As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible to create recolorable avatar bundles with prominent tails, wings, and other large features.
I am working on this as a combo bundle and character in my game:
The tail is too large and will have to be either shrunk, or turned into an accessory, which totally defeats the whole function in this creature’s design. This is hardly a disruptive piece too. Further, the middle pair of arms would make the bundle more flexible for general use if they were simply an accessory and could be removed.
However, if I make the tail and these arms an accessory, I have to give up on those parts using SurfaceAppearance, which means they will look completely different from the rest of the bundle if I do high quality PBR texturing, and they will be locked to a single color, which severely limits the usefulness of the bundle. I don’t want people to have to buy a different skin tone accessory every time they want to change their color, and I don’t want to have to create and upload different skin tone accessories either. These are expensive to create.
I will not do any of that, so I’m forced to screw up the design so it fits inside limits that were never meant to contain tails in the first place.
Accessories and skinned clothing should use their respective part’s skin color underneath so that creators can texture accessories and clothing that are meant to extend the body in a reusable way. The current situation is completely at odds with how bundles can be recolored using skin tone.
Otherwise, we need another type of avatar asset or skinned clothing category for body add-ons that supports skin color. Tails are extensions of the body, not accessories. Them having no support for PBR looks horrendous.
I understand there is a technical limitation related to asset quantity holding back surface appearance support for accessories, but we’ve been waiting a very long time for this, and we are now running into these limitations that severely hold back freedom of design.