So say I already have an alpha channel on my color map to have my item paintable, Should I then place my phong map in the alpha on my normal map and then check the base alpha phong mask?

I've been having this nagging question that has been bugging me for a while and that is: Is there a way to map the phong on your items?

I sometimes make items that have areas that should have different glossiness. Now since TF2 dosen't have Specular maps I would assume that this would be done with phong... At the moment the phong settings are beyond me... Could someone shed a little light on explaining the basics to me?

Like the title says I was wondering how you import the textures onto the models in Blender. I have been able to get plenty of TF2 models into Blender but they always come into blender greyscale without the materials intact. Up to this point it hasn't mattered much as the characters were used as reference for my projects. Now I'm working on a project that actually requires me to view and use the game's textures so I was wordering if you could help a modder out.

Thanks a bunch.

Okay after like an hour I found the files for the arm tatoos... Seems like I was correct in that they had skin tight duplicate arms with the tattoo applied. The thing that I don't know is whether they had an alpha map on the textures so It was the just the the tattoo or if the whole arm was textured like the arm bellow it with the tattoo applied.

I don't know how to import the textures of the models into blender to see what they did but I'll ask you in anouther discussion so the users of this group whith similar questions can have an easier time looking it up. Thanks.

Hey I have a question regarding applying texture to default character textures... I want to make a Halloween hat that also applies makeup to the face of the character.... How would I go about doing this?

On first thought I was thinking I would have to duplicate the geometry of the character's face and apply my makeup to that with an alpha map so where there isn't makeup the face would show up...problem is that would take up a good chunk of my poly count for each LOD leaving me with fewer polygons to use for my hat.

I then thought It would be grand If there was a way to layer on the original character's texture my makeup therefor saving me immense effort with this workaround and giving me more polygons to add to my hat.

I noticed that there were a few arm tattoo Items in the game. So I'm looking for the solution they used for that basically. Thanks for all the help.

Thanks a bunch. Shame there is no clay render as they have for Blender.

Well I got the source SDK working without the launcher. ^_^ yeah I tried the configuring the Gameinfo text and the file paths like you stated in your tutorial but was having issues with the program running... My only guess why it didn't work then was that TF2 was not on my C drive...
(I have a small SSD drive for my main drive and a huge HDD for storage). Once I moved the game from my K drive to my C drive everything ran smoothly. (And then when I found out that I only had like a few hundred mbs to spair on the C drive I quickly moved TF2 with steammover back to my K drive and it still works... Confusing as hell but it works...)

So I have two tiny questions... How do I get two models in the model viewer at the same time? (ex: the Pyro model with my workshop hat)

Second question is how do I greyscale the character wearing the item so the workshop item is the focus?

Yeah I've been having this issue with the SDK model viewer. I can open my workshop items just fine however I'm unable to open any of the character models from tf2. This causes some issues for me when I want to have my hat/ misc. item on a greyscale image of the the character for my backpack icon. I'ver been able to get around this issue by using photoshop to composite the modelv iewer image of my hat with the greyscale figure I rendered in Blender... But this is time consuming and I feel a bit sloppy.

I am using Icyeyes TF2 SDK launcher and can get the program running just fine. I can import my items through "Load Model" but I just can't import the game's characters... I select "(Steam) Load model" and it gives me the file brouser however when I select the "player" folder I get the error message. "File models\player doesn't exist.

I hope there is a solution to this problem... ANd I hope I gave you enough information... I would really appeciate your input. Thanks.

Yeah I have yet anouther question. I am making a hat that includes a mustache and I was wondering how would you rig the mustache so it would follow the mouths movements... I'm not noticing any bones in the head for facial exspesions for rigging... Is it all done through shape keys?

Do I even need to worry about advanced rigging when the mouth(or at least the upper lip) doesn't move much ingame?

Thanks in advance and for all the trime you have spent helping me out.

Thank you very much.