Do you enjoy playing Roblox? Have you ever wondered how to use Roblox Studio? This article explains the basics, but does not include Lua coding. I will write a separate article on Lua in the future.
Studio
First, you need to log in to your Roblox account. Go to the Create tab then click Create New Game. It will then prompt you to choose from available templates. If you want to make a game entirely from scratch, chose either Baseplate or Flat Terrain.
Just know that the Create tab may not be available on the mobile version of Roblox. From what I recall, it is on the computer versions of Roblox only.
How you Get Started
Once you have selected a template of either the baseplate or Flat Terrain, click the “Basic Settings” tab to give the game a name and description. Highlight and delete the defaulted name, and type in whatever name you want your game to be called. Give a description. It could involve your plans for the game, or something else. Then go to the “Access” tab and chose what platforms you want your game to be available for, and other things such as VIP server price. The available options are computer, phone, tablet and console. Then go to “Advanced Settings”. The “Advanced Settings” tab allows you to chose what kind of gear is allowed in the game, if any, as well as the allowed gear genre. You could even set something to allow people to copy your game, but I recommend leaving that off unless you want people to copy your game.
Then scroll down and click “Create Game”. Once you open up the game in roblox studio, you can begin making your game.
Part
With the part options, you can bring parts into the studio that you can edit and combine to make models. To add a part into the realm, you click the parts options then click from a few different part types. You can pick from block, sphere, wedge, or cylinder. Once you click one of the four options, the part of your chosen type is added into the studio, and you can move it around, rotate it, color it, and such as you please. Moving, rotating, and scaling an object is easy. You just need to have that object selected, pick what you would like to do with it, and click and drag on the colored gui of sorts that appears on the object, with moving its arrows, and with scaling and rotating its dots. The colors of the small guis are red, blue and green.
Terrain
The terrain tools allow you to make terrain of all kinds. The editor tool in the top area of the studio in the “Home” tab and the “Terrain Editor” option in the “View” tab both lead to the same thing, the terrain tools. The Terrain Editor area has three main options that appear when you open it. It opens on the “Create” tab. The “Create” tab has the options Generate, Import, and Clear. The Generate option produces random landscapes based off of variables you can change. You can change things such as the position/size of the generated terrain, the biomes within it, the size of the biomes, if caves will be generated or not, and the seed. Import lets you import heightmaps and colormaps, and Clear removes all the terrain within the world that you have open. The “Region” tab allows you to select, move, resize, rotate, copy, paste, delete and fill in terrain. The “Edit” tab allows you to add, subtract, grow, erode, smooth, flat, paint, and replace terrain. There is also an option called “Sea Level” within the “Edit” tab as well. You use the options in the edit tab by clicking anywhere on a grid that appears when you have an option selected. You click and hold and drag your mouse anywhere you want to add, subtract or do whatever to the terrain, based off of the selected option. Most of the edit tools have brush options, such as the terrain can be made in a circle, cube, or cylinder shape. You can also change the size of the brush. There is also a “pivot position” option as well as the option to change the material of the brush, and a couple toggle options which can allow or deny the tool to ignore water, and snap to the grid. Having the “Ignore Water” option on allows a terrain piece to be subtracted without the water being deleted as well, while “Snap to Grid” allows you to more easily create smooth looking terrain without it being messy and all upside down and sideways by snapping the terrain ‘brush’ to the grid. In the Explorer section in terrain you can edit colors of individual terrain materials by expanding the material colors small tab and entering the RGB color values you’d like for specific terrain options. You can turn on “Decoration” which adds animated grass in the grass terrain. The blades of grass are the same color as the grass terrain. When a region of terrain is selected, there is an option called “Merge Empty” which merges the terrain in a smooth way so there is no air in-between pieces of terrain. The grow tool fills in areas with terrain, which would be useful if you are trying to make hills, or smooth out unwanted gaps. The erode tool slowly removes terrain, which would be useful if you are attempting to create a cave, river, lake or canyon. The smooth tool lets you flatten terrain. The flatten tool has a few options within it. They are “Erode to Flat”, “Grow to Flat” and “Flatten All”. The Paint tool allows you to change the terrain. This could be useful for biome transitions in a world. Water has separate properties which can be customized as with the terrain options. The water options are “WaterColor”, “WaterReflectance”, “WaterTransparency”, “WaterWaveSize”, and “WaterWaveSpeed”. Be aware that some water properties are only visible when play testing or playing, so if you include water in your world, I’d suggest playtesting while working on your world.
