CS:S - Creating soccer textures

This tutorial is an addition to the previous tutorial about how to create a soccer map. It gives you a few simple ideas on how to expand your soccer map to use different textures, other than LOLOBUBU's original textures. This will allow you to adjust your overall map feel for your specific setting.

This original tutorial was written many years ago while I was still quite young, but if someone needs something, I will happily rework parts of it, like I did with this introduction.

For editing pictures, I can't tell you what to use. Use whatever you feel comfortable with, but you want something that is as powerful as GIMP or Photoshop. However, you will still need the following tools:

• VTFEdit / Photoshop VTF Plugin
• GCFScape

Run GCFScape and open your 'source materials.gcf', enter 'hl2', then 'materials', then 'Nature' and finally extract grassfloor002a.vtf and open it with VTFEdit. Export it from VTFEdit into a .tga and open it with your favourite image editing software. The grass looks dark and unhealthy, so go create a new layer on it with 20% opacity. Now go fill the layer with a green color, this is not the end green you will have on your texture, just have a green. Now go Image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation and edit the green to your likings. Now you can make more of these Grass images with one layer green, maximum grass textures you can need is 4. If you want a striped grass texture go create a new file RGB/8Bit with 512x512 pixels and just put 2 of your grass textures on it in a row. Go import it in VTFEdit and save it as a .vtf. Now we need a .vmt for the file, I am not using the integrated feature in VTFEdit so just create a file and name it the same as the .vtf file.

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "FOLDERNAME/FILENAME"
"$surfaceprop" "grass"
}

At foldername it is not the folder 'materials', it is a folder inside it, you can decide the name.
The filename does not content .vtf at the end!

Following are two example grass textures I made, following this tutorial.

Just use one of your grass textures, go Image->Adjustments->Hue/Saturation or Black and White! Just make a nice white that looks like a real pitch line on grass. Use the same .vmt settings as in your normal grass texture.

Creating a texture for a soccer ball either requires some skills, or a somewhat good sense for finding adequate pictures. The texture itself should be about 512x512 pixels and should look something like this.

In theory, the center part of the texture gets displayed four times on a ball. If you don't make this part too big or too small, it will most likely look good. Use the following .vmt settings.

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "FOLDERNAME/FILENAME"
"$surfaceprop" "glass"
}

First, find a good texture; this is probably the hardest step, because in the end we want a texture which loops nicely across your brush. In addition, you will find it a little difficult to use net colours that are different from white. For example, if you view a black net from a distance in game, it will most likely appear white until you get closer. So unless you resolve this problem somehow, or don't really mind about it, you should stick to a white texture. Generally, it should be 128x128 pixels in size.

To get it looped in the end, I suggest placing the texture twice for testing like this:

To make sure that they line up perfectly at the edges, you can use something like the 'Warp' tool in Photoshop and bend the texture around. Make sure that your texture can loop horizontally and vertically! In order to preserve transparency in your photo (which you created with the magic wand tool), I suggest saving it as .png. Use the following .vmt settings.

"LightmappedGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "FOLDERNAMEFILENAME"
"$surfaceprop" "glass"
"$translucent" 1
}

If you'd like, you can use the following, desaturated texture for a white net.