Vantablack leather through Metalness

How to make use of metalness for darker materials

Summary

Published: May 21 2025 by beckylou_1 Last documented update: May 21 2025 by manavortex

This page will tell you how to create a truly black leather material by creating a custom .mltemplate

Wait, that's not what I want!

• If you want to learn more about metalness in general, please check Material properties -> Roughness/Metalness

• Did you know? You can darken any material by adding a semi-transparent layer of black silk (pick the bottom entry from the roughness menu)

How to create black leather

1. Find the leather material template under base\surfaces\materials\fabric\leather

2. Add them to your project

3. Custompath them by moving them to a folder like author\mod\materials

Edit the new mltemplate file

1. Open the file by double-clicking

2. Find the "overrides" section and expand it

3. Add the following values into metalLevelsOut:

To save typing these numbers, you can steal them from a different material such as silk or spandex.

n	v(0)	v(1)
280c47	0	0
7cda36	0	0.25
749e4d	0	0.5
b56c4b	0	0.75
8980e7	0	1

1. Save your new .mltemplate

Change your item's base material

1. In MLSetupBuilder / the .mlsetup, you can now use your newly-created file instead of leather_black_bull.mltemplate (simply change the path).

2. Pick a metalLevelsOut from the list above:

You can then use the roughness in conjunction with the metal levels to create various types of truly black leather.

Standard Clean Leather: Metalicity(1)