It’s absolutely essential to support diverse character skin colors on textured MeshParts.
10 Likes
Massive support for SurfaceAppearance to have a Color function for the property itself, would help out developers to not use and change the Color3 / Color of the Instance they’re using for SurfaceAppearance like a MeshPart and a Part. 
I somewhat use SurfaceAppearance for creating certain objects and testing with it, having to change the Color of the Part or MeshPart of where the SurfaceAppearance is parented too. I find this extremely hard to do and rely on that a property similar to Texture doesn’t have a Color function inside of it, not the best performance and act.
Somehow Texture has a property for this, wish SurfaceAppearance did when it became Beta a couple of months ago.
6 Likes
For me something like this would be extremely valuable, especially when AlphaMode is Transparency. With the regular AlphaMode, the part color blends through if you have a transparent albedo map (which is extremely powerful already). If you use Transparency/cutout rendering, there is no way at all to influence the output color.
Of course, it’d be great to be able to multiply the color with non-cutout rendering too (so we get two ways to influence the output color), but the Transparency AlphaMode case is especially critical to me, such as allowing for recolorable fences and road markings, or easily increasing variation by adjusting foliage colors a bit.
8 Likes
This is 1000% needed.
I’m trying to use the same metal texture for several different ores, but if I’m going to do that I’ll have to recolor it somewhere else and upload it again. You can already do this with Textures, Decals, ImageLabels, ImageButtons, ViewportFrames, and ParticleEmitters, so why not SurfaceAppearance?
3 Likes
Can we get an idea of if this is planned for the near future (i.e. this or next quarter)? If not, can it please be?
My game lets you customize colors on alien characters and it is currently impossible (or very very difficult and needlessly tedious and expensive) for me to make markings and patterns on creature bodies. I want to use SurfaceAppearance with opacity so I can map patterns onto creature body parts, but I currently have no way to change the color of these patterns to match the colors the player chooses. I have to use meshpart cutouts that wrap around the meshpart body, which is awful.
15 Likes
Textures and Decals allow the albedo to be tinted. It is absolutely necessary that SurfaceAppearance support this as well. MeshPart textures need this as well, Roblox seems to have a problem with the flexibility of textures on MeshParts, which is unacceptable given all of the cool new technology that has been released recently relating to meshes.
I want to use mesh deformation to animate the wings of this custom character, but I also want to allow users to apply custom colors to their characters; this case being coloration on the wingtips. I would normally do this by breaking the wing up into several parts and imperfectly animating it this way, but now with skinned meshes I don’t have to resort to ugly methods like that. However, using skinned meshes is an imperfect solution because of this missing feature; mating together skinned meshes so I can have the wingtips be an arbitrary and independent color completely prevents me from providing multiple different wing patterns because the wing will be “hardcoded” into the wingtip pattern.
27 Likes
In games that use all the colors of the rainbow, to customize accessories this would be awesome.
6 Likes
How on earth am I supposed to attach variable patterns to this creature if it is entirely a skinned mesh?? I would have to have the pattern as a separate mesh hovering above the surface of this one and skinned to it, which will be a nightmare to animate without clipping. This feature is urgently required.
16 Likes
I’m a bit confused as to why we don’t have this feature but yet we have it on decals/textures?
11 Likes
To add to this feature request - it’d be nice if we could mask colour tints to specific parts of a SurfaceAppearance so we can easily create colourable props:
42 Likes
so why isnt this a feature already 
this is the least they could do to improve the pbr surfaceapperance workflow 
15 Likes
The lack of this feature is currently stopping me from going full out with Skinned Meshes. I want to make customisable assets, and this can only really be done with a Color value for SurfaceAppearance. Previously, for R15 rigs, I could just split the mesh into different colours. Though I think we can all assume how a mesh like this would look when weight painted (This is a sleeve).
The best way to do this is by having a SurfaceAppearance that textures either just the sleeve or just the coloured lines. Though because we don’t have a Color property for SurfaceAppearance, I can only make that a static colour, which is not what I want.
I really hope this is a feature that will be added or considered soon.
7 Likes
i am on my knees begging for this feature soon, i should not have to resort to uploading the same texture with different colors just to see which fits better with my game 
23 Likes
This feature is desperately needed. My game relies on SpecialMesh.VertexColor to recolor hairs for character customization. I really want to enable MeshPart heads and accessories to use newer technologies like layered clothing, but if I did that, I would have to upload tons of additional hair textures which is incredibly tedious and takes away a lot of freedom from players. Making versatile meshes with SurfaceAppearance is just too much of a hassle when a new texture is needed for every color.
SurfaceAppearance.Color use cases:
- Quickly changing the color of environmental meshes like bushes, flowers, and corals
- Allowing players to dynamically recolor hair, clothes, and accessories
- Creating detailed, versatile furniture or other props with just 1 color map
If SpecialMesh is already able to be tinted with VertexColor, it seems simple enough for the same functionality to be added to SurfaceAppearance. I hope this gets added.
21 Likes
This limits games like mine soooo much, where players want to morph into things, and expect to be able to use all sorts of colors to tint their morphs or pets.
I have to decide to use morphs with ‘parts and unions’ where they can color them, or use meshes where I they are stuck with a few modified textures, or use the surfaceappearance with bump, metal, and normal, but no color layer, and then I get to color the mesh, but its so bland and plastic looking. Tinting really does need to be a thing.
14 Likes
Day 822 of not being able to colorshift SurfaceAppearance, forcing me to waste texture memory.
17 Likes
Just to note. You can achieve recolorable objects by making the texture transparent, and simply recoloring the part to change what’s underneath. This doesn’t work for transparent objects like trees though.
What we need is SurfaceAppearance.Color alongside a SurfaceAppearance.ZIndex property, so we can layer cosmetics on skinned MeshParts. This is essential for the future of the platform, and would drive millions of dollars in revenue for all sorts of games, whether it’s used to layer and recolor makeup, freckles, cars, or gun skins.
Decals do NOT work to achieve this; Decals completely ignore a MeshParts UV layout. They stop rendering at 45 degree angles (noses and eyelids included), project onto behind-surfaces you don’t want, and aren’t reusable if you needed to get face paint to work on more than one head shape. Decals do actually respect the UV layout on parts that use SpecialMeshes, but SpecialMeshes don’t support PBR, skinned animations, or LOD. It would be amazing to be able to layer recolorable PBR textures onto MeshParts like this. If it’s too expensive for some reason, the textures can just be loaded at lower resolutions depending on distance/size.
23 Likes
Is nobody pushing for this internally…? This functionality is pretty essential, it’s a massive limitation.
10 Likes
Probably the most greatly ignored but most helpful addition i’ve seen yet. I’m stunned by the fact that it’s still not added. Still wasting memory and wasting human life by manually remaking colormaps just to change colours!! 
6 Likes
@JoshSedai Hey, any chance you can look into this? You posted several announcements for UGC materials, and they already have this functionality. Material variants can be recolored by changing the part’s color, and they have all the same maps that a SurfaceAppearance does. This small feature would be incredibly useful and save developers so much time and hassle, and it feels like it’s going unnoticed. Thanks
9 Likes