Changelog

VFX Loom 1.0 is the first public release: a node-based procedural VFX editor that runs inside Roblox Studio and exports finished effects straight into your place. Everything below ships in this version. Later releases will be numbered 1.1, 1.2 and so on.

Start with Getting Started.

Launch access

• Added a direct purchase flow that verifies the Roblox account before hosted checkout.
• Confirmed payment links VFX Loom access to the Roblox account verified during purchase.
• The full product remains one Local Plugin; the Creator Store StoreBridge is informational only and does not contain the editor.
• The 1.0 reference now covers all 62 production nodes with dedicated pages.

Editor

• Node graph canvas with pan, zoom, marquee selection, box-drag connections and Fit to frame the whole graph.
• Quick Actions, a floating column beside the canvas holding the actions used constantly — add a node, undo and redo, arrange, fit, group, ungroup, inspect, set output, and the Animation Editor.
• Groups: wrap a selection into a group, open it as its own scope, and step back out. Group boundary ports are derived from what is actually connected.
• Inspector for the selected node, with typed numeric fields, steppers, ranged readouts, colour swatches backed by a picker, and per-parameter animation controls.
• Node search that ranks exact names first, then prefixes, keywords, titles and descriptions, with socket compatibility used only as a tie-breaker.
• Set Output marks which image node the Preview and Export use, and it is undoable like any other edit.
• Full undo and redo across every document change. Selection, zoom, playback and panel state deliberately stay out of the history.
• Reference Image: a floating window that holds a Roblox image beside your work for visual reference. It never touches the graph, the preview or the project.

Nodes

• A production node library spanning Generators, Processing, Composite, Transform and Animation — noise, shapes, gradients, sprite sheets, blurs, colour grading, masks, morphology, warps, polar and coordinate mapping, vector and float maths, blending and layer compositing. See Nodes.
• Typed sockets: a connection is only offered where the types are compatible, and a connected input takes its value from the graph instead of the Inspector.
• Layered Composite nodes with per-layer blend mode and opacity.
• Projects load even when they contain a node type the build does not know: the unknown nodes are reported rather than silently dropped.

Animation

• Animation Editor: a keyframe timeline that floats over the graph, with a scrubbable ruler, tracks grouped by node, collapsible headings, zoom and pan.
• Keyframe any animatable parameter from the Inspector — scalars as one track, vectors and colours per channel.
• Select, marquee-select, drag, copy, paste and delete keyframes. A multi-key drag is one undo step per track.
• Curve editor on any keyframe, with eight interpolation presets — Hold, Linear, Smooth, In, Out, In-Out, Bounce and Elastic — and draggable tangent handles on smooth segments.
• Editing an animated parameter’s value writes a keyframe at the current frame instead of discarding the animation.
• Curve-valued parameters get their own shaping editor with add and remove point controls. See Animation.

Preview

• Live preview of the graph, updated in place as you work, with three view modes: Atlas for the whole sheet, Frame for detail, and Animated for playback.
• Transport controls — play, pause, stop, step, loop — plus a scrubbable timeline shared with the Animation Editor, and Space / arrow-key shortcuts.
• Expand opens a large preview using the same graph and playback state.
• Preview quality (Full, 75%, 50%, 25%) trades resolution for responsiveness while you work, and never affects what an export produces.
• Preview backgrounds — black, checkerboard or grey — for judging transparency.
• Progress is shown on the image itself while a render is in flight, spanning every pass rather than reaching 100% early.
• Any node can be inspected in the preview without changing the project’s output.

Export

• Export is built into VFX Loom. One Local Plugin, no second plugin to install and nothing to connect.
• Flipbook export renders every frame at full quality, packs them into one atlas, publishes it, and writes the complete flipbook configuration onto a ParticleEmitter — layout, grid, framerate and mode.
• Single Frame export renders one full-resolution frame, either applied to a selected object or published on its own as an image.
• Targets are resolved from your Explorer selection: a ParticleEmitter or Beam is updated in place, a Part or Attachment receives an emitter. Models, Folders and multi-selections are refused with the reason.
• VFX Loom only ever overwrites an emitter it created itself; emitters you made by hand are left alone, and the panel counts them before you commit.
• Determinate progress with a measured time estimate, and Cancel during the render — a cancelled export creates nothing at all.
• An incomplete render is refused rather than published, so a sheet with a missing frame never reaches your place.
• The result is selected in the Explorer and grouped as a single Studio undo step. See Export.

Projects and libraries

• Project manager for creating, opening, renaming, duplicating and deleting projects, with a starter project for a first run.
• Project settings own resolution, frame count, frame rate and padding, and refuse combinations that cannot be represented instead of silently changing them.
• Library of built-in local presets to open or import as a starting point.
• Community Library for browsing and searching shared presets, opening or importing them into your own project, and publishing your own.
• A built-in Getting Started guide, reachable from the toolbar.

Appearance

• Six appearance presets, chosen in Project Settings, applied live across the whole workspace.
• Quick Button scale (0.75×–1.25×) for the floating action column, so the controls can be sized to your monitor.
• Panels are responsive and stay inside the window: the editor is usable in a narrow docked widget as well as full screen, and floating windows can be moved and resized freely without escaping the canvas.

Performance and stability

• Lower memory pressure during animation and export, with a shared render budget that sheds recoverable memory before a large workload starts — and refuses clearly, up front, when one genuinely will not fit.
• The preview stands down while an export runs, so the two no longer compete for memory or for which frame is being rendered. The last preview image stays on screen throughout.
• Smarter caching between frames: parts of a graph that do not change over time are computed once and reused across the whole flipbook.
• Faster blur-heavy and mask-heavy effects, and lower allocation churn in the hot paths, so long editing sessions stay steadier.
• Rendering yields to Studio while it works. A heavy export no longer freezes the window, and the Cancel button stays live throughout.
• Exports render through their own full-quality path, so a slow preview setting can never quietly reduce the quality of what you publish.

Known limitations

• Community presets have no preview images in this release. Cards show their name and details, and open and import normally; preset previews are not currently delivered, and cards without one are laid out compactly rather than showing an empty box.
• Beams cannot use a flipbook. A Beam target requires Single Frame export; the panel refuses the combination rather than producing something that will not animate.
• Every export creates a new image asset. Roblox cannot version an image, so iterating on an effect leaves the earlier uploads on your account.
• A Studio beta feature is required to export. Enable File → Beta Features → CreateAssetAsync Lua API and restart Studio. Nothing else is needed — no HTTP, no API key, no external tool.
• Playback is unavailable while the preview is rendering. The transport greys out until the frames are ready.
• Bool and Enum parameters cannot be animated, and the alpha channel of a colour parameter has no keyframe track.
• The atlas is capped at 2048 pixels per axis, which bounds the combination of resolution and frame count a single effect can use.

Everything before 1.0 belongs to the earlier Founders build line. Those builds are not separately versioned here, and their notes described behaviour that 1.0 supersedes — most of it the export pipeline, which is now integrated into the plugin.

Release notes start at 1.0.