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Roblox introduced its Roblox Cube AI tools, the core generative AI system for building 3D objects and scenes in time for the Game Developers Conference.
And the company said that this week it is open sourcing the first release of its 3D foundational model for GenAI dubbed Cube 3D. Anyone can use Cube 3D on or off the Roblox platform, said Roblox execs Anupam Singh and Nick Tornow in a blog post.
Last fall, Roblox announced the ambitious project to build an open-source 3D foundational model to
create 3D objects and scenes on Roblox. Now it’s followed up with Cube 3D’s release.
Cube will underpin many of the AI tools Roblox will develop in the years to come, including highly complex scene-generation tools. It will ultimately be a multimodal model, trained on text, images, video, and other types of input—and will integrate with our existing AI creation tools.
More details on Cube 3D
Cube 3D generates 3D models and environments directly from text and, in the future, image inputs. Today, state-of-the-art 3D generation uses images and a reconstruction approach to build 3D objects. This is a good option when there isn’t sufficient 3D training data.
However, thanks to the nature of Roblox’s platform, the company trains on native 3D data. The generated object is fully compatible with game engines today and can be extended to make objects functional. The difference here is similar to a racetrack movie set.
On TV, you might see what looks like a fully functional racetrack, with stands, garages, and a victory lane. But if you were to walk around on that set, you’d quickly realize that the structures were actually flat. Building a truly immersive 3D world requires complete, functional structures, with garages you can drive into, stands you can sit in, and a victory lane with a functional podium.
To achieve this, Roblox has taken inspiration from state-of-the-art models trained on text tokens (or sets of characters) so they can predict the next token to form a sentence. The innovation builds on the same core idea. Roblox has built the ability to tokenize 3D objects and understand shapes as tokens and trained Cube 3D to predict the next shape token to build a complete 3D object.
When Roblox extends this to full scene generation, Cube 3D then predicts the layout and recursively predicts the shape to complete that layout.
Anyone can fine-tune, develop plug-ins for, or train Cube 3D on their own data to suit their needs. Roblox believes that AI tools should be built on openness and transparency, which is why the company said it is a committed partner in the open-source AI community.
Roblox released one of its AI safety models because it believes sharing advancements in AI safety helps the entire industry accelerate innovation and technical advancements. For this reason, the company also helped found ROOST, a new nonprofit dedicated to tackling important areas in digital safety with open-source safety tools. In open-sourcing Cube 3D, the goal is to enable researchers, developers, and the broader AI community to learn, augment, and advance 3D generation industry-wide.
Cube 3D for Creation
Roblox previously talked about how AI can accelerate the creation of 3D assets, accessories, and experiences. Ultimately AI will enable even more immersive and personalized play and connections, the company said.
“We invest in infrastructure to support AI at every stage of the creation cycle—for both the developers of these experiences and the users who spend time in them. We envision a future where developers will give their users new ways to create by enabling AI in their experiences. This puts the power of AI in the hands of more than 85 million daily active users as part of their gameplay,” the post said.
In the past year, Roblox introduced several new features through our AI-powered Assistant within Roblox Studio to provide developers with the tools and capabilities they need to create and eliminate hours of manual work. With Cube, we intend to make 3D creation more efficient. With 3D mesh generation, developers can quickly explore new creative directions and increase their productivity by deciding rapidly which to move forward with.
Imagine building a racetrack game. Today, you could use the Mesh Generation API within Assistant by typing in a quick prompt, like “/generate a motorcycle” or “/generate orange safety cone.” Within seconds, the API would generate a mesh version of these objects. They could then be fleshed out with texture, color, etc.
With this API, developers can model props or design their space much faster—no need to spend hours modeling simple objects. It lets devs focus on the fun stuff, like designing the track layout and fine-tuning the car handling. This API saves hours on each object created and gives you back that time to experiment with new ideas without worrying about spending too much time or effort. Longer term, Roblox plans to enable more complex and functional objects, even scenes.
This technology extends to the tens of millions of creative people who play and connect on Roblox every day. Roblox sees a future where developers enable their users to become creators using AI. With the Mesh Generation API enabled, players can bring to life anything they can imagine. If a player wants a futuristic car, they can just type “red car of the future with side wings” or “black leather motorcycle jacket” and see it generated. This kind of in-game AI generation is going to unlock a whole new level of creativity. Players can personalize their experience in ways developers never imagined, and that’s going to make their games even more engaging.
