Template:Painted variants/Tutorial

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This tutorial will document the current method of painting hats in Photoshop. Note: Please check on Template:Painted variants which hat's need to be done, and which hats have been done. Please note that the generated images may differ slightly to the hats in-game due to TF2's lighting mechanics.

Setting up HLMV

For your images to be of adequate quality for us to accept, you need to set up Half Life Model Viewer so that it generates high quality images. You can force high quality settings in your graphics cards control panel, but this does not work for some people - so I will document the alternate method.

Dxsupport.cfg

  1. Navigate to this directory T:\Steam\steamapps\twigslayer\sourcesdk\bin\orangebox\bin (where T:\ the folder your Steam folder resides in).
  2. Open up Dxsupport.cfg in a text editor of your choice. If you do not have this file, create it with this content.
  3. Find your graphics card within that file, if it is not listed go to the bottom and use ATI Unknown or NVidia Unknown.
  4. Add or modify the following lines in Dxsupport.cfg, and save it.
"DxLevel"	"99"
"ConVar.mat_antialias"	"8"
"ConVar.mat_forceaniso"	"8"
"ConVar.mat_picmip"	"-10"

Inside HLMV

  1. Open up Model Viewer via the Source SDK.
  2. Check (if it's not already checked) the Normal Mapping checkbox.
  3. Set the background colour to white: Options - Background Color...
  4. Full-screen HLMV (so you get a nice big image).
  5. Open up a model and ensure there is no anti-aliasing or other quality defects. If there is it's likely your graphics card is not able to render images of high enough quality.
    When generating hat images, angle the hat slightly forward and facing right (from the hats perspective). For example: File:Painted_Tough_Guy's_Toque_7D4071.png.All the painted images of should be in the same position.