Reproduction Steps
Create a mesh part, and set a texture on it, with its TextureId property.
Create a second mesh part, and do the same put set part transparency to .02
You will see that they both preserve the texture’s details.
Now create a third mesh part, and give it a child SurfaceAppearance, set the SurfaceAppearance’s ColorMap to the same texture as before, and set the SurfaceAppearance’s AlphaMode to Transparency.
You will notice a great deal of detail lost in the one using surface appearance.
Expected Behavior
I would expect that the details of a surface appearance texture to be as sharp as a meshpart texture.
Workaround
No workaround other than not using SurfaceAppearance
Issue Area: Engine Issue Type: Display Impact: High Frequency: Constantly Date First Experienced: 2022-05-02 00:05:00 (-05:00) Date Last Experienced: 2022-05-02 00:05:00 (-05:00)
However… with a different mesh and texture, (palm trees) It looks as though there is no loss of detail.
The only thing I can think of, is that the second Mesh and texture is not ‘double sided’ and perhaps the texture is uploaded at a higher resolution. I will try to use a higher texture resolution on the first mesh and see if there is a change, if not, I will download the .obj, make it one sided, and reupload and see if there is a difference. I will get back to you.
I found my original files, converted the 2048x texture to 1024, 512, and 256, those are the scales shown left to right in the screenshot.
The left of each set is with surface appearance, right of each set is meshpart only.
I can’t see that it is really making any difference.
Which leads me to believe the issue is with the original texture itself. I uploaded it a quite a while ago, so I am not sure what its resolution is, but it looks sharper than my test of 256, so must be higher than that. Really not sure why it is loosing so much quality on SA.
As for me, I will just re-upload any textures that seem to be having this issue as a work around.
If you would like to check the texture yourself, and see if you can find what might be the issue the address to the original mesh and texture is as follows.
I wonder how the ColorMap look like. Perhaps there’s too gradient or the alpha isn’t fully opaque on the opaque part?
There’s some explanation in the documentation (SurfaceAppearance | Documentation - Roblox Creator Hub, look at AlphaMode) that explains how this should be rendered when SurfaceAppearance.AlphaMode is set to Transparency and Meshpart.Transparency is set to 0.
