SurfaceAppearance

This property determines how the alpha channel of the SurfaceAppearance.ColorMap is used.

When set to Transparency and the MeshPart.Transparency is set to 0, opaque pixels in the ColorMap will render as completely opaque in the 3D scene. This combination works better with depth-based effects and occlusion.

When set to Transparency and the MeshPart.Transparency is set to at least 0.02, a different blending method is used that can better represent smooth transparency gradients and soft edges. This combination does not support all effects and occlusion may not be perfect.

See here for more information.

Applies a tint to your existing colormap. Set directly with color picker or programmatically with Color3.

This property determines the color and opacity of the surface. This texture is sometimes called the albedo texture. The alpha channel of this texture controls its opacity, which behaves differently based on the SurfaceAppearance.AlphaMode setting.

See here for more information.

A Content that determines the color and opacity of the surface (sometimes called the albedo texture). The content can hold an asset URI or a reference to an EditableImage object.

The alpha channel of the texture controls its opacity, which behaves differently based on the SurfaceAppearance.AlphaMode setting. It defaults to an empty content, in which case no color map is applied. Assigning an EditableImage is useful for dynamically generating or modifying textures at runtime, such as in avatar customization and other in-experience content creation workflows.

This property determines the apparent emissivity across the surface. An emissive mask is a grayscale image where black pixels correspond to no emissivity, and white pixels correspond to full emissivity.

The emissive contribution gets added to total lighting contribution across the surface, and the sum gets multiplied by the albedo texture, which would be sampled from ColorMap if provided.

This value is a multiplier to control how strong the emissive contribution is across the surface. If the final contribution of emissives goes beyond supported dynamic range, it will get clamped; this could result in emissive contribution appearing all white when using large emissive strength values. Since this value is a multiplier, the maximum value to prevent clamping depends on all of the other contributing values, including EmissiveTint, ColorMap and combined lighting contribution.

This value is an RGB color for tinting emissive contribution.

This property determines which parts of the surface are metal or non-metal. The metalness map is a grayscale image where black pixels correspond to non-metals and white pixels correspond to metals.

Metals only reflect light the same color as the metal, and they reflect much more light than non-metals. Most pixels in a metalness map will be either pure black or pure white, while values in between can be used to simulate dirt or grunge on top of an underlying metal area.

When Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale is 0, metalness has no effect. For the most realistic reflections, it's recommended to set Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale and Lighting.EnvironmentDiffuseScale to 1, as well as Lighting.Ambient and Lighting.OutdoorAmbient to (0, 0, 0).

See here for more information.

A Content that determines which parts of the surface are metal or non-metal. The metalness map is a grayscale image where black pixels correspond to non-metals and white pixels correspond to metals. The content can hold an asset URI or a reference to an EditableImage object.

Metals only reflect light the same color as the metal, and they reflect much more light than non-metals. Most pixels in a metalness map will be either pure black or pure white, while values in between can be used to simulate dirt or grunge on top of an underlying metal area.

When Lighting.EnvironmentSpecularScale is 0, metalness has no effect. Defaults to an empty content, in which case no metalness map is applied.

This property modifies the lighting of the surface by adding bumps, dents, cracks, and curves, without adding more polygons. The normal map is an RGB image that modifies the surface's normal vector used for lighting calculations. Its R, G, and B channels correspond to the X, Y, and Z components of the local surface vector respectively, and byte values of 0 and 255 for each channel correspond linearly to normal vector components of -1 and 1.016 respectively. This range is stretched slightly from -1 to 1 so that a byte value of 127 maps to exactly 0.

The normal vector's Z axis is always defined as the direction of the underlying mesh's normal. A uniform (127, 127, 255) image translates to a completely flat normal map where the normal is everywhere perpendicular to the mesh surface; this format is referred to as a "tangent space" normal map. Note that Roblox does not support world space or object space normal maps.

Incorrectly flipped normal components can make bumps appear like indents. If you import a normal map and notice the lighting looks off, you may need to invert the G channel of the image. The X and Y axes of the tangent space frame correspond to the X and Y directions in the image after it's transformed by the mesh UVs. If you view your normal map in an image editor as if it were displayed on a surface, normals pointing towards the right side of the screen should appear more red, and normals pointing towards the top side of your screen should appear more green. The terms "DirectX format" and "OpenGL format" are sometimes used to describe whether the G channel of the normal map is inverted or not (Roblox expects the OpenGL format).

Roblox also expects imported meshes to include tangents. Modeling software may also refer to this as "tangent space" information. If you apply a normal map and it does not seem to make any visual difference, you may need to re-export your mesh along with its tangent information from the modeling software.

See here for more information.

A Content that modifies the lighting of the surface by adding bumps, dents, cracks, and curves, without adding more polygons. The normal map is an RGB image that modifies the surface's normal vector used for lighting calculations, where the R, G, and B channels correspond to the X, Y, and Z components of the local surface vector respectively. The content can hold an asset URI or a reference to an EditableImage object.

Roblox expects tangent-space normal maps in the "OpenGL format" (the G channel is not inverted), and imported meshes must include tangent information. Defaults to an empty content, in which case no normal map is applied.

Determines how the surface's texture maps look when they are scaled. When set to the default ResamplerMode.Default, the textures smooth out using bilinear filtering when displayed larger or smaller than their size in texture memory. When set to Pixelated, the textures preserve the sharp edges of pixels using nearest-neighbor filtering. Defaults to ResamplerMode.Default.

This property determines the apparent roughness across the surface. The roughness map is a grayscale image where black pixels correspond to a maximally smooth surface, and white pixels correspond to a maximally rough surface.

Note that surface roughness works on a very small scale. Reflections on smooth surfaces are sharp and concentrated, while reflections on rough surfaces are more blurry and dispersed.

See here for more information.

A Content that determines the apparent roughness across the surface. The roughness map is a grayscale image where black pixels correspond to a maximally smooth surface, and white pixels correspond to a maximally rough surface. The content can hold an asset URI or a reference to an EditableImage object.

Surface roughness works on a very small scale. Reflections on smooth surfaces are sharp and concentrated, while reflections on rough surfaces are more blurry and dispersed. Defaults to an empty content, in which case no roughness map is applied.

Managed by the engine and not intended to be set directly. A Content that holds the compressed runtime texture data for the surface appearance. It is the backing storage for SurfaceAppearance.TexturePack: when the object is published, the engine bakes its individual texture maps into a single texture pack asset and stores the resulting reference here.

Requires elevated permissions to read (RobloxScript security) and is writable only by the engine (RobloxEngine security). Defaults to an empty content.