Effects, and finishes

1.2.1 is out for macOS and Windows. It is the biggest update since launch, and it is really two things: your pet can have particle effects now, and a painted pet can be gold.

Effects

There is a third mode next to Build and Paint. Pick an effect from the library, put it on any part, and it plays on the pet while you work — fire, frost, light, dark, magic, nature, space, and a category called Other that is mostly the ones I could not file anywhere else.

Four dials do the tuning: Size, Speed, Amount and Chaos. That is deliberate. A Roblox particle emitter has a long list of properties, most of which you only want to touch once you already know what the rest of them do. Each of the four moves a group of them together, in a way that keeps the effect looking like itself. An Advanced switch opens the underlying values when you want them.

Each effect is a stack of layers — a halo, a ring, some dust — and each layer can be recoloured on its own. That is where the good ones come from: take Deep Space, pull its colour to your game’s palette, and it stops looking like a preset.

The library is not in the download. It streams from the same place the parts and faces come from, so effects arrive without you reinstalling anything.

It arrives in Studio as real particles, not a video and not a trick. The bundled plugin now applies the effect when it assembles the pet, and the setup script carries its own copy if you prefer pasting that. Restart Studio once after updating the app so it picks up the newer plugin.

Finishes

Paint your pet, then pick Golden, Diamond, or a colour of your own. The finish reads your artwork and fits itself to it, rather than painting a flat metal over the top — so the shape you painted still shows through the gold.

Tone is contrast: left is flat, right pushes the darks and lights apart. Re-fit re-measures the pet after you have made a big colour change. And the Flat view shows you the exact colour that will land in Roblox, with no lighting in the way.

Also

The Paint panel was redesigned — every setting is a name beside its control now, with the explanation in a tooltip instead of a paragraph you read once and then scroll past forever. Undo in paint mode always steps back through your most recent change first, which sounds obvious and was not true before. And there is an x-ray Wireframe view, which exists for one reason: an effect that plays inside a part is invisible otherwise.

There is no 1.2.0

I built 1.2.0 three times in one day and signed two of them. Each time I tested it I found one more thing worth fixing before anyone downloaded it — the last two being a finish that did not show in the Flat view, and a switch whose unselected half sat in a grey box it should never have had. So the first version you can download is 1.2.1, and the two builds nobody ever saw are in the release ledger where they belong.

The Flat one is worth saying out loud, because it was not only cosmetic: while painting in that view, the app could have baked the finish into the artwork itself. Finishes are new in this release, so nothing that ever shipped carried it — but it is exactly the kind of bug that is silent, permanent and discovered weeks later by someone who cannot explain why their pet keeps getting shinier.