Change Colour of Surface Appearance in Studio ( TUTORIAL )

[InsanityFE4R (INSANITY)]

There was a post that sparked my attention suggesting that Roblox should add a feature allowing us to Change the colour of the Surface Appearance inside Studio without any 3rd party software. I began a quest on finding the solution for this and yet again I have found it!

Change in Colour:

The way to do this is by inserting a Highlight inside the MeshPart and adding the following Properties:
Change FillColor to your desired colour in RGB

Changing the FillTransparency will also change the intensity of the colour over the normal map. Please note that you should have your albedo map in grayscale when uploading it for better results!

THIS IS A PLACEHOLDER FOR WHEN ROBLOX WILL HOPEFULLY IMPLIMENT IT IN THE FUTURE WITHOUT THE NEED FOR HIGHLIGHTS

Also please do not ask me for any assets inside the screenshot(s) provided. For other inquiries please feel free to ask.

If you believe this was set in the wrong category or I have missed something please notify me so I can fix it to the best of my abilities. Thank you for reading and may this help you in any way shape or form.

[WinnersTakesAll (Winnerz)]

Highlights are limited to 31 enabled instances at a time and are quite performance heavy so maybe using them is a bad idea?

Just a warning for if you going to use highlights for every surface appearance part.

[InsanityFE4R (INSANITY)]

I don’t see any performance issues, and 31 is plenty.

[WinnersTakesAll (Winnerz)]

IMPORTANT: As a performance limit, Studio only displays 31 simultaneous Highlight instances on the client at a time. If you exceed this limit, the additional instances are silently ignored. While a disabled Highlight doesn’t display, it still takes one of the 31 available Highlight slots. If you plan to permanently disable a Highlight instance, it’s best to delete the highlight rather than disable it.

For low-end devices, Studio uses a fallback version that doesn’t have high performance overheads. This version doesn’t have the outline effect; instead, it creates an interior fill with a checker pattern to emulate the FillTransparency property.

Highlights are performance heavy on the shader so they are limited to 31 instances and low-end devices won’t be able to see the shader in fully quality due to said performance issues.

You can read below about the limitations.

Highlight | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub

[InsanityFE4R (INSANITY)]

So why would you use Surface Appearance for low end devices instead of just removing them. If you make a game designed for low end devices then why bother at all with Surface Appearance? This is also the best solution you’d ever come across for colouring ColorMaps inside Roblox so until you find a better solution you shouldn’t argue.

[NimbleNero (Nero)]

Not sure if it was a thing when this was posted. But you can change the tone/color of surfaceappearances if u make whatever part u want changable transparent

[InsanityFE4R (INSANITY)]

Can you please provide screenshots because I don’t see this?

[NimbleNero (Nero)]

I’m not the best at explaining, but as you can see this texture has opacity (Somewhat transparent in one area but not fully)

So since my colormap has transparency in only one area., the brickcolor i have selected will add somewhat of an underlight. Diff results with diff levels of opacity/saturation