools like Adobe Color Wheel to get a simple guide to color. Complementary colors are always a good start for any asset.
Functionality
Functionality is a good step towards bringing believability to your character. Having a human in space without a space suit would be weird, but even having a space suit in an earth like world also doesn't align well. Tying your avatar design to the world around it completes a more complete, and therefore better, result.
Environment
Your character needs to fit in with the environment otherwise it will seem a little off. Roblox experiences tend to have a simple, low poly style. You should create your assets with that in mind.
If you are creating your own environment and game with its own style, you have a lot more freedom to create the assets as you want but this will usually take a lot more time.
Limitations
As Roblox is designed to run on pretty much everything from high end computers to mobile devices and standalone VR, limitations do play a part in your character design.
An example would be you can't have a high polygon character with super fine detail using multiple 4K textures. You literally can't use assets like that in Roblox as it won't let you import them. Understanding the limitations of the engine you are creating your character for is actually very important.
Finding other examples of assets you would like to create helps guide your own creation process. Roblox studio allows you to export their Avatar templates, so you can easuily have reference for your own character.
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