Roblox’s silence on issues with monumental support like this one is one of the reasons why the community has been losing trust in Roblox over the last 3 years. I am confident Roblox wants to do this, but there is always zero communication on the state of urgently needed features, or why they’re taking such a long time.
23 Likes
Exactly. It’s like they don’t even read feature requests. Incredibly frustrating, and it’s impossible to tell if this request (which has had support from several notable developers) is being worked on or just completely ignored. It’s one of my main gripes with the platform, simple QOL feature requests or bug reports will sit for years before getting any sort of recognition. It makes me sad just imagining how much more would get done if developers had direct communication with the teams rolling out new features like SurfaceAppearance.
7 Likes
At the very least, they could post something like.
“We are aware of this request”
and even better follow that up with
“We are not interested in adding this at this time.”
or
“This is something we are interested in adding, but it is not priority”
or
“This is something we are working on”
13 Likes
Hi everyone – wanted to follow up here. We are aware of this request and have passed it along to the relevant engine teams; hope to be able to provide a more detailed update soon.
53 Likes
Thank you so much! I’ve been waiting for this feature for an extraordinarily long time.
I’m creating a wolf RPG, however, it’s difficult to make a decent looking fur texture while still having customization options.
Materials do not utilize UV maps, which makes certain textures turn out funny.
Example:
This would look a lot better if the textures were smooth. To do this, however, you’d need to use SurfaceAppearance.
5 Likes
I should also note that we want this as well:Layer UV Mapped Textures + Change Color3 Values
The ability to do this along with changing the colour will allow for the creation of markings etc. in @iiau and I’s project, Wolfstory.
Example:
(images created with Photoshop, but the ability to layer textures onto a UV map with transparency settings and colour them would be astounding!)
7 Likes
This is something that would greatly help when dealing with foliage. If this was added, I could recolor my foliage to match different seasons with ease. It’s something that I’ve wanted for a while now.
9 Likes
Can we have an update please? When is soon? I’ve been desperate for this property for so long now and it would make so many things so much easier
6 Likes
Yes this is still very much wanted 
3 Likes
This is already a great suggestion because of what everyone’s already said above, but I wanted to add on another use case that I’ve run into where the lack of this feature is actually pretty detrimental to game performance:
One of the last remaining uses for specialmeshes is to use colors above the Color3 value for the texture. Doing so makes it neon, which is otherwise impossible for a textured mesh.
As an example, you can do the following:
- Create a transparent part
- Create an inverted sphere mesh inside the part
- Create a decal inside the part and set the texture
- Set the decal’s Color3 to something above 255
Then, you get something like this:
(if anyone working on this needs a rbxm example, DM me and I’m happy to help!)
& the thing is: decals inside transparent parts is crazy inefficient. Normally, you’d use a meshpart + surfaceappearance + alphamode, but because this feature isn’t there, that’s not an option here.
I don’t know the exact amount & haven’t done any extensive benchmarking or anything, but it seems worse by maybe about 5x. That’s enough to be the single biggest performance issue for any game that does this extensively and may be the thing that prevents it from running well on some lower-end devices. It’s not an issue that every game has but it’s common among some of the bigger combat games on the site, & for those it would be incredibly beneficial.
9 Likes
This doesnt allow for pbr and multi-surface materials.
1 Like
What is soon? Any updates now? Is this planned?
We just want you to communicate your planned things with us, make a page of planned features, please. It’s tiring not knowing what roblox planned, and what it doesn’t plan.
3 Likes
Any updates? I have this white stool. I am sad that it can only be white. I gotta import recolored textures if I want to recolor.
7 Likes
This been freaking months man, what do you expect us to do with a texture that doesn’t change colours? hurry up this damn update
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While you’re at it, make it so every single property of SurfaceAppearance is programmable. I’m trying to make skins easier to make in Counterblox…
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It is insanely inefficient, hard on memory, and TIME-CONSUMING to have to reupload several textures in different colors for just one SurfaceAppearance. This is absolutely one of my biggest problems with utilizing PBR and SurfaceAppearances and it’s annoying that Roblox only acknowledged it after 2 years. Not only that, but they also then proceeded to go silent on the issue for (what is now) 5 months… for just changing the color of a texture. Come on.
4 Likes
Yes I agree, most textures should have a Color property, I have actually made a post including this feature in my feature request post about Terrain:
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My game has items that can be crafted out of arbitrary ingame materials. I need them to have textures (in this case a UV mapped peanut). I currently need to use a textureless SpecialMesh with a Decal on top for the texture so that the base part can be recolored based on whether they’re made of gold, bronze, etc. I’d like to use SurfaceAppearance instead for its PBR capabilities.
10 Likes
The Material Manager ignores meshes’ UVs. Material Manager also does not have transparency. But Material Manager can change color. Surface Appearance needs to have color.
Why have two different texturing systems and exclude features from them, it makes no sense.
Material Manager
- No UVs; just tiling.
- No Transparency.
- Changing Color.
Surface Appearance
- Transparency.
- UVs.
- No Changing Color.
4 Likes
The initial post requesting this feature was on November 2020 and the first signs of Roblox caring is on January 2022.
It took 1 year, 2 months, and 10 days for Roblox to notice tyridge77’s post. From CountLoop’s post sending the feature request to the engine team is still ongoing and from this date has took 1 year, 3 months, and 30 days.
It has been 2 years, 6 months, and 9 days, still nothing. Tyridge77’s request is completely reasonable. This is a feature THAT ALREADY EXISTS in material manager.
9 Likes