Materials: troubleshooting

Troubleshooting guide for materials.

My material ignores transparency!

If you have done everything correctly, then something in the mesh got borked. Easiest way to fix:

• Export your mesh

• Re-name it to act as a backup

• Replace it with something where transparency definitely works

• Import over that mesh

• Copy-paste the material setup from the original mesh

My material is black and shiny!

That happens when one of the depotPaths can't be resolved. Double-check your values — Wolvenkit File Validation can help you with this.

All paths are okay, it's still broken

It's possible that you have a texture ref inside an object that expects mlsetups or mlmasks, or vice versa. File validation can't test for this, so you'll have to do it by hand.

Make sure to have the correct kind of cKeyValuePair for your kind of material.

My material isn't showing at all!

Test if it is the material, or if your mistake is somewhere else. Replace your material's basePath with something that you'll definitely recognize, such as base\environment\decoration\containers\cases\coffin\textures\m_z_gold.mi.

If the gold material shows up and your custom material doesn't, then you have an issue with the material.

If the gold material also doesn't show up, then your problem lies somewhere else. Maybe the entire chunk is hidden?

My black <material> looks grey in sunlight!

By default all the base game leather materials in the game have a metalness of zero and can only be scaled based on roughness. Black leather looks like black leather, even under direct sunlight because inside all the cracks and crevices the leather is black as night. However, because the game has leather setup without metalness options, the cracks and crevices are also flooded with light and so the whole material looks like a washed out flat grey.

For more information, see Vantablack leather through Metalness