It’s currently impossible to make accessories (e.g. body parts like wings and tails) respect avatar skin tone.
All accessories should automatically use the part color of the body part they attach to so that a specially crafted accessory texture or surface appearance can use opacity to show the skin color underneath.
The lack of this feature is undermining almost every single avatar bundle I’m working on, and destroying my artist intent.
I really cannot wait multiple years for this. Please look into this, this is a small change with huge impact, and I think it is forwards compatible with avatar advancements. This would bring accessories in line with user creative expression capabilities on bodies.
Transparency in accessory textures is already undefined behavior. As an example, this could be implemented with a property on the accessory instance to toggle body part color matching so that dev intent with game data can be preserved, and old accessories on the platform are unchanged, while new accessories can take advantage of it. Alternatively, the avatar loading flow with HumanoidDescription could do this automatically.
Under every hat is a gray color, and I agree we should be able to make new UGC hats match the color of the body part it’s attached to for use with opacity. Sounds great and would allow for a lot of creativity.
Are there any particular guidelines/rules that tell creators to leave the base mesh at the default colour? Even to this day I don’t understand why people don’t make more use of that functionality (ie make the texture have transparency + use the mesh underneath for the rest of the colouring)
I assume scripts aren’t allowed in hats/scripts get trimmed out automatically, because scripts could easily be used to change colours according to what head it was placed on (among other neat things it could dynamically do based on the users avatar)
I imagine you get better quality just modifying the texture than going through the trouble of making the recolorable texture just so you can upload the same accessory multiple times on different color parts. In any case, I don’t expect Roblox to honor the original color of the underlying part at upload time, nor should they; there are better ways to use the underlying part color, i.e. this feature request.