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.
heres a DeliciousBakedPie / Tinfoilbot inspired bush texture i made. #1 shows the default coloring, #2 shows it at (0, 255, 0) and #3 shows it at (255, 384, 0)
the bush texture was originally for an alien planet which is why it’s BROWN, but i wanted to use the texture for a HUMAN planet called “earth” where plants are usually GREEN. but i cant make the plant GREEN and look good without the out of bounds numbers or whatever you’d call them
~?~?~?~?~?~?~?~?~
TEMPORARY WORKAROUND: you can put decals on the surfaceappearances, but it doesn’t work with the backs of triangles on DoubleSided meshes, which means you need 2x as many triangles (not good, but also not a lot for my 4 triangle mesh. it would also need 2x as many decals). also, it only works here because my mesh matches the UV mapping of a decal.
(left is MeshPart with SurfaceAppearance and a Decal, right is 2 parts in a cross shape, but the decals do the weird transparent object layering thing which looks awful)
Any updates on when this is being added? I need this right now. The life of everyone around me depends on this. My grind is interrupted by this mishap.
In conclusion, I would just like to know when you guys are adding my feature.
Had to jump back to this post after reading about staff’s perspective of feature requests in this update.
I strongly urge someone to up the priority of this feature or provide some more info on whether it’s being worked on. Beyond making development easier, this feature would make monetization of so many games that much easier. It has been requested for over half a decade, and while I understand that some features prove to be highly difficult to implement, I cannot actually think of any other singular feature that would more directly lead to increased income.
Customized cosmetics is lifeblood of successful monetization. This feature would make it that much easier for developers to let players purchase cosmetics in their games.
Want to implement colorable trees for different seasons. Current solution would be to use premade surfaceappearances, and add them in. Causing an instant ‘pop’ effect, but atleast it would work.
Recolorable SurfaceAppearances would make this task trivial. Would even allow us to smoothly fade the color.
After nearly 3 years, there has to be a reason why this hasn’t been implemented yet. Atleast tell us why.
Too much work? Platform support issues?
Here’s a post requesting what is essentially the same feature, made in 2017. This has been in demand for around six years. I firmly believe this feature has gone unacknowledged for far too long. Hopefully we hear something before the end of the year.
I did this for for a single asset recently, a recolorable meat. It was a horrid fiddly nightmare balancing all of the painted layers and transparencies properly, and it behaves incorrectly when multiple colors are involved. Never doing it again unless I have to. This is not a solution.
Also we’ll never get to create custom material shaders. There’s too many technical constraints and caveats.
This method becomes very inaccurate and rigid when working with things like skin textures on stylized characters like Roblox’s own “stylized” other packages, shading can become wildly inaccurate resulting in an ashy-looking complexion when you are a shade darker than nougat or peach. Working with transparent textures such as hair and leaves, as mentioned by Fennec, is also impossible unless you work with outdated SpecialMeshes that go under parts. SpecialMeshes already have a texture recoloring feature but lack various features such as PBR and skinned mesh deformation. The framework for recolorable mesh textures already exists under special meshes, the main problem is that MeshParts, the more updated dynamic mesh system is rigid regarding textures and colors.
I’m aware it doesn’t work with multi-colored images, but trying to re-color multi colored textures is a mess anyways. All I’ve done here was add a Black & White filter to my texture, then I set the white values of my texture to transparent, via (cant be done in photoshop) Photopea > Filter > Other > Color To Alpha (Set the base color to white). Then you simply export as PNG (to keep transparencies) and you make a surface appearance with the AlphaMode set to “Overlay” then boom. Fully Colorable. Idk what else you’d ask for. in my opinion this seems perfectly fine. SurfaceAppearance.Color would only remove the process of having to make the white values of the texture to be transparent…
I am very sorry for your request about the stool being white.
The best solution is to duplicate the object and set the transparency up to 0.5 and you can change the color.
Images with alpha transparency like leaves and hair can not be recolored via this method, and as with solid textures the work around with transparent shading as shown by you can work in some situations but others resulting in messy and inaccurate results. With decals, when color3 is changed, the actual hue of the texture/image is changed which makes way for more accurate recoloring, especially important when working with certain textures. Again, this method you have listed may work in some situations but it is very rigid and does not support textures that have alpha transparency such as hair. This may work for your style or you specifically, but in many cases having a texture just contain a shading overlay can be very limiting.
I pretty regularly run into situations (many of which listed in this thread) where color changing SurfaceAppearance objects would be really really helpful. The amount of bloat and workaround mess I can remove from my projects is going to be huge if this is ever added.