Lighting
To do lighting we need something such as a torch. You’d need a model first, but here I’ll explain how to add fire and light. Fire is optional for lighting. It can be used for torches or campfires, etc. When you have a part selected, right click and select the option “Add Object”, search for “Fire” and click it. Doing so will make the object light on fire. The fire becomes a separate entity in the Explorer tab area. The numbers for heat and size can be changed. Lights can be added onto parts so they give off well, light. I personally recommend PointLights for in-game lighting, especially if you are making lamps. You can change the range, color and other things of the light to your needs.
Spawn Point/SpawnLocation
If you want the players of your game to spawn at a specific point in the world, I suggest you add a SpawnLocation. It’s pretty easy to do. First, you have to go to the “Model” tab at the top of the Roblox Studio page. Once you click on “Model” you then have to find a small area to the right of the Studio page and click the first option, which looks like a gear or cog. Then on the left of the Studio page, a tab appears where you can search for objects. You have to simply search “spawn” and the spawn point part will be visible in the available object choices. You should click on “SpawnLocation” and a spawn location object will be brought into the world. You can then move it anywhere you’d like. With the spawn point, I personally suggest moving it slightly below the terrain or environment so it does not look awkward. For example it would look weird with a spawn point in the middle of a forest. Even if the spawn point is visibly underground, the player character will still spawn as if it was above the ground.
Model
If you would like to make something into a useable model, you have to union then group the model. You have to highlight all the parts that are in your future model, right click, and click the union option. That makes all the parts become a single model. However you then have to group the model. You do that in a similar method to unioning, however you just select the group option instead of union. Once you union and group all the many parts of the model, you have to select the model (its usually named model by default, unless you named it something else) in the Explorer part of studio, then right click, and pick the option “Save to Roblox”. Then a popup appears, allowing you to name the model, give a description for it, and such. The creator is usually set to “me” by default and unless you are working on the game with someone else, that will be the only option. The genre option allows you to give your model a genre, however that is entirely optional to do, and the default genre for models is all. You can also toggle allow copying and allow comments. By default those are both off. If you don’t want people trolling in the comments of your models, I’d suggest you keep comments off. Once you are done, click submit to post your model to the model library. It can take time for it to upload, so be patient. Once it is done uploading, it gives a confirmation message along with the model ID, and a link to the page where the uploaded model is located. Click “Done” to close out of that pop-up and get back to the studio. If “Do Not Copy” is off, then the model will be offsale so other people that are not you cannot use it.
My Model Example
I created a model of an animal statue, so I started by clicking the part option, then selected cylinder. I selected the model by clicking on it then used the scale tool to make it large. I then did the same with two block models. I then pressed CTRL and selected both blocks, right clicked and clicked the negate option. I then selected the blocks and the cylinder and right clicked and clicked the union option. That deleted the blocks, and left the cylinder with a shape carved out of it. I added many more parts, and once my statue was done, I highlighted all of the parts that were in the statue, right clicked, and clicked the union option. That made all the parts become a single model. I then grouped the parts to make a complete model.
Remember to make sure that “CanCollide” is on in the part attributes or the object will just fall into the void instantly. When a part is anchored it can’t move, even if something such as gravity is against it. I’d say the anchored attribute is something that should be used for a statue model, or something else that you do not want to fall apart when someone attempts to touch it.
I truly enjoy playing Roblox. I hope this article helps you enjoy it more as well. My Roblox username is Greystokey, so please say Hello if you see me while playing.