Interlopers.net - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

by **The Giblets of Jesus** on Mon Jan 10, 2011 4:06 pm

Hey all,

Currently I'm making a snow themed map for CS:S and for the lower parts of my outside walls, I'm using the same texture all around some buildings. Since this is snow / tundra themed, I was going to add the \snow01 decal to all of the lower parts, but this soon became time consuming and impractical.

So, I thought I'd be a much better idea just to create a new texture, with the \concretewall010c base and simply layer the decal over it, save it and use it for my map.

However, god hates me and has made decals rather impossible to copy across in their normal form and I can't copy just the alpha layer over without the black background with it

.

So my question is:
Is there a method of copying decals across into another file without the background.

Regards,
Gibletz.

P.S.
Sorry if this sounds silly, I'm not great with textures Ã‚Â¬_Ã‚Â¬

by **Stormy** on Tue Feb 01, 2011 7:59 am

I'm not totally sure what you mean but have you tried opening the decal in GIMP or PS (with their respectable VTF plugins) and saving it as a .png? You might be able to export it easier that way.

by **Jordash** on Tue Feb 01, 2011 9:03 am

If you are using photoshop, select the alpha channel, then hit "load channel as selection" (it is a button at the bottom of the channels panel which looks like a few dots arranged in a circle). Then change the channel back to RGB and copy, when you paste it should be exactly as the decal appears ingame.

by **Groxkiller585** on Tue Feb 01, 2011 10:57 pm

I just open the VTF in paint.net, add it as a layer to the texture, do some touch-up stuff to make it blend well, and that's it. Most decals have an alpha, if it has black background then it uses $vertexalpha for ingame transparency and there you just have to delete all the black, which can be time consuming. (Or in GIMP, color-to-alpha, choose pure black.)