I don’t see why Meshes in Parts would be effected by any changes. The big thing is the hope that MeshParts get a similar thing. If they do however make a change to this, that’d upset a lot of what I’ve been using and making.
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By “this technique”, you mean using decals on special meshes, right? We’re unlikely to ever stop supporting this. Do note that this is not efficient rendering wise - we’re essentially rendering these objects twice, second time around with more overhead to be able to combine texture with a previously rendered part’s color. I go into this a bit in my RDC presentation from this year.
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It’s the only way to get the part color though.
And for allowing a user to change the color of the part to anything they want, it’s essential. So, maybe a solution to this sometime? 
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Currently this is the only way to get transparent textures to work. Of course, I would love it if transparent textures would be supported on MeshParts in the future. Any word on the possibility of that happening?
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Thank you so much, I needed a texture to tween from invisible to fully visible to give the illusion of the food cooking.
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In case you need to retain collision fidelity, this technique will not work. In my case I have a cylinder with a hole in the middle and this technique turns it into a solid part that I can no longer walk through.
By moving from a MeshPart to a Part with a Special Mesh, you unfortunately lose this ability.
However if you have two parts, a visual object and a collision object, you can retain it.
You will need to join them together, and have the visual object be non-collidable, and have the collision object be invisible.
Maintains collisions + looks like what you intend.
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This tutorial is for the most part redundant ever since SurfaceAppearance added support for texture transparency. I’m not sure what happens to outdated tutorials but the OP should edit this post to direct people to resources where you can learn about SurfaceAppearance.
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If you have materials I could reference with, I’d be more than happy to include them within this tutorial; however, the tutorial itself is over 3 years old at this point. At the time of posting, this was the only method of allowing textures on meshes that allowed you to see the part’s true colour.
If there are additional methods that I don’t know of now, I’d be happy to take a look and incorporate them!
It’s basically taking any meshpart that’s been UV mapped in the 3D authoring software, attaching the new-ish SurfaceAppearance object to it, setting it’s ColorMap field to the desired texture, then setting the AlphaMode property to Transparency.
What I’m saying is that the SurfaceAppearance object has essentially completely eliminated the need for this workaround at all, and so may mislead any new developers who look up something like “how to apply transparent textures to meshparts in Roblox”.
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Aha! I’m with you now.
I seem to only be able to access this feature as a beta setting and - while it does work for the intended purpose - I can’t specify the areas of the mesh I’d like to use neon in. It seems to negate all effects but ForceField.
This is a neon MeshPart with SurfaceAppearance applied, the AlphaMode is set to Overlay.
When this moves out of Beta, I’ll add this method into the tutorial as well. It’d be really useful if I was able to apply an emmission layer… possible feature request there.
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Wait, what does it look like if AlphaMode is set to Transparent? If you do that then the texture should “override” the model’s color except for wherever it’s transparent, allowing you to set the lamp bulb’s color to whatever you want.
Also, even though it’s a “beta” feature, it’s currently usable in games.
In my image, the MeshPart is Yellow + Neon.
When the AlphaMode is set to Overlay, I’m able to change the colour of the object and it will show through any transparent parts.
However, if I set it to Transparent, the yellow “transparent” segment is truly transparent, meaning you can see straight through it.
If the colour is the only thing people are after, I can see this replacing my current tutorial. As far as I can tell, this would also solve the issue of collisions too.
@zeuxcg does using the SurfaceAppearence in this way get around the rendering cost?
(I imagine it would have a similair cost?)
and is there any possibility of us getting access to an emission layer?
In that case I personally just make the bulb a separate part and use that to change the light color. I don’t think it’s worth fiddling with textures and stuff like that if that’s all you’re trying to accomplish.
Thanks, it’s really useful for add clothes to NPCs without humanoid.
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This was a life saver, Thank you so much!. Roblox should really make meshes work better
but this doesnt work with surface apperances right?
If you’re looking at getting the part’s colour, yes. You can use AlphaMode as “Overlay” to get transparent areas as whatever colour you need underneath.
here is what i mean
Blockquote
Thank you so much I was very worried for the rabbits 
