Note that I am no expert on mappings, and I think generally it is best to use the same mappings as most other people use to make life easier for everybody. However, with that said, this should work:
1. Add this to your build.gradle to create a local maven repo on your computer:
repositories {
maven {
url "file:///${project.projectDir}/mappings"
}
}
2. Change back the mappings channel (the mappings channel is hardcoded to use 'official', 'snapshot' and 'stable' so you have to use one of those):
mappings channel: 'snapshot', version: 'vemerion-mappings'
You can of course change 'vemerion-mappings' to something else but then you have to change it in the mappings repo as well in the next few steps
3. Create the file structure 'mappings/de/oceanlabs/mcp/mcp_snapshot/vemerion-mappings/' in your mod project folder
4. Inside the file structure you just created, create a zip file named 'mcp_snapshot-vemerion-mappings.zip', that should contain the fields.csv and methods.csv files etc
5. Run ./gradlew clean and ./gradlew cleanEclipse
6. Run ./gradlew genEclipseRuns and ./gradlew eclipse
7. If gradle complains about duplicate mappings then everything will probably fail and you have to update your mappings files and redo the process
8. Import the project into Eclipse
9. Your custom mappings should now work
Hope this helps! As a last word of caution, I just want to reiterate that IMO it is probably best to stick with the normal MCP or Mojang mappings.