AssetService:CreateEditableMeshAsync() returns an Object not an Instance

[Mmm_Wafflez (Sammy)]

Title; when attempting to create a new EditableMesh instance from AssetService:CreateEditableMeshAsync() the returned type is object data, not an instance of the object. This makes it impossible to create a new EditableMesh instance as object values cannot be typecasted to instances / instances cannot be created from object values alone.

Here is my code to come across this error:

local AssetService = game:GetService("AssetService")

-- meshContent from link
local success, meshContent = pcall(function()
	return Content.fromUri("rbxassetid://ASSET_ID")
end)

local meshPart = nil

if success then
	meshPart = AssetService:CreateMeshPartAsync(meshContent)
	meshPart.Parent = workspace
	print(type(meshPart))
	
	editableMesh = AssetService:CreateEditableMeshAsync(meshContent)
	print(typeof(editableMesh))
end

[TheGamer101]

EditableMesh is an Object rather than an Instance and this is intended behaviour. Object is the base class of Instance.

Object | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

Instance is the base class of all classes that can be put in the DataModel tree. EditableMesh and EditableImage can’t be parented to the DataModel as they are meant to be used through Content references instead of parented to the tree.

You can see it can be used if you do the following:

editableMesh = AssetService:CreateEditableMeshAsync(meshContent)
print(editableMesh.ClassName)
print(#editableMesh:GetVertices())

Let me know if there is something else that it being an Object prevents you from doing.

[Mmm_Wafflez (Sammy)]

I haven’t been able to set the Parent to workspace, because Parent is inherited from Instance not Object.

[TheGamer101]

This is intended behavior. The idea is that Editable* instances represent runtime-creatable Assets and it doesn’t make sense for these assets to live in the DataModel. Instead they should live separately and be referenced by shared strong references (Content.fromObject()).

Allowing them to both live in the DataModel and be managed by strong shared references wouldn’t be ideal for a lot of reasons I won’t fully get into but the main one is that it is assumed that the DataModel tree is a Directed Acyclic Graph and this would introduce cycles.

[Mmm_Wafflez (Sammy)]

Do you know a way in which I could render an EditableMesh on the server/client? I remember being able to do this with the beta, but a lot seems to have changed from then till now.

[TheGamer101]

Yeah, previously to render an EditableMesh you parented it to a MeshPart. While this was intuitive it had a big disadvantage that there was no way share EditableMeshes between MeshParts.

Now to render an EditableMesh, you create a new MeshPart which references it using AssetService:CreateMeshPartAsync:

	editableMesh = AssetService:CreateEditableMeshAsync(meshContent)
	
	meshPart = AssetService:CreateMeshPartAsync(Content.fromObject(editableMesh))
	meshPart.Parent = workspace