NormalMap on SurfaceAppearance darkens transparent area

[ErichAviman]

The main issue I am having is that when I apply a NormalMap to this texture it turns dark,

The NormalMap is a PNG and all the transparent areas are… transparent

Removing the NormalMap removes this darkening effect:

I noticed this issue when I was messing around with my lighting settings and decided to turn it to all dark as I noticed in more typical lighting conditions it was darkening the material below it.

Help would be much appreciated

[ErichAviman]

Just realised that even w/o the NormalMap the middle does not change depending on material selected

Only the colour selected can be seen, if anyone knows why this is please help.

EDIT: Using the devforum post below I am able to get the middle to be transparent when not using SurfaceAppearance, but I really want to be able to use a NormalMap which requires SurfaceAppearance to be used.

How do I import a model with transparent textures?

I’m trying to import a transparent plane of leaves from Blender to Roblox Studio I know how to achieve the same ends using SurfaceAppearance but that feels like I’m cheating around a valuable skill I want to know, and I’m concerned about performance issues with many SurfaceAppearance instances when I want this game to work on low-end devices I basically want to do what was mentioned here but Im unsure what that means or how to achieve it, and I’ve tried following various tutorials but none hav…