Interlopers.net - Half-Life 2 News & Tutorials

Editing Tips

1. Rotating textures

   Tip Rating: 1.00

   When texturing large open areas of concrete or terrain it is a good idea to rotate the texture to about 40 to 45 degrees and increasing the scale to minimize the effect of tiling that will occur.

   Category: Textures

   Tip submitted by Blink

2. Blend Half-life 2 textures

   Tip Rating: 1.00

   You can easily blend any texture from half-life 2 together by simply creating a custom vmt,
   in the example I would like to blend rockwall_cave02a with forest_grass_01
   just name your vmt what ever you want and type:
   
   

   "WorldVertexTransition"
   {
   	"$basetexture" "nature/rockwall_cave02a"
   	"$basetexture2" "nature/forest_grass_01"
   	}

   
   
   Now you will see the name of your vmt in the texture browser and you can use it, don't forget to add the vmt if you release the map.

   Category: Textures

   Tip submitted by source-maps

3. Photoshop tiling

   Tip Rating: 0.00

   If you are making textures in photoshop and you are at the point of tiling the texture
   most people cut the right side and paste it to the left, and then cut the top and paste it to the bottom.
   Well there is a filter in photoshop that does this trick for you.
   
   Go to Filters > Other > Offset
   Fill in the half of your resolution in the Horizontal and Vertical boxes
   
   So if you are working on a 1024x1024 texture type 512 in both boxes.
   
   The rest is up to you and your 'healing brush' tool!

   Category: Textures

   Tip submitted by source-maps

4. Re: Tips Submission Thread

   Tip Rating: 0.00

   Don't turn off building mipmaps. EVER. Even for UI textures. You can disable it in the texture's flags but build them when importing to VTFedit anyway. Why?
   
   It screws up in-game. Without mipmaps it can't figure out how to show the texture in hammer's broswer. Plus if used ingame it only becomes visible up close, standing maybe 4 feet away causes it to turn into y-linear noise.

   Category: Textures

   Tip submitted by Groxkiller585

5. Wildcard Texture Searching

   Tip Rating: 0.00

   Use a semi-colon as a wildcard when searching for textures. Consider that you want to find the the generic, tileable dev textures. They are called 'dev/dev_measuregeneric01' and 'dev/dev_measuregeneric01b'. You know they're in the dev/ folder and end in generic, but nothing else. Use the code:

   dev/;generic

   and there you go! All textures in the dev folder that end in generic. Or perhaps you're looking for the tools skybox texture, called tools/toolsskybox. Type

   tools/;box

   and it'll show up.

   Category: Textures

   Tip submitted by Zecrah

6. Texture Flipping

   Tip Rating: 0.00

   You can flip textures by using negative values in the texture scale section on the face edit sheet tool. Put a negative X value to flip the texture horizontally, and a negative Y value to flip it vertically. For example, if you have a 'fake' brush door using the door textures, the handle will appear on opposite sides of the door. Making the texture scale of the X value on one side negative will correct this.

   Category: Textures

   Tip submitted by Zecrah