How to create textures with Paint .NET and notepad

Started by Silver Knight, 18-02-2010

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Silver Knight

How to create textures with Paint .NET and notepad.

For this tutorial you need to get:
Paint .NET Program from http://www.paint.net
Paint .NET VTF Plug-in from http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=50

Making a texture does not need to be more complicated than simply finding a image you want in your map, converting it and adding in a VMT for it to use which is why i personally prefer using paint.net as it's fast and simple to use, and has great results.

For this tutorial i am going to use this image: and convert it in Paint.net and add a simple vmt.

Step One: Save the image and open it in paint.net or if your using Firefox, drag and drop it onto paint.net.



Step Two: Click "File" then click "Save As".

Step Three: Change the "Save as type" box to VTF(*.vtf) as shown in the image bellow, give the image a suitable name, for this instance i am going to call it "Alien".



Step Four: Save the image in a suitable place, since this is a single image, i will save it on my desktop, but it's best to save it into a folder that you can access easily and keep things organized.

Step Five: A menu will appear with options to choose the template and other options, for this tutorial, we are going with a basic, compressed texture. Select the template "Compressed Texture" since we really don't need our texture being a huge file size, if there are any transparent parts in your image, select Compressed Texture with "alpha" instead.



Step Six: It's rendering, if your hammer with the preview, save it!

Step Seven: Making the VMT is fairly straight forward, open notepad and use this format:

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "lobby\alien"
}


Just replace lobby\path with with the path your texture will be in, you do not need to include .vtf at the end, as it does it for you, that being said, it also already takes note that it starts in materials\ folder.



Step Eight: Save the file and enter in "Alien.vmt" and it will save as a file called Alien but in vmt format.

Your done! You now have a working texture which can work in game or in hammer.

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