If you're building a combat game or an RPG, setting up a roblox billboard gui health bar is one of those small touches that makes the whole experience feel way more polished. It's honestly a bit annoying to have to constantly check a leaderboard or a static screen UI just to see if you're about to lose a fight. Floating health bars give players that instant feedback they need during a chaotic battle, and the good news is that they aren't nearly as complicated to make as they might look at first glance.
Most people start out by just putting a basic UI on the player's screen, but a Billboard GUI is different because it actually exists in the 3D world. It hovers over a part—usually the character's head—and moves right along with them. It's a classic feature in games like Blox Fruits or Type Soul, and once you get the hang of the scaling and the scripting, you can customize it to fit whatever vibe your game has.
Setting up the Billboard GUI structure
Before we even touch a single line of code, we need to get the visual stuff sorted out in the Explorer. You'll want to start by inserting a BillboardGui into your StarterGui (or directly into a dummy if you're just testing the look). I usually call mine "HealthDisplay" just to keep things organized.
Inside that BillboardGui, you're going to need two main components: a background frame and the actual health bar itself. Think of the background as the "container." It's usually a dark gray or black rectangle that defines the total width of the bar. Inside that frame, you'll add another frame—this one should be a bright color like green or red. This second frame is what we're going to shrink and grow based on the player's current health.
One quick tip that'll save you a headache later: make sure you use Scale instead of Offset for the sizes. If you use offset (pixels), your health bar might look massive on a phone and tiny on a 4K monitor. If you use scale (the first number in the UDim2 property), it stays proportional. Setting the main bar's width to 1, 0 and its height to 1, 0 inside the container frame ensures it fills the space perfectly.
Making the bar look right
Now, if you leave the settings at their defaults, the roblox billboard gui health bar might look a bit flat. To give it some personality, you can play around with the CornerRadius using a UICorner object. Adding rounded edges instantly makes the UI look more modern and less like something from a 2012 baseplate game.
You should also look at the AlwaysOnTop property in the BillboardGui settings. If this is checked, the health bar will show through walls. Some developers love this because it helps players find each other, while others hate it because it ruins the "stealth" aspect of a game. If you want a more realistic feel, leave it unchecked so the bar disappears when someone hides behind a building.
Another crucial setting is the ExtentsOffset. Since the GUI is usually "adorned" to the player's head, it might end up literally inside their face if you don't move it. Setting the Y-axis offset to something like 2 or 3 will nudge the bar up so it floats gracefully above their name tag.
The logic behind the health bar
The scripting part is where the magic happens. We need a way to tell the green bar, "Hey, the player just got hit, so you need to get smaller." The most efficient way to do this is by listening for the HealthChanged event on the Humanoid.
A lot of beginners make the mistake of using a while true do loop to update the bar every split second. Don't do that! It's a waste of processing power. By using Humanoid.HealthChanged, the script only runs when something actually happens. Here's the basic logic: you take the current health, divide it by the max health, and use that fraction to set the X-scale of your bar. If you have 50 health out of 100, the fraction is 0.5, so the bar becomes 50% wide. Simple math, but it works perfectly.
If you want to get fancy, you can also change the color of the bar as the health drops. You can script it so that when health is above 70%, it's green; between 30% and 70%, it's yellow; and below 30%, it turns a frantic red. It's a great visual cue that tells the player, "Hey, maybe stop running into those spikes."
Adding smooth transitions
If you just change the size instantly, the bar will "snap" to the new value. It works, but it feels a bit janky. To make it look professional, you should use TweenService. Instead of just setting the size, you "tween" it over a short period, like 0.2 seconds. This makes the bar slide smoothly down when someone takes damage, which looks ten times better.
Tweens are pretty easy to set up once you understand the syntax. You just define the TweenInfo (how long it takes, the easing style, etc.) and then tell the service which property you want to change. For a health bar, Enum.EasingStyle.Quad or Cubic usually gives a nice, snappy feel that doesn't feel sluggish.
Handling multiple players
In a multiplayer game, you aren't just managing one bar; you're managing one for every person on the server. There are two main ways to handle this. You can have a script that clones the roblox billboard gui health bar into every character as they spawn, or you can have a single local script that handles all the bars for the player's local view.
Usually, cloning a script into the character's head (via StarterCharacterScripts) is the easiest way for newcomers. This way, every character "carries" their own UI and the logic that runs it. However, if you're worried about performance in a 50-player server, you might want to look into a centralized system. But for most projects, the character-script method is totally fine and much easier to debug.
Common pitfalls to avoid
One thing that trips people up is the "Adornee" property. If your BillboardGui is sitting in a folder somewhere and doesn't have an Adornee set, it won't show up in the 3D world at all. Make sure the script sets the Adornee to the character's Head or HumanoidRootPart as soon as it's created.
Another issue is the "DistanceDisplayMode." Roblox has built-in health bars that sometimes pop up and clash with your custom one. You'll want to go into the Humanoid settings and set HealthDisplayType to "AlwaysHide" so you don't have two different bars competing for space above the player's head. It looks messy and confuses people.
Lastly, think about the text. Sometimes a bar isn't enough. People like to see the actual numbers, like "75/100." Adding a TextLabel on top of your frames is an easy way to provide that extra detail. Just make sure the text color contrasts well with the bar color so it's actually readable in the middle of a fight.
Finishing touches and customization
Once you've got the basics down, you can start getting creative. Maybe the health bar shakes when the player is at low health, or maybe it has a little pulse effect when they're healing. You could even add a secondary "shield" bar that sits on top if your game has armor mechanics.
The cool thing about a roblox billboard gui health bar is that it's a foundation you can build on. You can add the player's name, their level, or even their faction tag all within the same Billboard GUI. It becomes a little information hub that follows the player around.
Take some time to experiment with different UI gradients too. A simple green-to-dark-green gradient can make a bar look much more "premium" than a flat hex color. It's these tiny aesthetic choices that separate a "test project" from a game people actually want to spend time in.
Just remember to keep it clean. You don't want a massive UI that covers the player's entire body. The goal is to provide info at a glance without blocking the actual gameplay. If you can strike that balance, you've nailed one of the most important parts of a game's user interface. Happy developing!