Highlighting objects

The Highlight instance is a visual effect which you can use to call attention to a specific object within a game. Every highlight effect has a silhouette outline that surrounds the object and a solid overlay interior that displays over the object. You can customize both of these components independently to modify the highlight's visual appearance.

Useful applications of the highlight effect include:

• Providing visual feedback that an object is important and/or interactable.
• Making distant objects visible through objects that are closer to the user.
• Indicating the current position and status of other characters.

Add highlights#

As a performance limit, Studio only displays 255 simultaneous Highlight instances on the client-side at a time. If you add more than this limit, the additional Highlight instances are silently ignored.

Note also that highlights on low-end devices may be more pixelated but will otherwise look the same as on other devices with any combination of settings.

Parent to objects#

To add a highlight effect to an object, you can parent a new Highlight directly to the object.

1. In the Explorer window, hover over either a Model or a BasePart, then click the ⊕ button. A contextual menu displays.

2. From the menu, insert a Highlight. The highlight displays on the object with its default property values that create a white outline and a red tint overlay.

   

Set the adornee#

Alternatively, you can place the Highlight instance outside of a child/parent relationship either within the workspace, StarterPlayer, StarterGui, StarterPack, or ReplicatedStorage, then set its Adornee property to the Model or BasePart that you want to highlight.

Customize highlights#

You can change the properties of a Highlight instance to create interesting visual effects that properly highlight objects in theme with your game.

OutlineColor#

The OutlineColor property sets the Color3 value of the highlight's outline.

OutlineTransparency#

The OutlineTransparency property sets the visibility of the highlight's outline to any value between the default value of 0 (opaque) and 1 (invisible).

FillColor#

The FillColor property sets the Color3 value of the highlight's interior.

FillTransparency#

The FillTransparency property sets the visibility of the highlight's interior to any value between the default value of 0 (opaque) and 1 (invisible). You can use this property to determine how much of the object's existing color you want viewers to see.

DepthMode#

The DepthMode property controls how the effect displays with respect to other objects in the world.

• AlwaysOnTop — Allows the highlight to display regardless if there are objects between the camera and the highlighted object. This means the viewer is always able to see the highlight regardless of what is between the highlighted object and the camera.

• Occluded — Hides the highlight if there are objects between the camera and the highlighted object. This means the viewer is only able to see the object if there are no obstructing objects between the highlighted object and the camera's view.

Enabled#

The Enabled property allows you to quickly enable or disable the highlight without any impact on performance.

Performance tips#

While you have a lot of options to customize Highlight instances, the following tips are recommended to increase your game's performance on all devices:

• Adding or removing a Highlight can cause a geometry rebuilding step that might lead to performance spikes and extra draw calls. If you want to change a Highlight instance's appearance or temporarily hide/display it on an object, it's best to customize the properties of the Highlight instance directly, as changing any property of the Highlight instance is lightweight and doesn't impact performance.

• Roblox draws objects in a back to front order, which can cause problems if you embed objects with a child Highlight inside other objects that also have children Highlight instances. For this reason, it's best to keep objects with Highlight instances outside of a parent/child relationship with other objects with Highlight instances.

• The first Highlight rendered on the screen incurs most of the performance cost (up to 1 millisecond of GPU time on mobile devices). For additional highlights beyond the first, you should not see a significant performance impact on any platform.

• On mobile devices, highlights are more costly on performance when they cover more of the screen. On other platforms, highlights have the same performance cost regardless of their screen coverage.

• On all platforms, highlights that are not visible on the screen (whether disabled or fully transparent) incur no performance cost.