A beginners guide to Skinning
Difficulty: Beginner |
| Category: CS:S > Skinning | Author(s): |
Ok when i first started playing CS:S i found that there was hardly anywhere on the internet that was helpful concerning creating or applying skins so i've decided that i'm goin to do this tut just to help any new players out ther that are interested in reskinning or simply installing skins.
Ok first of all, what is a skin?
A skin is the thing you see when you holding a gun or looking at a gun lying on the ground. It is the image that is "wrapped" around the mesh model of the gun.
How do I instal skins?
To instal Skins, you have to place the right folders, containing different image files, into the corresponding files. Depending on what type of skin you are installing, these corresponding folders differ.
How do I know what folders to put the skins in?
To find the right folders, for must find where you installed CS:S and Steam. Depending where you installed this, changes where your folders will be. When you find you "Valve" folder, open it up and enter the folder called "Steam". You will then see a few more folders, from these select and open the SteamApps folder. In this folder will be another folder which has you Steam user name (in the screen shot, my user name is "spencercss"), open this folder. then you will see more folders, one of them will be called "counter strike source", again open this folder and you will be faced with yet more folders, select the folder called "cstrike", this is where you will be putting the files for your skins. (see screen shot A + B for visual guidance to the folders).
What folders go where?
when you Download a Skin, you usually find that the author has put the files in folders. These folders are usually "materials" "models" "sounds" and some times "scripts". Inside the Materials folder you will find another folder called models, inside this should be a folder called "weapons" and inside this will be one or two folders, the one that will always be there will be "v_models" and sometimes there will be a folder called "w_models". the files inside the v_models folder are the images that appear in 1st person view and the files inside the w_models folder are the images that appear when weapons are lying on the floor or whilst you are looking at someone else in 1st person view.
In the sounds folder ther should be the series of folders:
cstrike -> sounds -> weapons -> "weapon name"
the sounds folder is not always included as the default sounds are fairly decent.
Inside the models folder you will find a lot of files, these you do not need to worry about.
So, when you download a skin, you have to make sure that you have each of the folders mentioned above and then you can copy + paste the files into the right folders. For this you may need a Decompressor, i use WinRAR which can be found here: http://www.rarlab.com/download.htm . There are many other decompressors around and im sure they work just as well.
So now i know how to instal skins, what about editing existing skins?
To edit skins you will need at least 3 programs, not including steam and CSS. These programs are: GCFscape (http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?p=26), VTFedit (http://nemesis.thewavelength.net/index.php?c=149), and a good image editing program such as Photoshop or Macromedia Fireworks.
When you have all of these programs, you are ready to start editing.
To begin with MAKE SURE YOU STEAM IS NOT RUNNING! I REPEATE! MAKE SURE STEAM IS NOT RUNNING! Ok, enter GCFscape and clikc file -> open and browse all the way to your SteamApps folder and open the "counter strike source shared.gcf" (screenshot C), extract the models folder to a convenient location.
Now exit GCFscape and open up VTFedit. go file -> open and browse to where you extracted the models folder and open it up. Open up the weapons folder and select v_models if you want to edit 1st person veiw weapons or w_models if you wwant to edit world veiw models. Then pick which weapon you wish to edit and open the .vtf file within the folder to see the textures of the gun (screenshot D).
Click file -> export and export it to a convinient location. Open the extracted file up with your image editor. And edit the file to suit you, (screenshot E, i've added cammo to the action and forend of the auto-shottie). Now save what you've done and import it into VTFedit. Click save and navigate to your materials -> models -> weapons -> v/w_models folder and save the file in the correct weapons folder (if its not in the folder coppy and paste the weapon folder from where you extracted it with GCFscape) and overwrite the old .vtf, this should then have put this into the game so you can see it when you play.
See screenshot F for a veiw of my auto shottie in game.
Credits... well ... erm i learnt how to skin from the tut by jaketwo_91 so i spose i owe that to him and the rest is pretty much all mine.
Good lucking skinning! |
| Added: 2 years ago | Tags: beginners, guide, skinning |
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