As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to show the material underneath a section of a SurfaceAppearance that is transparent.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because currently it is forcing SmoothPlastic to show underneath transparent areas of the texture.
As an example, the shelf with the books (1 mesh) has a texture with the main color cut out to allow for the part’s color to show through, BUT the material isn’t changing to stone or wood. The empty bookshelf is a control variable to show the materials I am trying to set. SurfaceAppearance.AlphaMode is set to Overlay.
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I have a handpainted meat texture that I made in Photoshop (this is the only software I have for this purpose) that is carefully crafted to allow for recoloring. But I wish I could change the underlying material to take advantage of a meat material I also have in my game. This would add a little more surface texture and variation to the model without sending me back into authoring software to wrap these extra textures myself (individually, for each of albedo, normal, and roughness - it’s a major pain to wrap these all together without misaligning anything in Photoshop alone). The triplanar(?) mapping that Roblox uses to wrap materials onto meshparts looks great most of the time. I wish that I could layer my surface appearance over the underlying material. To compensate for this I had to spend a lot more time than I wanted to carefully painting meat texture across all of the relevant texture maps.
Further, if I want body markings on creatures using surface appearance, I have to bake in the skin texture along with the markings, or duplicate the body mesh, inflate it, and weld it to the original mesh. I would rather just use a material for the underlying body texture, and let the markings rest on top. Also, duplicating the mesh completely doesn’t work for skinned mesh bodies.
A separate request but somewhat related, being able to layer surface appearance would be very powerful. More than one would even allow for multiple layers of body markings (e.g. imagine makeup, eyeshadow, lipstick, all at once and separately customizable).
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Another use-case: neon!
These are both set to Neon material (and same color) but the one on the right (no SurfaceAppearance) has a red Decal on one of the meshpart’s faces. I would like SurfaceAppearance to behave similarly in this case!
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