Cleanup is going to take awhile, so the site is back up but editing has been disabled.

1-Start

From HalfLife 2 Knowledge Base

by Mxthe

1 Warming up
2 Getting the Stuff
3 Start to Skin
4 Other Tutorials

Warming up

Allright, beeing a skinner is a little easier than being a Mapper or modeler, but dont start to think its too easy, first you must have inspiration, you must know how to draw, and you must PRACTICE!

To learn something, you must not just read one thing and then say : "Oh I got it, im a skinner"

NO, you must read hundreds of tutorials and manuals, you must download dozens of softwares and stuff, and you must know how to spend hours on one thing without dropping it...

What your about to read is a... let's say fast tut and index to show you the real base of the texturing and skinning, the software down there are to me, the easiest way to do the job without having to go trough vtftotga or vtex, i hate them xD

So now, drop your soda and be ready to read ALL of it, or else, close this window.

[edit]

Getting the Stuff

To start texturing, you must get adobe photoshop wich is a very very usuefull software for texturing, in fact, its the best!

Download trial here :

http://www.download.com/Adobe-Photoshop/3000-2192_4-10401295.html?tag=lst-0-1

Once you got it, you can draw your texture or modify an already existing one.

Now to convert the texture to the Valve texture format (vtf) You can get the Adobe Photoshop Vtf Plugin here :

http://www.nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=39

It is a very easy to use software, all you have to do is install, then click File->Import

It can be a vtf. tga. or jpeg. or Bmp.

And then, when you opened it, File->Export

it can also be a vtf. tga. or others

And your done, you just converted your file!

Vtf edit has other stuff, thats why on the link up there, there is a manual to use it.

[edit]

Start to Skin

Once you converted your texture to a jpeg. or tga. format, you can easily open it in photoshop, and modify it.

Now if you want your texture to apply to the Hl2 engine, for example, you want to skin a weapon.

You need gcf scape to open the gcf file to get the already existing texture in the Steamapps directory :

http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=26

Remember the exact way to the texture

Example

If the texture is situated in : Materials/Metal/

Then, you open your texture with vtfedit, and export it in .jpeg

Open it with adobe photoshop, modify it as you wish, save it in .jpeg

Import the jpeg. in vtf edit, export it in vtf.

Then you need the vmt.

The vtf. is the base texture, the vmt, defines how the texture will be used, it is an easy language, but has a lot of keywords, here is a tut about vmt :

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VMT

http://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Creating_Materials

(This tutorial also explain how to create a texture or modify it, it is only a litle more complicated than with vtfedit, use the way you prefer)

The best way to create a vmt, is to open an already existing vmt, and modify its base texture, and save it with the name of the vtf.

The vmt MUST have the same name of the vtf, or else it will not work.

Then, in your game directory, it could be css or hl2, you place it in the exact same folder as where you picked it :

Example

Materials/Metal/

Then test, and it should work.

If the material appears in pink and black squares, it means that the vmf file you made has wrong name or wrong $Basetexture in it.

Read carrefully the Vmt tutorial.

[edit]