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Imagine that you are playing a racing game and that the car you will use is created by artificial intelligence. Or a sand battle where you quickly craft all your equipment and weapons. Centipede tank with four turrets? Flying a bat drone? Roblox is integrating a new CubePart AI model into its platform and game developer tools, which is to say Children and other players Generating objects in games that actually do things using moving parts.
CubePart AI, an open source AI model that Roblox has just published research on and will introduce as its platform, is an extension of the AI-generated 3D objects that Roblox introduced last year. But this time, the objects can have actual working parts that fit the physics of the game they’re in.
AI models for creating multi-part objects already exist, but Roblox says, in a new paper, that its model is better, promising to train on more objects than other models (2 million parts, half a million total assets) and the ability to label parts of objects using AI faster. The result may be things that actually work and can work in games using existing game engines.
AI-generated mobile tanks, robots, or watch skulls?
The modeling AI will work in Roblox Studio for developers, but will also be accessible to players in games that support it starting today.
“Our dream is for any two-person studio to be able to create a huge, complex game, but if you take it further, why aren’t more and more of our players becoming creators, even without having to open a full-scale studio product?” Anupam Singh, senior vice president of engineering at Roblox, told me in a Zoom chat.
Strange examples in a Roblox research paper of what could be made show how bizarre it is: “a floating surveillance unit housed inside a human skull,” with cameras, moving vertebrae, and a “sensor halo.” Or a “range weapon carved from a living elder tree” with enchanted berry ammo and a vine scene.
This won’t be isolated to some sandbox on the side somewhere – it’s something you’ll be able to bring directly into your in-game activity. “The trick we’ve found is that unless you incorporate it into a very interesting game, after a while it gets a bit boring,” says Singh. “You create an object, but then you need all the other gameplay elements surrounding it.”
Animatronic creations can’t be infinite—Singh says natural failure points would impose limits to keep things from getting too big—and they can’t deform and move quite like living creatures yet, so they’re reserved more for machines, suits, and vehicles than aliens and companions, though golem-like robots are possible.
More exemplary examples of multi-part 3D creatures, weapons, vehicles and other exotics created using the new AI model.
Where are the borders?
I saw signs Roblox’s generative AI ambitions Back in 2023, but the state of things in 2026 will be even stranger. Much of her vision is already possible. But it remains to be seen whether my kids or anyone else will want to do this. When I told my 13-year-old Roblox player all about the changes to the AI, he made an angry face and asked me “Why?” Parents may feel the same way.
While the possibilities are huge, Singh told me, the creation of any object will be moderated in the same way as AI-generated content was handled previously, and free-form AI creation will be included in games in which developers choose to include the new model — it’s not just a power you can call upon at any time. However, where will all these pieces take us, and will the AI costs associated with these generative tools be feasible in the long term without a subscription?
Generating the world is the next step
The new CubePart AI capabilities are another step towards increasingly realistic and automatically generated shared worlds. Roblox Reality, which will be released later this year or early 2027, aims to create games that run at 2K resolution and 60 frames per second using artificial intelligence – apparently a service It will have some subscription linked to it.
There’s also a more exotic initiative, called Game Cartridges, which aims to explore collaborative experiences in AI-generated worlds. Right now, generative AI is mostly a solo thing, not collaborative — and it’s still difficult to get generative AI to make changes to something that’s already been made.
Singh says the AI isn’t good enough yet to create world models that can remain stable enough for co-op or multiplayer play, but playable demos in Roblox Global Research Station Showing a sign of what’s to come: It’s similar to what Google is aiming for with it Genie 3 3D world building with generative AIwhich was launched in February.
The idea of generated worlds and quick creations gives me echoes of the metaverse, and for a company like Roblox that has essentially been its own metaverse, it makes me wonder when things like this might come to VR headsets like the Meta’s, or even augmented reality glasses.
“We don’t use the word metaverse anymore, but let’s think about what the metaverse is,” says Singh. “It’s a whole complex landscape that you can jump into and interact with.” “World Models are always single player. But what if (everyone) can be in the same world, and when the state of the world changes, I’ll be able to see it. This multiplayer collaboration is what will make World Models interesting.”
CubePart is just one piece in the Roblox AI animation puzzle, but Roblox isn’t the only company moving toward generative worlds. Instead, think of Roblox as the canary in the gaming industry’s mines. It’s where a lot of studios could go.
