Stepping up your building skill on ROBLOX

I often hear developers say they can program, make the most beautiful scripts, but not build. Completely mystified by how one turns “blocks” into beautiful sweeping meadows, or rumbling waterfalls, they give up.

I’m here — as someone who has been fortunate to find a love for both building and programming on Roblox— with a few observations of things that I think make a big difference in the level of aesthetics when it comes to building on Roblox.

Of course, there’s many techniques and things, but here are the most neglected concepts. Materials, colors, lighting, and plugins.

Materials and Color

The default place has an ugly color and no materials, but we are about to change that.

Welcome to the default place when you create a new file in ROBLOX Studio. It’s rather ugly . Why? Because in no world does one expect a grey void landscape peppered with studs. The first step is to make it green. Now we have two deviations here of style, in your opinion, which one looks better?

Two baseplates, one on the left is what I would have built 2 years ago, the one on the right is what I would use today

If you are like me, I would pick the one on the right. Why? Because it’s a more subdued color, and it uses a material — . To put it simply, when you are building on ROBLOX, rarely do you want a brick that has a “plastic” material — for few things in the real world are plastic. Furthermore, rarely do you want a bright color, subdued colors look much nicer and allow for the “pop” of leading elements in your gameplay. I would suggest — no, implore — that a majority of colors you use are subdued. The same goes for materials. Let’s look at another example:

Which wall do you prefer?

Above is a red brick wall. On the left, a classic bright-red and yellow design. on the right, nicer subdued colors, much better. We will leave the bright reds and yellows for interactive game elements, such as a capturable flag.

Use the right tools

So let us get to the real reason I believe people have trouble building— they are using tools that make building much more difficult. Take, for example, building a hill. How do we get perfectly aligned hills and parts, beautifully arranged? I for sure hope you are not using the ROBLOX building tools that come in default with studio — tools still being reengineered by ROBLOX. Our solution to getting the rotation and alignment comes right now from plugins.

Let’s take, for example, gap-fill, a plugin by Stravant. This plugin allows you to fill gaps between two bricks, a seemingly simple task that is complicated by the fact that we’re working with rectangular prisms. Let us take a look at our hill-building case-study. What I have done here is take a part, and using qCmdUtl (my own building plugin), rotated it. Then, I used the “select edge” tool (hold down alt) to rotate another part around the edge. You can see the resulting two pieces on the right. I am now about to fill in the gap with gap-fill in the image below.

You can see the result immediately below, the gap has been filled.

I want more. Using gap-fill, I finished out the curve. Then, I used my own tree plugin (sorry, this one isn’t available to the public yet), to generate a free trees. The power of plugins should be evident.

I just made a nice, smooth, hill, in about 3 minutes. You can see, by cloning segments and reusing parts, and then filling in the gap, I can easily extend my landscape in whatever direction I want. One big thing to note is that with landscape, angles should not be sharp. I have rotated, at most, five degrees. In fact, you will notice this is the default rotation ratio on qCmdUtl.

qCmdUtl is being used here to rotate one part around the edge. You can see the rotation increment is 5 degrees.

This creates a nice, but noticeable slope. For more direct jumps of slope, I suggest adding more contrast as one expects in real life— with a change in color. Grass does not grow sideways on cliffs. The effect is illustustrated below:

Notice once again, the use of materials and subdued colors in the cliff. More bright colors are used in the trees, which help to prevent the overwhelming of the player. This vendetta feels nicely built, but it lacks atmosphere. Which brings me to the biggest thing you can do in two minutes that will instantly change the aesthetics of your game.

Lighting

The base scene, without any tweaks in lighting

We draw our scene, scattered pine trees, and a small cliff against a bright blue sky. Standard. Boring. Let us changing the atmosphere of the game. Let’s add some fog, ambient color shift — an easily forgotten element — and a skybox. Below the effect is highlighted.

Lighting is beautiful, and you will notice the “best” built places always tweak the lighting.

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.

With the right tools, you will be find building more enjoyable and easier.

There are many more techniques when it comes to building on ROBLOX, some of these I am not even aware of until I carefully watch my building process. Watching someone build on a livestream is quite interesting and useful. Yet, in the end, it’s the practice that counts. Don’t stop. Keeping going.

Good luck, please share your creations with us, we love to see what you are making. This is Quenty, signing off.