Seemingly unique issue with Detail Sprites and Episode 2.

[PapaRabbi]

I've been losing my goddamn mind trying to get detail sprites to work in an Episode 2 map I'm working on, and either my Google-fu is weak, or this is an issue literally nobody has had. First results were

https://www.reddit.com/r/SourceEngine/comments/3s59hw/displacement_grass_missing_hammer_hl2ep2_setup/

Detail sprites not showing up

The first link looked promising, but I don't have a detail.vbsp file in my root directory ( C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\common\Half-Life 2\hl2). I tried decompiling the misc_dir.vpk file with gcfscape, but that just gives me a single 133kb file with "detailsprites.vmt" in it, not even a vtf. Am I opening the vpk wrong, or am I going about this in the wrong way? Is the detail.vbsp a shareable file, and could someone share it with me?

[Stiffy360]

Which detail sprites specifically are missing?

For example

"material nature/blendgrassgravel001b uses unknown detail object type coastline_redgrass03"

[PapaRabbi]

canal_reeds. And the texture they're not showing up on is nature/canal_reeds. I used the same texture as Valve did in the canals section of HL2.

[Stiffy360]

Hammer is probably mounting episode 2's detail.vbsp instead of half-life 2's. Either use the half life 2 SDK, or extract half life 2's detail.vbsp, move to the /ep2 folder, then rename to something like detail_hl2.vbsp. Then go to materials/detail in the misc and textures vpks and extract the "detailsprites.vmt and vtf. Stick them in ep2/materials/detail. Then rename them to something like detailsprites_hl2. Edit the vmt and change detailsprites to "detailsprites_hl2" or whatever you called it.

Then in hammer go to map->map properties, and find where "detail.vbsp" is specified, and change to "detail_hl2.vbsp" and the mdetail texture change to "detailsprites_hl2"

[PapaRabbi]

Ok, I found the detail.vbsp inside hl2_pak_dir.vpk. I placed it into the hl2 root folder, and the sprites started appearing inside hammer. However, they weren't there when I compiled. I went through with the rest of your post, but the problem is, when I open up hl2_misc_dir.vpk to extract the detail vmt and vtf, I can only extract the vmt. There's no vtf in there.

[Blueberry_pie]

VMTs are in hl2_misc_dir.vpk, VTFs are in hl2_textures_dir.vpk.