Transcript

Hello and welcome to lesson 2.3 VTFEdit of How to Create Texture Mods presented by MLPTF2Mods.com. VTFEdit could be regarded as the most useful tool of all. Without it, we’d be making textures using command lines. That is not fun or convenient. You can find a link to the download in the video description or right below the embedded video on our site. Make sure you have the necessary runtimes installed as indicated on the download page. Otherwise it may not function properly. Additionally, when installing, it would be a great idea to check off the boxes to associate the program with both .vtf files and .vmt files. Some would argue against associating .vmt files with VTFEdit since they are just text files and there are many better text editors out there. However in the interest of simplicity and consistency, whenever I show you VMT files, they will be in VTFEdit.

Before getting too far ahead of ourselves, let’s talk about what VTF and VMT files are. VTF is short for Valve Texture Format and uses the file extension .vtf. All the files in GCFScape we were looking at in the previous lesson were VTF files. If it is a texture in game, this is the format it is going to be in. VMT is short for Valve Material Type and uses the file extension .vmt. These are text files which are referenced by things like models and scripts to tell it what textures gets applied and other shader properties to be included when rendered. While there’ll be mention of material files periodically throughout the lesson series, for the early parts, the primary focus is going to be on texture files.

With VTFEdit installed, we can open up and view VTFs like the Amputator texture file I kept from the previous lesson. There isn’t too much you need to get familiar with here. On the left side you have the image tab which displays various bits of information including the flags. On the info tab, you can see the VTF’s version, dimensions, texture format and such. By changing the view, you can check out the texture’s alpha layer. We will talk about the importance of alpha layers when we get to the creation stage. As to be expected, under file you will find the open and save functions in addition to the import and export functions to get it in and out of the more common image formats that your image editing software can make use of. Whenever exporting a file you intend to modify for the game, always use TARGA format. Like many other things, we will talk about why we use TARGA instead of JPEG or PNGs during the creation stages of the lesson series.

Now that we are slightly more familiar with VTFEdit, we’ll take a look at the image editing software we’ll be using.