Getting Your Shirt Right on Roblox
The shirt template is just a flat image. You upload it, Roblox stretches it over a character's torso mesh, and that's it. But getting the stretch to actually look right without your logo getting warped into something unrecognizable is where people fail.
The official template lives at
roblox.com/shirt-template. It's a 512x512 PNG with grid lines already drawn on it so you can see exactly which part of the image maps to which part of the body. Front panel, sleeves, back panel — all laid out flat. The torso section runs across the middle roughly from y=160 to y=350 depending on the character type. That's the zone that matters most.
I spent an afternoon once trying to put a detailed circuit board pattern on a shirt. Looked perfect on the flat template. Put it on a character in-game and the arms and sides of the torso stretched the traces into diagonal nonsense. My workaround was simple: I restricted the pattern to the front and back panels only (the two wide rectangles in the center), left the sleeve areas blank white, and added a thin border strip that could tolerate the warping at the edges. The result actually looks intentional rather than broken.
Roblox Download Shirt Template
Download the official one from the link above. Save it as a PNG. Don't convert it to JPG — Roblox will compress your details into mud. The template file has a specific structure: the left half is the front view, the right half is the back view. Within each half, the upper portion maps to the chest/shoulders and the lower portion maps to the waist. The vertical center line of each half is the spine or sternum seam. If your design has text, keep it within the central 300 pixels horizontally or it'll get cut off or mirrored weirdly.
There's also a second template for young avatar bodies. That one is smaller and proportionally different — the torso is shorter relative to the head. If you're targeting both age groups, design to the larger template and crop any critical detail from the bottom quarter before uploading for the young version.
Here's the thing most people don't figure out: the template grid is guidance, not a hard boundary. The actual UV mapping Roblox uses doesn't perfectly align with those grid lines. I learned this the hard way when I designed a symmetrical crest dead-center on the template and in-game it sat about fifteen pixels to the left on the character's actual chest. The fix was to open the template in GIMP, place a small marker dot at the exact center, design around it, then check it on a character model in Roblox Studio with a debug script before committing. You can't rely on the grid alone.
The technical workflow is: create your design at 512x512 pixels minimum. Keep critical content — logos, readable text, facial features — within a safe zone of x=100 to x=412 and y=180 to y=330. Colors should use the full sRGB gamut. No alpha transparency in the shirt texture itself; Roblox will render transparent pixels as black. If you need see-through elements, use a separate jacket or accessory item instead.
I've seen people try to upload high-resolution designs at 1024x1024 expecting better detail. It doesn't work. Roblox downsamples to 512x512 regardless, so you're just uploading a larger file that gets compressed anyway. Design at the target resolution from the start. Saves time and avoids the surprise of your crisp vector edges looking soft after the bake.
One more practical note: the template shows the shirt in a T-pose. Characters in-game animate. Their shirts stretch and compress during movement. A design that looks fine static might look distorted when the arms raise. Test on an actual animated avatar, not just the static template. I use a simple script that loops through walk, run, and jump animations while taking screenshots. Takes about ten minutes but catches things the flat view never will.
If you need more control over shirt appearance, the limitation is that Roblox shirts are single-texture items. You can't layer multiple shirt textures on top of each other. The workaround is to bake everything — shadows, highlights, folds, patterns — into one composite image at design time. It's more work upfront but it's the only way to get depth without relying on lighting which changes per environment.