Under the Hood: Cross Attention Between 3D and Text/Image Tokens
The key technical challenge was to connect text and images with 3D shapes. The core technical breakthrough is 3D tokenization, which allows us to represent 3D objects as tokens in the same way that text can be represented as tokens. This gives us the ability to predict the next shape just as language models predict the next word in a sentence.
To achieve 3D generation, Roblox designed a unified architecture for autoregressive generation of single object, shape completion, and multiobject/scene layout generation. Autoregressive transformers are neural networks that use previous inputs to predict the next component. This architecture provides both scalability and multimodal compatibility so that as Roblox expands the model, it will work with many different kinds of input (text, visual, audio, and 3D). Roblox is open-sourcing this model. In this initial stage, creators will be able to generate 3D objects based on text prompts. Down the road, Roblox intends for creators to be able to generate entire scenes based on multimodal inputs.
To train a generative pretrained transformer (GPT) for shape generation, Roblox uses discrete 3D shape tokens and align them with text prompts. This novel approach sets us up for the world of 3D scene generation that’s playable.
Where Cube Is Heading
Today, much of the world uses AI for text, to predict words in a sentence. Many also use it for images, to predict pixels. This gets much more complex when creating scenes, where all of these elements come together and need to work in context with one another. For example, imagine an experience with a simple scene that can be described as “an avatar on a motorcycle in front of a racetrack with trees.”
Many elements go into building this experience. The trees are a combination of two 3D meshes, the motorcycle is a dense mesh with details and triangles, and the buildings are made up of Roblox parts. The avatar on the motorbike has more complex geometric features for its body, limbs, and head. Finally, Roblox needs a way to tie it all together with a layout. For that, the company needs bounding boxes, which outline an object to define its size and location, to know how to arrange this geometry. This is a painstaking process, but AI is capable of helping with each step. With AI, creators can get to the first version faster and have more time to test new ideas or refine their scene.
When Roblox gets there, it wants the 3D objects and scenes created to be fully functional. It calls this 4D creation, where the fourth dimension is interaction between objects, environments, and people. Achieving this requires the ability not only to build immersive 3D objects and scenes, but also to understand the contexts and relationships between those objects. This is where Roblox is heading with Cube.
Beyond this first use case of mesh generation, Roblox plans to extend to scene generation and understanding. The company will be able to serve users the experiences they’re most interested in and to
augment scenes by adding objects in context. For example, in an experience with a forest scene, a developer could ask Assistant to replace all the lush green leaves on the trees with fall foliage to indicate the change of season.
The AI Assistant tools react to requests from the developer, helping them rapidly create, adapt, and scale their experiences. Roblox will share updates and new functionality as it continues improving and expanding the foundational model. The Cube 3D model will be available later this week.
More news
Meanwhile, Roblox said it also has updates to Roblox Studio’s performance and reliability, UI, and Asset Manager, several new APIs, and a more personalized homepage.
Roblox believes developer teams of any size can produce some of the biggest games on the platform because it provides the tools to publish once to almost any device, anywhere in the world.
At last year’s Roblox Developers Conference (RDC), the company announced its overarching goal: to have 10% of all gaming market content revenue flow through Roblox and be distributed within the creator community. To achieve that, Roblox said it is committed to giving developers creation, discovery, and monetization tools that make it easy for them to start and build businesses on the platform.
Last year, creators on Roblox earned $923 million, up 25% from $741 million in 2023. The number of daily active users on Roblox grew 21% in 2024, while the gaming industry grew at a single-digit pace in the same time frame.
During the fourth quarter of 2024, 85.3 million daily active users spent an average of 2.4 hours a day immersed in games, shared experiences, and more. There’s a clear trend of players coming to Roblox over any other platform, and this is an enormous opportunity for creators to build quickly and find new audiences of active and engaged players, the company said.
Streamlining Roblox Studio for Creators
For creators big and small, Roblox Studio is the 3D immersive content creation ecosystem and engine. And at GDC, the company is rolling out new features.
It is dramatically improving Roblox Studio’s performance and reliability. This includes improvements to Explorer, which the company has rebuilt in Luau with a more performant architecture. Developers can now manage thousands of Explorer instances without slowdowns.
Roblox is also making Studio even easier to use with an updated UI and the ability to customize toolbars. It is upgrading Studio’s Asset Manager with unified asset management, improved search and filtering, and increased performance and stability.
To enable quick and efficient communication between developers, the company is making it possible for developers to collaborate in real time by leaving comments and annotations for one another. AI powers many of the tools provided to Roblox creators to build their games and quickly explore new creative directions. At GDC, it is announcing several new tools that showcase how AI can make things even easier for them.
