As a Roblox developer, it is currently impossible for special meshes to use the use the brick material of the brick it’s modifying. While this can sometimes be addressed by using a texture, there are some materials that cannot be replicated with a simple texture. I find it incredibly annoying that when I set the material of the mesh’s parent to Neon, nothing happens and it continues to look like dull plastic.
I’m currently developing a game that is set in complete darkness and the only light sources are neon parts with lights in them. In order to make the player’s character visible I have turned off appearance loading and changed all of the body parts to neon material. This works great except for the head, because it is a mesh. It looks terrible and there is absolutely no way to fix it at the moment.
If Roblox is able to allow meshes to use the parent brick’s material, it would give me the ability to address the inconvenient, ugly issue in my game and I believe that many other users would benefit from it as well, since they wouldn’t have to use a texture to replicate the look of a brick material.
If you use MeshParts, they support materials. I’m aware MeshParts do not cover all use cases of SpecialMeshes, but for characters they should be mostly negligible (aside from having to rebuild the character if R6).
Also, this belongs in Client Features (you can edit the category by clicking the pencil icon next to the thread title). Studio Features are for Studio-only features such as built-in plugins, the Explorer pane, the Ribbon UI, etc. Anything that is present in live servers as well (which definitely applies to MeshPart rendering) is a client feature.
Ok, thank you for the information, I was not aware of MeshParts. So basically, this issue has already been addressed, what I’m doing is just one extremely rare case in which there is no easy solution, and it isn’t worth implementing material support for special meshes just for this one case?
No, just for this specific use case it wouldn’t be worth implementing. Currently we’re at this awkward middleground with MeshParts and SpecialMeshes where they do almost the same thing, but neither are suitable to replace the other – what will likely end up happening is they will be combined into a single object which has both objects’ capabilities, and we’ll get material support for non-physically-accurate meshes that way.
Yes, there is an easy solution right now: use MeshParts. They’re nearly the same thing as SpecialMeshes except have realistic collision. It would be easy to either swap R6 limbs out with them or to overlay them on top of R6 limbs.
