Regardless of whether you were there at the beginning of the game when everything was just beginning or heard about CS:GO just yesterday, you probably know about one of the most interesting topics in the game, and this is the topic of custom skins.
Could it be that what originally attracted you was the famous Dragon Lore, intricately painted with almost all the colors of the rainbow? Or, alternatively, maybe you looked at the price tag and that’s what got you into this niche? We recently wrote (link) about how an enterprising fan sold a Dragon Lore skin with Tyler’s “Skadoodle” Latham autograph for abouk 50 k USD. At the same time, the skin that he sold for $61,000, Drone originally bought for $35,000. Not bad, huh?
Fantastic battles unfold in the market of skins – AUG moguls, HODLers, second-hand dealers, and the manufacturers of skins themselves viciously clash for a pretty penny. The latter category is of utmost interest to us. After all, the thought may have crossed your mind that someone created these skins! And the skin for Dragon Lore was also created by someone, and it could have been you! So after all, you can create a beautiful skin that will be appreciated the community and make a fortune on it!
We must immediately warn you that the old saying is very true: if something looks suspiciously easy – that is suspicious. It is true that sometimes those who trade come across unprecedented luck, as is the case, for example, with Bitcoins. Nevertheless, statistically, the number of such cases is a value that tends to approach zero, so you should not count on it. Almost always creating a worthwhile skin is painstaking, hard work, and it requires considerable preparation, plus it can take a while (meaning years). Although, yes, you could make a lot of money doing it. But the same can be said about everything else in life, right? To become a good player, you need to work hard, to become successful, you need to put in some effort, and to get abs…that’s actually a sensitive topic for us, so let’s move on.
In general, we must immediately warn you that creating a skin is not easy – but it is feasible. Having created your skin, in theory, you can make money on royalties for its distribution, and also make your impact on game history. Skins in CS:GO (and not only CS) can be very memorable. For example, imagine how much more it would hurt to be killed with such a gun?
In case you need any more convincing, here are the real stories from real skin designers(from mashable.com):
“Designer Chris “CLeGFX” Le said during a live stream yesterday that when community-made weapon skins for CS:GO were accepted and added into the game by Valve in the old days (circa CS:GO’s 2012 release), creators would earn about $40,000. Nowadays, Le said, “You get way way way way way more than that.
Le alone has had five different skins added to CS:GO crates since 2015, netting him at least $200,000 in just two years. He has made and submitted a lot more than five weapon skins though — he has 40 CS:GO skins on his Steam workshop page that haven’t been picked up. At least not yet.
Another designer, Coridium, has been making weapon skins for CS:GO since late 2013. Out of 50 submitted skins, a whopping 17 have been accepted. That is at least $680,000 earned from CS:GO skins since 2013, though it’s probably a lot more considering they created some of the most popular skins in the game, including the white-and-orange AK-47 Asiimov guns.”
Interested yet? Read on! What is a workshop in CS:GO and how to create your skins? Here is probably the best description of a workshop – from Steam’s site – and the address:
“In the workshop, Steam collected all the modifications created by the players, – here you can search, download and add your own modifications for your games. ”
If you remember, DotA was created through numerous modifications of the map for Starcraft, Aeon of Strife. Talk about eons of strife! The amounts of work put into those initial modifications strain the mind, just imagining it all. If you put together all the discarded versions of maps, after which DotA became DotA, you can stretch them to the Moon and back three times. After all this work, DotA is one of the most famous games in the world. The workshop in CS:GO allows you to somewhat emulate the process and create something of your own to remain forever in the annals of history (we know that you read this word correctly – with two n’s).
# 1 Tools
- For the first step of the process, you will need a canvas. Models of weapons from the game shall be your canvas. You will need Photoshop to paint.
- In order to create skins, Valve uses the file format Valve Texture Format (abbreviated VTF, among new users often called WTF). Photoshop does not work with this format directly, so, after downloading Photoshop CS5 Extended, you will need a program called VTFEdit, which will help convert the files with which we will work to VTF, that is, to those that the game will accept as its own.
- You will also need the CS GO – SDK program to submit the finished work (Steam library – tools).
Food for thought! It’s best to work in one folder, because if you don’t keep track of the amount of content, soon the entire desktop will be covered in files, so create a separate folder for the workshop – and a separate folder for each design. We will work with a sniper rifle in this example. Just because it’s cool.
Oh! Very advanced user – click here.
# 2 – Models
You will be the most sought-for ladies’ man in the whole city – every day you’ll have a new model. Downloading materials with which we will work goes like this.
There are two types of files in this folder – .obj and .tga. These are respectively the 3D models and the textures themselves. Open the .tga file in Photoshop (theoretically, in Photoshop, you can use any type of file that it supports, and then convert the files to tga).
To do this, select the “File” menu and point out to your PC the path to the folder that you downloaded to a specific directory.
The file is open in Photoshop. After that, you use the full breadth of Photoshop’s features to make changes to the skin. In order to learn how to use Photoshop, you will need, you guessed it, a guide to Photoshop – or you can use your intuition because it’s not that complex. It can go like this:
- Take any picture
- You make a weapon your main background
- Everything else you make invisible
- You drag a picture by hand over the image until you get bored (here the process ends… You died, and the hopes of Red Faction died with you) or something happens and you have a beautiful work of art in front of you.
- Save your progress.
- …
- Profit.
Using VTFEdit, open the resulting file, which you saved – as .tga – and convert it to a format acceptable to Valve, and this, as you remember, is VTF. Save the VTF file to the root directory of the game.
Now you should have two files – .vtf and .tga.
In order to enable the console, do as follows: Help & Options -> Game Settings -> Enable developer console. Now the console can be executed in the game.
Open the game itself and with a smooth wave of the hand press tilde (to the left of the “1” key, it looks like a seahorse lying on its side). In the console, you write
workshop_workbench
Next, a window opens in which you select Custom Paint Job and then Choose Pattern. Then choose the vtf-file.
Do everything as denoted using red ink here(minimum settings) and save the file as txt.
Start up CS GO – SDK. Next, Weapon finish publisher – add.
Here you fill in all the corresponding columns and attach three files – txt, tga, and vtf. Accept the terms of the agreement, send, and – tada! – you’re famous all over the world and incredibly rich.
Just put in a good word for us, when the media from around the world, shoving each other around the room, fights for the right to ask you a question about how your road to global domination began.
