Layered accessories: a single mesh, 4k triangles and two cages
Layered clothing has to stretch over any body, and that explains every requirement: one single mesh, a ceiling of 4 thousand triangles, watertight, with an R15 armature and an inner and outer cage.
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A layered accessory is the most demanding thing you can submit to the Roblox Marketplace, and the list of requirements looks arbitrary until you understand what it has to do.
The sentence that explains everything is on the first line of the specification: it has to stretch and fit on character bodies. Not on a body — on any body, of any proportion, with any other clothing above and below. Every requirement on the list exists to support that.
The problem
The official definition: a layered accessory requires a specific set of components and configuration standards so it can stretch and fit on character bodies, plus performance and quality optimisations.
And the documentation gives a process warning right afterwards, worth taking seriously: since a good part of those requirements has to be applied while you model in your third-party program, it is important to review the specifications early and often during the work.
That is not generic advice. Topology and cage requirements are not the kind of thing you fix at the end — redoing the mesh after texturing throws the texture away with it. The specification is a design constraint, not an exit check.
Step by step
1. Geometry. Five requirements, and the first two are usually what eliminates the model.
- Single mesh. The accessory has to be one single mesh, not a set of objects. A jacket with separate buttons, a dress with a belt as its own object — all of it has to become one thing.
- A ceiling of 4 thousand triangles.
- Watertight, with no exposed holes or inverted faces.
- Quads wherever possible.
- No face with five or more sides.
The last two go together and are usually the result of a boolean operation or careless extrusion. It is worth checking while the mesh is still simple.
2. Size. The mesh has a maximum size in studs, centred on the attachment point, according to the type. T-shirt, shirt, sweater, jacket, pants, shorts, dress and skirt fit inside a cube of 8 studs. Eyebrows and eyelashes have a much smaller limit: 1.5 by 0.5 by 0.5.
The detail that matters is the "centred on the attachment point". It is not the size of the piece in a vacuum — it is the size of the box around the attachment. A piece displaced from the origin blows the limit without looking large.
3. Texture. A layered accessory texture for the Marketplace cannot exceed 2048 by 2048.
And there is one piece of information that saves work: a high resolution texture is converted automatically to a lower resolution, to optimise performance. Meaning that painting at an enormous resolution and uploading it does not deliver more quality to the player — it delivers the same result after the conversion.
4. The two requirements that define "layered". This is the part that separates a layered accessory from a rigid one, and there are two:
- It has to be weighted and bound to an R15 armature.
- It has to contain an inner mesh cage and an outer one.
Without both, what you have may well be an accessory — but a rigid one. The practical difference is visible: a rigid piece pokes through whatever is underneath it, while a layered piece settles over it.
5. Attachment. Each layered accessory requires at least one attachment point on the associated body part, and its name has to follow a specific convention according to the AccessoryType.
The good news is that Studio's Accessory Fitting Tool adds and configures the appropriate attachment automatically, with the right name. The name table, in the artifact, is for whoever configures it by hand — and it is worth having nearby even when using the tool, to check.
The two most used cases: layered upper pieces use BodyFrontAttachment; lower pieces use WaistCenterAttachment.
There is also an importer shortcut: it recognises mesh objects as attachment points when they carry a particular suffix in the name — which only applies when importing meshes with cage data, such as layered accessories and character bodies.
6. Understand what each limit protects. It is worth reading the list a second time with the question "why does this exist?", because the answers change how you model.
The triangle and texture ceilings exist because an avatar may be wearing several layered pieces at the same time, on servers with dozens of avatars, on modest devices. The cost is not your item alone — it is your item multiplied.
The single mesh and the watertightness exist because deformation through the cage needs a closed, coherent surface to work; a hole or an inverted face produces a visual artefact precisely at moments of greatest deformation, which is when the character moves.
And the size limit in studs exists because the piece has to fit in the space that attachment point reserves, on any body — including the shortest ones.
The artifact
The document below is the specification in checklist form, with the complete table of attachment names by accessory type.
It is organised in the order things break: geometry first, because it is what forces a redo; then size, texture, the two layering requirements, and the name table.
At the end there is a note on what the attachment does beyond positioning, which is the subject of the common mistakes.
It is worth reserving a fixed place in your workflow to check the triangle count, because it is the only requirement on the list that grows by itself while you work. Watertightness and single mesh are states that hold; the count climbs with every detail added, and anyone who only checks at the end discovers the overflow after doing all the work.
Common mistakes
The first mistake is about scope: treating "single mesh" as a suggestion. It is not. A layered accessory modelled as a set of objects cannot be fixed by configuration — it has to be merged, and merging after rigging and texturing means redoing both.
