The Actual Pipeline
A Dynamic Head UGC for Roblox is a single mesh package that separates facial features into distinct components — usually the jaw, upper eyelids, lower eyelids, and sometimes the tongue or cheeks — each bound to its own bone or morph target so they move independently when animation data drives them. The trick is that Roblox's UGC system expects a very specific hierarchy and file format, and if you mess up the naming convention or the bone assignments, the head simply won't rigger correctly in Studio. It's not complicated once you've done it three or four times, but the documentation is scattered across devforum posts from different years and the export settings in Blender and Maya don't always agree with each other. I use Blender. It's free and it handles the rigging well enough if you're patient. Start by modeling a standard Roblox head base mesh — you can pull the template from the Roblox plugin or just export one from an existing head model. The base needs to be a clean quad mesh with no ngons and a subdivision surface modifier that you apply before export. UV unwrap it. Texture it however you want, though remember that UGC items have a texture size limit of 1024x1024 unless you're working within certain premium tiers. Now comes the important part: separate out the jaw, eyelids, and any other moving pieces as distinct meshes under the same object, not as child objects in the scene hierarchy. They need to share the same origin point as the base head.
Roblox How To Make A Dynamic Head Ugc
Once your pieces are separated, you bind them to a Rig. In Blender, add a Rigify rig or build a simple custom rig with bones named exactly how Roblox expects them. The critical bone names are jaw, eyelid_top_L, eyelid_top_R, eyelid_bottom_L, eyelid_bottom_R, and tongue if you're doing one. These have to match Roblox's expected skeleton, otherwise the UGC system won't recognize the animation mappings. Parent each moving mesh piece to its corresponding bone using Vertex Groups, not armature modifiers alone. You can use a Shrinkwrap modifier to preview how the jaw follows the face, but the actual binding happens through vertex weight painting. Here's where I ran into a problem that cost me about two hours last month: I exported my mesh with the Armature modifier still active instead of applying it, and Roblox's UGC uploader accepted the file without error but the jaw bone was completely disconnected from the mesh geometry. The head loaded fine in the catalog preview but had zero articulation. The fix was straightforward — go into Object Mode, select your mesh, and apply the Armature modifier before exporting. Also make sure your vertex groups are named identically to the bone names. Case sensitive. Export as FBX. Use these settings: include selected objects only, apply modifiers, check armature, use default rest pose, and set the forward axis to -Z forward and up axis to Y up. That's the Blender-to-Roblox convention. Import into Roblox Studio using the UGC plugin. The plugin will validate your rig and tell you if anything is misconfigured. If it says your bones don't match the expected skeleton, double-check every single name spelling. One typo and the whole thing breaks.
There are limitations you should know about. Dynamic heads can only have a certain number of bones and vertex groups before the UGC approval process rejects them or they perform poorly in-game. I've seen heads get flagged for having too many separate mesh pieces — keep it to the minimum that actually looks good. The jaw and eyelids are usually enough. Extra geometry like cheeks or eyebrows adds complexity without much visual return and increases your chance of a rigging error. Another gotcha: dynamic heads don't animate on their own in a player's inventory or catalog page. They only move when another script or animation triggers them. If you're making a dynamic head for a game that requires idle animations, you'll need to pair it with an AnimationController or a LocalScript that reads from the player's emoticon or animation library. Not every use case works out of the box. If Blender isn't your thing, Maya works too but the bone naming convention is just as strict and the FBX export has more options that can silently break things if you pick the wrong ones. ZBrush doesn't support rigging natively so you'd need to retopologize and rig in a separate application anyway. There's no shortcut around learning the actual pipeline.
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