SurfaceAppearance.Color

PBR is awesome, but it’d be quite a bit more useful if we could adjust the color of the ColorMap without having to switch textures.

Currently you can’t have a detailed coat color map for instance, upload it as white, and change the color in game(what if you want the same coat with the same color details - buttons and what not - but yellow?).

I propose SurfaceAppearance.Color, which would just act as a color multiplier the same way decals , shirts/pants, and UI images work. It’d of course just default to Color3(1,1,1)

It’d allow us a lot more freedom for customization in projects that heavy utilize PBR and I know this is a pain point for a lot of devs that want to use this tech in their games.

342 Likes

YES Please!! It would make my life so much easier!

9 Likes

I fully support this! You can currently achieve flat-colored models using Color by using only Roughness, Metalness and Normal maps; but obviously this limits us to flat colors. We need to have more control with this, so a Color value for SurfaceAppearance is definitely necessary.

the Texture and Decal object already have this property so it only seems logical. Naturally the Color value would apply to the ColorMap only. I personally think this should be a Color3 value though, and not a Vector3 like VertexColor. This gives us much easier control over this.

Hope this gets added, I feel like this should have been part of the release.

22 Likes

This would be outstandingly useful to have!

4 Likes

This is a must-have in many cases. Having to use multiple textures just to get 1 color difference is tedious and a waste of space. This would remedy that.

6 Likes

Totally! This has to be in the pipeline. Current materials support this.

28 Likes

+1 for this. Being able to modify the color of a texture opens a lot of possibilities without needing to have a ton of extra textures for color options.

13 Likes

Empowering users in this way would be great. One example is having variance of leaf colors across a map!

13 Likes

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. :+1:

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

:+1: 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:

41 Likes

so why isnt this a feature already :man_standing:

this is the least they could do to improve the pbr surfaceapperance workflow :frowning:

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