Custom Textures And Overlays

[SELERY]

Hello everyone, a couple people have been asking about how to make custom textures, so I made this little tutorial.

(if any more experienced mappers find an error in my tutorial let me know so I can fix it)

 

Things you're gonna need:

- Hammer for editing the map, duh (I suggest having a little experience with mapping)

- Some sort of program to make the texture that will let you export it as a .png (I'm using Gimp)

- VTFedit for converting to a valve texture file

- VIDE for adding the texture to the map file (VIDE has a vtf editor inside it, but I haven't tested it out yet, if you want to try using it instead of VTFedit go right ahead)

 

This tutorial will be for making a custom overlay, but it should work for custom textures as well. All the big important steps are yellow.

 

 

First, you're gonna want to make the decal, I'm going to use gimp because it's free

 

When you create the new image make sure that the dimensions are a power of 2 (1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048) The higher the resolution the more crisp your texture will look in game. I made my background transparent but you can do whatever you want.

 

[spoiler=picture]

 

 

After you make your image make sure you merge all your layers. Then you can export it as a png to somewhere.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Next, we're gonna want to turn it into something valve games can use. So open up VTFedit and import your image (don't worry about any of the import settings, just click ok) If your background is transparent it will appear black in VTFedit, don't worry, it will be transparent in game.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Then, we save it as a vtf file. Go ahead and save it somewhere inside your cs:go materials folder, if you want to keep stuff organized you can make a new folder called decals like I have. Here's where it will be located \SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Counter-Strike Global Offensive\csgo\materials\decals

 

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Now here's the tricky part, we need to make a .vmt file to go with our new .vtf file. Go ahead and navigate to that vtf file you just made. Now, make a new notepad file inside this folder, don't worry about naming it.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Open the new notebook file and paste this

Quote

"LightmappedGeneric"

{

"$basetexture" "decals/selerylogo"

"$decal" 1

"$decalscale" 0.25

"$translucent" 1

}

Make sure you use the actual name of your file and not selerylogo 

 

Then go file>save as. Use the "save as type" drop down to select "all files" and save your file as <name>.vmt

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Congratulations!!! You now have the 2 files you need for a texture Now we can place it anywhere in our map!!!

Go ahead and open up your map file in hammer. Click browse in the texture area on the right and search for your texture. When you find it, double click to select.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Select the overlay tool and click anywhere to place the overlay.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

To make sure it stays where we want it we're gonna tell it what face to be on. Select the selection tool and double click on the overlay. Go to brush faces, click "pick" and then click on the wall the decal is on. (It should already have the correct brush face, but this is the easiest way of making sure, otherwise it might not show up in game)

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Go ahead and compile the map, your new custom texture should be there.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

So, the texture shows up when we run it, that's it, right?... NO!

 

The texture shows up for you because the texture files are on your computer, but when other people try to use your map they won't see it because they don't have those files. So now we need to do one more step just because other people want to be able to see the texture. This is where VIDE comes in. VIDE lets us attach texture files to the map file so that when people download the map they get the all the custom textures bundled with it.

 

Go ahead and open VIDE. VIDE has a bunch of cool things, but we just want it for adding the texture to the map file (before I made this tutorial I didn't realize that VIDE had a vtf editor... I've never used it before, but feel free tot try it out instead of VTFedit)

 

BEFORE GOING ON MAKE SURE YOU ARE DONE EDITING YOUR MAP. You will need to do this next step every single time you edit your map, so try to have the final version to save time.

 

Go to tools>Packfile Lump Editor

Click open and browse to your map file, it should be in the "maps" folder inside the "csgo" folder

 

You should see a bunch of stuff highlighted in green, these are all the files that are currently attached to your map.

 

Click that button that says "scan" and then "Browse"

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Go up one folder and click "select folder" this should be the folder called "csgo"

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Click "scan" this will find all the files we're missing. We can the two new texture files highlighted in orange along with my other custom textures. Click the "auto" button and it will automatically add all the files you need for the map, making them green.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

Click the "add" button, all of your custom textures should now be at the bottom, highlighted in yellow. Hit "Save" and the custom files will be added to the map file. VIDE will make 2 files for you, the one with "bsp.backup" is the old file, don't use this one, it's just there in case something goes wrong.

 

[spoiler=Picture]

 

 

That's about it, I hope this little tutorial wasn't too complicated. Thanks for your time :3 If you have any questions ask away, I'll do my best to answer them.

Edited April 12, 2021 by SELERY
Typos

[TyGuy464646]

Looks good! Thank you

[Vel'Roz]

:+1:

you dont really need to label it as decal and stuff unless you want to be professional. If you click "auto add vmt" in the options somewhere in VTFEdit, It'll automatically create one, or if you don't want it like that, you can create one in tools>Create VMT file, and there.

 

P.S. if you dont create the vtf and vmt file in the desired folder, you have to edit the vmt file to match where your vtf file is at.

Edited March 30, 2017 by Vel' Roz

[EngineTrap]

Really cool! Didnt see anything new for me here but its nice to have tutorials for the newbies. +1