I doubt it will stay studio-only forever, and from what LightBeamRays is saying it seems like theyre trying to push it to more than just mesh parts. Ive been waiting for a feature like this for quite a while, so the fact that theyre getting this into studio to mess around with is amazing to me, its only a matter of time before its released in a less limited state.
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I’ve always been curious, is there a reason we can’t use SurfaceAppearances on regular meshes?
Is there any chance this will be released to the platform, or is it only for the studio?
Why is the rendering team so small? If Roblox is so focused on increasing visual fidelity as a part of their “vision”, shouldn’t upper management be focused on hiring more rendering engineers?
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Can we have support for transparency in Material Variants? Without this it’s impossible to have a part with a transparent texture with a normal map.
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Can we please get the option for Nearest-Neighbor texturing for surface appearances? Pixel art styles on Roblox are incredibly hacky to do at the moment.
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It’s certainly very cool. But the entire developer community is waiting for the glow texture…
This is a godsend, I will no longer need to have random color variations clogging my inventory. 
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hey thats finally neat.
the one thing thats now missing is texture scrolling and the entire surfaceappearance thing is perfect, do we know if thats planned?
well… almost, were still missing emission, displacement, and diffraction(which is a roblox limitation but regardless)
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I’m somewhat aware of the performance cost it has considering I’ve worked with shaders myself.
I MIIIIGHT have an idea on how it could potentially work.
Okay, let’s say… HSV can be adjusted during run-time, even through scripts.
Let’s give surface appearances a Lua function :GetCopyWithAdjustedHSV(), what this function would do is, it creates a copy of the texture with a temporary asset ID and returns a NEW SurfaceAppearance (or perhaps just a string with the temporal ID) that holds the new, adjusted Albedo/Color.
The new decal asset will exist in memory/storage until the user leaves the game OR until all SurfaceAppearances that hold a reference to the texture’s temporal asset ID are :Destroy()ed.
The pros of this is that this will give/return a re-usable texture and you can just create a new SurfaceAppearance that has an ID to it and works during run-time in a live experience.
The only downside I can think of here is that you wouldn’t be able to create a texture where the HSV is animated for instance but this solutions should work for all platforms.
HSV is only calculated once and after that a temporary and re-usable decal is created.
This is enough for things like character and vehicle customization and whatnot.
And if developers are smart enough to re-use the texture or it’s asset ID, it shouldn’t eat up memory either.
Alternatively:
Since I (and probably many others) don’t make mobile games at all, I wouldn’t mind it being a pc/console exclusive feature.
We already have graphics effects that don’t work on mobile.
And if it REALLY needs to work on mobile too (for the sake of including everyone), I suppose you could use baked/cached textures on mobile and only allow real-time use on PC/console or use shaders on mobile that perform cheaper and less-accurate HSV conversions.
I suppose for mobile you could implement a lookup-table for speedy (but lower quality) HSV conversions.
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finally
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This is so good but please remove the 255 rgb cap, make it like Texture instance color property. You can actually make emissive textures if you place a really really high number in color3 property of a texture, let us do the same thing with surfaceappareances.
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Although I love this feature, I will have little use for it unless if ZIndex were to be released. I’d love to make features such as markings available on my animal characters for character customization purposes, but this is impossible unless if I were to duplicate meshes, which is very costly on performance.
Finally, another way to paint those besides Color maps!
This has been needed for a long time.
Thanks!
Crossing my fingers this releases on time because I am already prepared to ship updates using it.
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You can easily mitigate this by uploading a white texture. Then, any tint you apply will be the exact color
yes, but you can’t tint a gradient easily
Is this a joke?? Couldn’t you already do that if your messing around with the RGB mouse???
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First time I’ve seen this comment made here, you are right, we need a way to disable that feature so I don’t have to upload what should be a 16x16 pixel art at 128px to keep the 16px pixels blurring out
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