Configurable LabPBR Player Armor

Configure your armor's material properties in real-time. Defaults to a plastic Minecraft-ish look.

This is a lightweight client-side mod that generates LabPBR material maps for vanilla humanoid armor. Pick the finish for each armor family, apply the changes, and your compatible shader handles the lighting.

Why I Made It

I don't know about you, but I've always thought that Minecraft was not intended to look like this. 👉🏼

Don't get me wrong— I love things like subsurface scattering and PBR textures. But Minecraft has a certain 16x16, blocky, whimsy style. I like applying realistic effects on top of that intended style rather than replacing it.

When I first built customizable armor materials in this same way for Adorable Hamster Pets Hamster Armor, I went with the plastic/cartoonish/stylized result because that way I got my pretty reflections, but it still felt like Minecraft.

I wanted the same treatment for player armor so I could match my hamsters lol. Then I realized, what if I made it configurable? I had already made the hamster armor materials configurable so I just set it up the same way.

What This Mod Does

• Configures smoothness, reflectance/metal type, porosity/subsurface scattering, and emissiveness. Yes you can make your armor glow with this.
• Updates its generated resource pack as soon as you apply a change, so you'll see the changes apply in real-time.
• Leaves armor textures, models, item sprites, normal maps, and POM alone for great compatibility.
• Runs entirely on the client. Servers and other players do not need the mod.

Easy Material Editing

LabPBR is a material format used by many compatible Minecraft shaders. The mod writes a small companion map for each worn armor texture; the shader reads those values and decides how the surface responds to light. Easy squeezy peezy.

Hover over a setting in the configuration screen to see its LabPBR channel and valid range. Apply changes whenever you want to check the result in-game.

Real-Metal Cheat Sheet

Once upon a time, a small group of powerful people agreed together in a secret meeting that these exact Reflectance / Metallic values would be used to emulate eight real life metals:

Smoothness controls the finish, not the metal. A few starting points:

The finish values are just recommendations— you do you. Where am I getting these numbers? See shaderLABS LabPBR Material Standard. Note that some shader packs do not implement the individual presets and treat 230–255 as custom metal instead.

Resource-Pack Compatibility

The built-in resource pack contains _s.png images for vanilla worn-armor and trim paths, plus the LabPBR format declaration. It does not replace diffuse artwork, models, item sprites, _n normal maps, or POM.

That means most resource packs that replace vanilla worn-armor artwork can keep control of the armor's shape and color while this mod controls its material response. Armor added under new modded resource paths will not be affected. If you want me to add it you can commission it.

Change Management

Fzzy Config keeps your experimentation reversible. You can apply a set of changes, revert it, restore to the defaults, or inspect change history from the configuration screen.

Material defaults

LabPBR reserves emission value 255 as disabled. Normal maps are unsupported because I think they look weird at the default game resolution, and POM is intentionally unsupported because it doesn't work on entities anyway.

How to Use

1. Install a supported Minecraft version and loader.
2. Install Fzzy Config and this mod on the client.
3. Use a LabPBR-compatible shader to see the generated material response.
4. Open the client config screen, choose an armor family, adjust its values, and apply.

Without a compatible shader, the generated maps are inert. See the compatibility notes for artwork-pack support and deliberate exclusions.

Check out my other mod, Adorable Hamster Pets