Building Lesson 003: Properties of a Brick

Welcome back to Imagination Tech’s Written Lessons for Building. Today we will learn about a function on Studio that is essential for building anything complex, or anything period. The Properties window may be already open on your roblox studio. If it is not, simply go to the View tab on the top, and click on Properties. You may notice I also have Explorer open. I will get to that in another episode. This lesson contains a lot of information so if you’re not ready, keep practicing the other skills we’ve learned so far.

Properties is a powerful tool when making a brick look and behave the way you want it. Every instance has its own set of properties. For example, when editing a brick you will see options regarding locking, form factor, etc. but when you edit a humanoid, you get options regarding things like walking speed, health, and much more. Today we will be looking at the brick properties (nearly the same for cylinder, sphere, wedge and corner wedge)

So first, if you select a brick, you will see sections. The first is all about the brick’s appearance. Here (instead of the Home tab or Model tab) You can edit the brick’s color and material. But something you can’t do without properties is change the transparency and reflectance of the brick. The transparency regards to how much light passes through (or see-through) the object is. It ranges from a scale of 0 to 1. 0 meaning completely visible and 1 being completely invisible.

Reflectance is how the light reflects the skybox (the background “sky” of the game. If you set it to 1, the brick looks like it could be a window looking out onto the skybox. If you set it to 0, you see no reflectance.

The next tool we can use in properties that we cannot use in the tabs is Position. Ok, so position can be altered with the move tool, but for precise movements, this can be helpful. Whenever you move a brick with 1/5th Stud on (see first lesson for more info), it moves a brick 0.2 studs at a time. Unfortunentally sometimes when you rotate an object or a group of objects it can shift them 0.1 studs on an axis, making it seemingly impossible to line them up. Here is an example:

As you can see from the picture, the bricks will either overlap or leave a gap. To fix this, we must go to the Position tool inside Properties. Let’s see what the coordinates are.

Now we remember from episode one that the red arrow on the move tool indicates the x axis. We also know (if you’ve taken a higher level math class) that the coordinates go in order of (x, y, z). We know that the brick was shifted 0.1 studs, so we expiriment and find out whether -197.0 or -197.2 is the solution to our problem.

After trying it out for ourselves, we know that making the x value -197.0 will make the gap close, connecting the two bricks. I don’t expect that you master this technique right away, but reread this section and experiment for yourself to get a good grasp on the concept.

Next is rotation. Like the Position tool, the Rotation tool can fine tune the rotation. Usually with 1/5th stud on, it rotates the brick every 15 degrees. With 1 stud it rotates every 45 degrees. With no limits, it doesn’t have any limits. It rotates every 0.001 studs, which is the smallest unit anything in roblox can travel whether it’s the size of a mesh to the change in distance of a brick.

If you scroll all the way down to the section labeled “Part” You will see two more tools that I wanna talk about before we go. There are still many to cover, but those are for another episode. One of which is the FormFactor. If anybody has ever wondered how to make a brick smaller than 1 by 1 by 1 studs, this is how. You click on the Form it is currently on, and switch it to Custom, that allows a limit of only 0.2 by 0.2 by 0.2 studs. Personally, this is the only Form I find helpful.

The final tool is size. Like the position tool, this changes the size of the brick in a fine-tuns sort of fashion. This can help with centering things. If you have a certain measurement of area you want your creation to be in, just make a part and change the size to that, lock it, and build on top of that. Re-scaling bricks also may involve re-shifting bricks because adding 0.2 to a brick adds 0.1 studs on each side from the center of that axis.

I hope this tutorial helped a lot. After this lesson you are ready to start building your first creation. Soon I will be releasing some scripting lessons to teach you how to edit bricks even further. Get building you guys! Next lesson we will talk about lights and how to illuminate your place.

-Domswolf