The second is confusing the two cages with technical decoration. They are the mechanism: the cage is what tells the system how the piece should deform over a body that is not the body you modelled on. Without them, there is no "layered".
The third is the subtlest and the only one that does not show on a standing avatar: the wrong attachment.
The documentation says what it is for, and it is more than positioning: the attachment defines which body part the accessory stays attached to when the character falls — in ragdoll — or comes apart in the game.
That means an accessory with the wrong attachment can look perfect on the standing avatar, in the editor, in the thumbnail and on the storefront. The error only shows in a game that uses ragdoll, at the moment the figure falls and the jacket ends up stuck to a foot. It is a defect that survives all your checking and reaches the player.
The fourth mistake has a rule of its own and catches anyone working on faces: eyebrows and eyelashes cannot be uploaded as a standalone accessory. They have to come with a character body or with makeup assets. And when they do, the object names have to be exactly EyebrowAccessory, EyelashAccessory and HairAccessory.
Anyone who models a beautiful pair of eyebrows and tries to publish them alone finds this out once they are finished — and the way out is not adjusting anything in the model, it is assembling a package with a body.
Next step
The documentation's own process recommendation is what saves the most time: reviewing the specification early and often, not at the end.
In practice, that becomes three stops inside your workflow. The first right after closing the silhouette, checking the triangle count, watertightness and five-sided faces — before detailing. The second after rigging, checking the R15 armature and the two cages. The third before texturing, checking the size in studs relative to the attachment.
Each of those stops avoids a different class of rework, and the third is the one most people skip — precisely the one that costs the whole texture when it goes wrong.
After that, the export requirements have their own pages for Blender and Maya, and they are worth following to the letter: a good part of the cage and skinning problems that show up in Studio are born in an export setting, not in the model.
And, for anyone not doing it yet, the general mesh specification still applies on top of all of this. A layered accessory does not replace those rules — it adds its own.
Sources
Ready-to-use artifact
LAYERED ACCESSORY — specification. Checked on 23/09/2026.
== GEOMETRY ==
[ ] SINGLE MESH (one single mesh, not several objects)
[ ] at most 4 thousand triangles
[ ] WATERTIGHT: no exposed holes, no inverted faces
[ ] quads wherever possible
[ ] no face with 5 or more sides
== MAXIMUM SIZE (studs, centred on the attachment point) ==
| Type | X | Y | Z |
|---------------------------------------------------|-----|-----|-----|
| T-shirt, shirt, sweater, jacket, pants, shorts, | | | |
| dress and skirt | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| Eyebrows and eyelashes | 1.5 | 0.5 | 0.5 |
== TEXTURE ==
[ ] at most 2048 x 2048 for a Marketplace asset
[ ] a high resolution texture is converted down automatically
(so uploading larger than needed improves nothing)
== LAYERABLE: the two requirements that define "layered" ==
[ ] weighted and BOUND to an R15 armature
[ ] contains an INNER mesh cage and an OUTER cage
Without both, the item may well be an accessory -- but a rigid one, not
layered. That is the difference between fitting over any body and
poking through whatever is underneath.
== ATTACHMENT: at least ONE, with the exact name ==
Studio's Accessory Fitting Tool names it for you. This table is for
whoever configures it by hand:
| Accessory type | Attachment name |
|--------------------------------------------|----------------------------------|
| Hat | HatAttachment |
| Back | BodyBackAttachment |
| Waist | WaistFrontAttachment, |
| | WaistCenterAttachment, |
| | WaistBackAttachment |
| Shoulder | RightShoulderAttachment, |
| | RightCollarAttachment, |
| | NeckAttachment, |
| | LeftCollarAttachment, |
| | LeftShoulderAttachment |
| Face, eyelashes, eyebrows | FaceFrontAttachment, |
| | FaceCenterAttachment |
| Neck | NeckAttachment |
| Front | BodyFrontAttachment |
| Layered UPPER pieces | BodyFrontAttachment |
| (shirt, t-shirt, sweater, jacket) | |
| Layered LOWER pieces | WaistCenterAttachment |
| (pants, shorts, dress/skirt) | |
== EYELASHES AND EYEBROWS: a rule of their own ==
They CANNOT be uploaded as a standalone accessory. They have to come
with a character body or with makeup assets. And when they do, the
object names have to be:
EyebrowAccessory
EyelashAccessory
HairAccessory
== WHAT THE ATTACHMENT IS FOR, BEYOND FITTING ==
It defines which body part the accessory stays attached to when the
character FALLS (ragdoll) or COMES APART in the game. A wrong attachment
does not show on a standing avatar -- it shows when the figure falls.
