What are your world settings? did your environment texture go missing perhaps? what did the background look like before? was it an image? a mesh? transparent? or a simple world material?

Make sure the vertex groups in your mesh match the name of the bones that you want to use to deform the mesh. then check your weight paint, are multiple vertex groups sharing the same weight? are the bones you want to use to deform weighted properly? are the bones you want to use to deform the mesh added in as vertex groups? probably they are missing

btw @CubicSpaceMonkN im curious, whats the reason that doing this requires a lot of vertices? wouldn't it just be able to use the UV map to apply the color on the face?

It's cool that it is possible though! but I guess it's really impractical since I would need to subdivide the mesh a ton to get the same result as plugging in the node in Materials instead. Thank you @CubicSpaceMonkN for helping me!

@GordonBrinkmann The reason I needed to use this method was for a special sort of rig that has lots of settings to customize, so I wanted to use Geometry Nodes as a way to save these custom settings as node groups then later use them as presets. One of those settings is changing the image file, so I thought it would have been easier to somehow store the image inside GN in the same node group so that anyone who would want to put in their custom texture wouldnt need to like... put in their node group then change the image in materials, defeating the point of a preset

ah well, thats unfortunate. but it sounds like these features will eventually make it in so thats good.

ah, thank you! this worked