What Happens When You Change Your Appearance on ROBLOX

By -

Every part of your ROBLOX character is fully customizable–you can change your hat, shirt, appendages, and even the look on your face. Like with every facet of ROBLOX, we want to give you as much creative freedom as possible. But what happens behind the scenes when you change the appearance of your ROBLOXian? We turned to Creative Director John Shedletsky to tell us. John?

Every item of clothing is a ROBLOX asset–a ROBLOX asset can include a wide range of things, like shirts, pants, decals, and models. Each and every asset has a unique number attached to it–the famous Domino Crown, for example, has an asset ID of 31174270, while the Shiny Teeth face has an ID of 20722130. On a fundamental level, the look of your character is determined by a list of combined numbers–IDs of all the assets you are wearing.

We save these lists of numbers in our database, and use the numbers to generate a picture of what you look like. As soon as you make a change to your character, a dedicated farm of computers begins searching our archive of number-combinations to see if this particular combination of clothing items has ever been created. ROBLOX has rendered billions of clothing combinations over the years, and even still, there are more possible clothing combos then there are atoms in the universe, so our system is constantly thumbnailing new combinations.

Currently Wearing

There are more combinations of clothing then there are atoms in the universe.

These combinations of numbers are stored on Amazon S3. But what happens if you manage to put together a combination of clothing that we haven’t rendered yet? We’re constantly bringing out new items and shirts; what happens when we don’t have an instance of your dress-combination on file? A different conversation happens between our web server and our database.

When you create a new or completely unique clothing combination, our database tells our web server, “We’ve never made something like this before. Please render it and store it.” We have a default, standard, blank ROBLOX character model onto which we can load assets directly in full 3D space. So we render a single frame of the character, and save it to S3. We then store the new combination of numbers with our existing ones. This process usually takes a couple of seconds (you know, when you see the huge question mark) before the changes can be seen. We just wanted you to know what was going in those couple of seconds.

Our clothing thumbnail system was built for efficiency–you’d cringe if you knew how many users were altering or changing their look at any given moment (hint: check out the graphic below). We keep the experience snappy by working with a system that is constantly updating itself with newer combinations. One elegant aspect of our system is that a list of asset IDs and body limb colors is sufficient to describe any possible ROBLOX character.

Finally, here’s another random fun-fact: Did you know that when you’re making changes to your characters’ look, other users can actually watch it happen in real time? In other words, if someone were to visit your profile while you were changing clothing, they’d actually see your character transform into their new outfit.

152 thoughts on “What Happens When You Change Your Appearance on ROBLOX”

  3. AwsomeMANak26:Guys I agree; In fact, it would be much easier to create Mine craft than ROBLOX, the ROBLOX staff did a very, very, very, very impressive job, no one else could have done what you have, oh, and, a lot of people are quitting because you have to have Mac 10.6 to play. You could make more money if you let below 10.6 play.

    • Ya wow you guys and girls that make roblox are truly amazing! Most websites like this only have like 1 person working the clothes so it ALWAYS comes out wrong. With roblox it never comes out bad! =D

  5. WOW! You guys are truly amazing on what you design. Ever since I met ROBLOX I have loved it. Now, I think I love it even more.

  7. they say there are more combinations then there are atoms in the universe. you can be pretty sure that is not true rendering the size of the universe is so big that it is unknown to the human civalization how big it really is. for example there can be 1 billion germs on a needle point at one time which each contains 100`s of atoms. in other words they say billoins of combonations have been found but the amount of needle tips you could fit in the universe are so many you couldnt have writen the number down in 2012 years.

  9. I wish ROBLOX would use the normal ID, the assets are to advanced for A guy like me. And 30 TB?! I only have 469 Gigabytes of Disk space!

  11. The amount of thumbnails created yesterday… speaking of which, why can’t you guys bring back the old thumbnails where our characters had no bevels? That’d be a cool option for your profile…

  13. wow! thats ALOT! and whens the next BIG update gonna be? (im not saying this is an update) because i havent seen many changes lately and when are you gonna add the in-game character changer like on the blog last year?

  16. I’m amazed of what the staff of ROBLOX do. I’m shocked of how much effort they put into this,good job ROBLOX staff.

    • I agree; In fact, it would be much easier to create Mine craft than ROBLOX, the ROBLOX staff did a very, very, very, very impressive job, no one else could have done what you have, oh, and, a lot of people are quitting because you have to have Mac 10.6 to play. You could make more money if you let below 10.6 play.

  20. I read all the news things you guys put up, and I say this is the second coolest thing you guys put up here. The first is the water physics news.

  22. This site has gone from good to bad but to good again. The site is finally improving!

  26. Man, I remember when characters took a full minute to load after you changed them. I’m glad that things have changed and it only takes two or three seconds now.

  28. That’s really cool Roblox. I didn’t realize how much goes into changing a single outfit! The only thing I found hard to grasp was that you said there are more clothing combinations than there are atoms in the universe. Even though there are trillions upon trillions of different combinations (probably way more), I believe that would only result to the amount of atoms in a small amount of space. It seems like the entire universe would contain WAY more atoms than the amount of clothing combinations. Sorry for thinking too much into this, but great job anyways! Keep it up!

  29. Hmmm well this is very awesome to learn. Good job ROBLOX another thing you’ve taught us.

    AND NOW WE KNOW! :D :3

  32. How do you guys know how much were created yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or the day before yesterday’s yesterday and…?

  33. I see… Quite complicated, but easy to understand, for me at least. I’m only 10, and I understand!

  35. wow. more clothing combinations in roblox than there are atoms in the universe? UNBELIEVABLE!!

  36. Interesting system…. and 30TB? My, I don’t even want to imagine how many things total are, let alone the data’s total memory usage..

  41. Umm, I think that administrators should add hat shadows, because when I look awesome in the light, i’m bald. -_-

  43. People who are thinking that this is an update… It’s NOT an update!!! This has been happening for AGES!!!

    And WoW ROBLOX!!! I never knew that!!! (well.. I knew about the database thing…)

  47. Also a cool feature that the roblox team should do is add transparency/Reflectance/Material to the body.

    But have limits on the transparency, like .5 max.

    • agreed. so that we dont waste our money on those fake scam invisible shirts and stuff.

  48. Sometimes Roblox justs puts up stuff like this because they can’t find anything else…but it’s actually pretty interesting. I’ve never really given thought to what happens when you change your ROBLOXian’s clothes.

    p.s. it said for some reason that i was posting too many comments. I didn’t post any before this :P

  49. Roblox is so cool, it has inspired me. I am gonna go to college for graphic arts and make a game just like roblox :D

  51. Nice, never thought about this. I wanna know this because i might be a game designer when i’m older, so i like knowing this stuff.

  53. Wow. I love roblox and you guys have come up with the best ideas i’ve ever seen. But are you sure that much was made yesterday?

  55. Well, I love the fact that My ROBLOXian Don’t take to long to load unlike other websites that take 5 hours…

  56. Wow! I Cant Believe They Came Up With This! I Wonder What ROBLOX’s Next Update Will Be!

    Joserockguy223! :3

  59. Woah….. I knew that, but 3 377 907 Character Tumbnails were made YESTERDAY?
    Wow!
    I clap you, Roblox!