The Actual Process
You open Roblox Studio, go to the Toolbox, and create a new shirt asset. The system generates a blank 512x512 template for you. This is where you paint your design. The template layout is non-obvious at first glance — there's a front torso panel, a back panel, two sleeves, and two legs, all laid out in a way that doesn't match how a flat garment would look. Spend ten minutes orienting yourself on the template before you do anything else. It saves a lot of frustration later. Create the asset in Studio. Download the default shirt template. Open it in your editor of choice — Photoshop, GIMP, even Krita works fine. Paint your design onto the template, keeping in mind that each body part maps to a specific region. Save as a JPEG or PNG. Go back to Roblox, open the asset page, click the "Upload" button next to the shirt icon, and select your file. It costs 5 Robux. You're done. That last sentence makes it sound easy. It is, mostly. The hard part is the template itself and understanding how the texture wraps.
What Beginners Get Wrong
The first thing I see people mess up is treating the template like a flat rectangle. It isn't. The UV mapping distorts certain areas. The shoulder caps get stretched. The sleeve cuffs compress. If you place a pattern or gradient across the template without accounting for these distortions, it will look wrong when it's on a character. Test early. Put the shirt on a dummy avatar in Studio and rotate the view. Don't wait until after you've spent hours detailing the chest panel only to realize the shoulders are completely misaligned. Another thing nobody tells you: the template's transparent areas are actually important. If you leave body parts transparent, they show the underlying clothing or base color. If you accidentally fill a transparent area, it covers it up. I've seen people spend forty-five minutes debugging why their pants looked like a solid block of color when they had painted over the leg sections by mistake. The template has little gray guides in the empty areas. Those are your boundaries. Don't cross them unless you mean to.
Color Space Issues
Work in sRGB. If you're coming from a print background and your project is in CMYK, the colors will shift unpredictably when you upload. Roblox converts to sRGB on import, but the conversion from CMYK is lossy and inconsistent. I learned this the hard way with a dark navy shirt that came out looking almost black after upload. Swapped to sRGB and rebuilt it. Took thirty minutes instead of three hours of rework. Also, avoid pure #000000 black and #FFFFFF white on the edges of your design. The Roblox rendering pipeline handles anti-aliasing poorly against those extremes, and you'll get halos around your pattern. Slightly off-black like #0A0A0A and slightly off-white like #F5F5F5 look the same to the human eye and render cleanly.
Get the Full Details
Pattern Repetition Problems
I ran into a specific issue a while back with a pinstripe pattern. I designed it on a plain shirt template, uploaded it, and when I previewed it on an avatar, the stripes were offset at the seam between the front and back torso panels. The UV seams don't align linearly. My workaround was to generate a slightly different stripe phase on the back panel so that when the seams met on the 3D model, the pattern looked continuous. It's a tedious manual fix. You have to eyeball it by rotating the avatar in Studio and checking each seam individually. There's no automated tool for this. The 512x512 resolution is tight. If you're doing anything with fine text, small logos, or intricate details, it will blur at a distance. The engine samples the texture at something less than native resolution for performance reasons on mobile devices. Keep text larger than 32 pixels on the template. Everything smaller becomes legible noise. If your design depends on crisp detail, consider whether a shirt is the right format, or if you'd be better off using a decal on a custom mesh instead. Shirts are for broad color blocks, gradients, and simple repeating patterns. They were never meant for high-fidelity artwork. The upload also has a file size limit of 10MB. You won't hit that with a standard 512x512 JPEG, but if you're exporting from Photoshop with layers or metadata embedded, it can creep up. Strip the metadata before uploading. Flatten the image. Export clean. Takes five seconds and avoids unnecessary rejection.
Template Updates
Roblox occasionally changes the shirt template layout. This happened fairly recently and broke a bunch of older custom shirts until people re-mapped them. Always check the Roblox Creator Documentation before starting a new project, and if you have an existing shirt you want to update, re-download the template first. Don't assume the one you have in your folder is current. The asset page has the latest version. It's free and it takes ten seconds to check.
