funnily enough, some of these features were a thing pre-2014 when they used a previous engine. I get some features being cut from an optimization standpoint like we don’t exactly need high poly realtime mesh merging or whatever it was… but basic texture recoloring??? not to mention the awful and usually shoddy attempts the engine makes at generating uv maps in instances where it quite literally makes no sense, I have yet to see an imported mesh with a material such as brick actually look decent given the strange uv unwrapping system roblox uses for materials.
edit: to add on, custom materials in the new material system literally can have their own color maps/basic 2d textures that do get tinted by part color, the only caveat being that its the crappy in-engine unwrapping that makes it literally useless in texturing compared to surface appearances
Yeah, Same here. They could really update surfaceappearance by changing its texture inputs, if their issue is adding too many textures.
For example, most game engines use something called ARGB image packing.
You would pack your PBR onto a single image in each channel of the image.
An example for this would be:
Alpha Channel: Ambient Occlusion
Red Channel: Specular
Green Channel: Roughness
Blue Channel: Metallic
This is what you can do to optimize pbr textures and i think if roblox would use this approach it would be a lot more optimized, but developers would need to switch and learn this workflow which seems disruptive. So the best idea would be to just have a shadergraph, since then said optimization challenges can be solved by developers and not have to be locked behind restrictions but by roblox.
EDIT: The property exists, but its functionality is not yet there. Studio also doesnt display it in the explorer yet, but you can access and change to it using the command bar. Changing the value however has no effect at the moment on the color of the surface appearance.