Roblox is unveiling its text generation API, which lets creators offer interactive possibilities in their experiences. And it is announcing a real-time translation API, which automatically translates in-experience text.
And Roblox will be updating its open-source voice safety classifier in the coming weeks to detect policy violations in several additional languages.
During one of Roblox’s GDC sessions, principal engineer Peter McNeill will demonstrate Studio’s
new look and collaboration tools as he builds and publishes a new game. Attendees will see how quickly creators can advance from a concept to a published multiplayer game on every major platform.
Connecting Millions of Users Through Experiences
The goal for discovery was to surface, in a fair way, more diverse content on the homepage, making it easier for people to find their next favorite experience. At RDC, Roblox said it was commited to open and transparent insight into its algorithm. That includes what the company values, how it rewards attributes that drive distribution, and how developers’ experiences are performing against those attributes. Thanks to these changes, the company has seen more experiences breaking into the top 100. The firm plans to continue evolving these discovery systems to feature more games in the homepage sorts, search results, and recommendations.
More than 90% of Roblox traffic originates from the homepage. To help players find the experiences and connections most relevant to their interests, the company is making the homepage even more dynamic and personalized. Earlier this year, the company introduced dynamic ranking, which means the “People You May Know” and “Continue” sorts will be dynamically positioned on the page based on how the user engages with them.
Roblox also rolled out the “Recently Visited” sort in search results so players can quickly return to experiences they enjoy.
In the coming weeks, Roblox will roll out the full release of the Friend Referral Program, which enables developers to create a program within their experience that rewards existing players for inviting new players to their experience, using referral links. They can also create in-experience rewards, such as a custom badge or in-game currency. Roblox has seen that those who play with their friends are more likely to spend additional time in creators’ games. In fact, the company found that co-play sessions are typically 1.9 times longer than solo sessions.
“Making a hit game doesn’t require expensive marketing or tech licenses or lengthy development lifecycles. It takes focusing on creating experiences that are simple and fun to play with your friends,” said Janzen Madsen, CEO of Splitting Point Studios, who’s speaking Thursday at GDC, in a statement. “When we launched a dusty trip, the automatic thumbnail personalization function, part of homepage discovery, really helped us find our audience, and we’re now at over a billion plays with no signs of slowing down.”
Roblox’s Ads Manager gives creators another way to drive growth and reach more players through sponsored experiences, search ads, and more. In the coming weeks, Roblox is introducing significant, long-requested upgrades to the product, including engaging ad units, improved performance, and simplified setup and ROI-focused reporting.
With the powerful creation and discovery tools we provide, developers have the opportunity to transform their ideas into growing businesses, Roblox said. And it’s not just the highest level of earners who have success on Roblox. In 2024, the top 1,000 developers on Roblox made an average of $820,000, up 570% since 2019. The top 10 developers made an average of $33.9 million, and the top 100 earned an average of $6 million—up 450% and 500%, respectively, since 2019.
The Roblox economy allows creators to increase their earnings by minimizing costs and providing monetization tools for studios of every size. From server architecture to distribution to moderation, the company has creators covered. Instead of spending hours figuring out complicated systems, they can invest more of their time building great games. And they can monetize them in ways that make the most sense for their game and player base.
Roblox is also providing creators with more ways to earn. Roblox Rewarded Video Ads are currently live in beta within select experiences, and it be rolling them out to more creators in the second quarter of this year. This will enable creators to offer their users more value at critical points within their game while also creating high-performance ads for brands. Roblox expects this combination to drive higher earnings while making the experiences themselves more likely to power engagement.
The company is also launching a way for experience creators to sell in-game currency, boosts, items, and
other developer products on their experience details pages. This makes it easier for creators to offer their items outside of their experiences, in other areas of the Roblox platform.
Roblox Assistant update
Since launching Roblox Assistant last December, the company has been expanding its capabilities, and improving its performance. Roblox said it is committed to making it a useful resource in Studio with devs in the driver’s seat, designed to accelerate productivity.
Devs should feel in control of what Assistant is doing in their games at all times, and be adjustable if it has made an error. With this in mind, devs can now review the changes that it makes to scripts before they’re applied, undo/redo changes that Assistant makes with the standard cmd+z /cmd+shift+z hotkeys, and edit previous prompts.
Additionally, Assistant now has a script debugging capability. It’ll run a root cause analysis and attempt to identify problem areas with a dev’s code, provide recommended changes or point the dev in the right direction of why code may be failing. There’s more updates coming.
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