As I just posted on myaperturelabs and Moddb, the moddb links should be up shortly.
I know we have been extremely short on updates and content, but this should make up for that. After much debate with the rest of the team and in celebration of my up coming Birthday, we have decided to give you this tutorial on how to make custom Portal textures. Now to cut back on the chatter and get this tutorial rolling here is a list of the tools you will need.
1. Tools:
2. 1. VTFEdit
3. 2. GCFScape
4. 3. An image editing program, I recommend Paint.net.
Now to begin the real "hard" part, for this tutorial I will be using the Dx8 Portals which are not animated but should be sufficient enough to get you on your way in creating brand new bad ass Portals.
Now that you have GCFScape and VTFedit navigate to your Steamapps folder, this folder can be found in C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps, double click portal content.gcf and navigate to materials/models/portal.
You will see a nice big list of junk, most of it you dont need to worry about, extract Portal_1_anims, Portal_2_anims, portal-blue-color.vtf, portal-orange-color.vtf, the noise blur 256x256, and also the 2 Portal-COLOR-dx8 files because we will be using these as our custom Portals.
As an example before the main tutorial here is what they will look like ingame, I will also include a download link for these Portals.
[img_thumb]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11456_q2rzd/dx8%20in%20dx9%20portals.jpg[/img_thumb]
Now that you have all these files extracted to a folder its time to edit the main files, unless you want custom colors the gradients are not really needed. Open up both the portal_1_anims and portal_2_anims in VTFEdit and edit them as such
From
"writez"
{
"$alphamasktexture" "models/portals/portal_mask"
"$bluramount" "1"
"$bumpframe" 0
"$translucent" 1
"$additive" 1
}
To
"UnlitGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "models/portals/dx8blue"
"$additive" "1"
"$translucent" "1"
}
and for the Orange
"UnlitGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "models/portals/dx8orange"
"$additive" "1"
"$translucent" "1"
}
Be sure to click the little save icon, now rename the 2 dx8 files to dx8blue and dx8orange. Place the 4 files into materials/models/portals and you will now have the Dx8 Portals in Dx9.
Now that you have this done its time to move onto more complex editing. You may be wondering why the Portals glow so bright, that is because the Dx8 texture is just a mask and not actually the main texture, you may also notice that the flame animation is still playing, so its time to remove that.
Open up the noise blur file in VTFEdit, export it as a jpeg, open it in paint and make the whole thing black. Save it as a black noiseblur, import it into vtfedit, save it as noise-blur-256x256.vtf and place that into your materials/models/portals folder.
Now when you go ingame your Dx8 to Dx9 portals should look like this
[img_thumb]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11453_wrz71/dx8%20in%20dx9%20orange%20closed.jpg[/img_thumb]
[img_thumb]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11452_4kd7y/dx8%20in%20dx9%20blue%20closed.jpg[/img_thumb]
Of course by this time you are probably asking about our Spirals, we have done a bit extra on them and you'll have to wait for the release of Project-Beta to see how we did those.
You may also be wondering what to do if you want different colored Portals and higher resolution masks, well not to worry Ill explain this too.
As you know you extracted 2 files that are Dx9 color files, just extract those as a Jpeg and use Paint.net to adjust the hue, you can find that here
[img]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11784_nqdhp/adjustmentspaintnet.jpg[/img]
Drag the bar in hue and saturation to change your gradient color, once you finish save it, import it in VTFEdit, save it as the portal-COLOR that you want to replace and place it into your materials/models/portals.
At this time you are probably sick and tired of reading this tutorial, but I'm not done yet because you still don't know how to give yourself bigger and better portals. You may have noticed that when opening the tiny little Dx8 portals are blocky and low res, like such
[img_thumb]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11454_buhal/dx8%20in%20dx9%20blue%20opening.jpg[/img_thumb]
[img_thumb]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11455_bx3ot/dx8%20in%20dx9%20orange%20opening.jpg[/img_thumb]
Obviously you need a better mask and a higher quality Portal skin, what you do at this point is extract, from the Portal Content GCF in the same directory you got all the other files from, the portal_mask.vtf. Open this file in VTFEdit, before you extract go to view and click mask, you may notice the black vanish. The black part of the image will go transparent, don't worry about this though as black in Portal is transparent anyways so its not an issue.
The mask should look like this
[img]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11785_ly3ja/portal_mask.jpg[/img]
This may seem difficult but actually it is rather easy to edit, just cut out the center like so
[img]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11786_0pvdw/portal_maskcutcenter.jpg[/img]
Give your Portal a color, please note these are not meant to be actual Portals and are made for demonstrational Purposes only, as I will leave the artistic work up to you.
[img]http://www.zilefile.com/files/11787_jqsip/portal_maskblue.jpg[/img]
To get this ingame import it with VTFEdit and save it as the name you wanna give your Portal, to give a custom name just edit the Portal-1-anims and Portal-2-Anims like so
"UnlitGeneric"
{
"$basetexture" "models/portals/CUSTOMNAMEHERE"
"$additive" "1"
"$translucent" "1"
}
And with that I leave you to your own business, if this tutorial helped you out good, if you get any issues feel free to ask and I'll do my best to help. I may have left something out and if I did I will correct it.
I know someone out there will try and copy our Spirals, but just remember our's will always be better.
Be sure to let others know about this tutorial and if you use it for your own mods be sure to mention us and give a link to this tutorial for People curious about custom Portals.
Related links and mods:
[url]http://www.moddb.com/mods/blue-portals[/url]
[url]http://www.moddb.com/mods/portal-stay-inside[/url]
And WinstonSmith's tutorial on Portal, you can find it in his tutorials
[url]http://www.moddb.com/mods/portal-stay-inside/tutorials[/url]
Please be sure to give these mods a look as they have helped greatly in testing and "perfecting" custom Portal methods and may offer even more help in the subject. As for animating Portal textures, I won't say how to do that yet, you'll either have to figure it out or wait another couple months for Project-Beta.
And with that I am off to go blow up stuff with Fireworks and eat some cake, from all of us at the Project-Beta team we wish you the best of luck and hope you enjoy one of our long kept secrets.
Link to the Dx8 in Dx9 Portals can be found in our downloads.
[url]http://www.moddb.com/mods/portal-project-beta1/addons/dx8-in-dx9-portals[/url]
And of Course 100% of the credit goes to Kave for figuring the mask technique out in the first place, without him we still wouldn't have our awesome Spirals or a way to make custom Portals.
The Download link to the Dx8 portals should be up soon and the news article should be authorized shortly
[url]http://www.moddb.com/mods/portal-project-beta1/news/how-to-custom-portal-textures[/url]
So now you can stop asking me how to do it and make some textures yourselves. :smug:
good tutorial.
[QUOTE=green bandit;23023124]good tutorial.[/QUOTE]
Good to hear
Before anyone asks I left out something, you can use ExitE mod textures but be sure to replace the gray background with black as black is transparent in Portal.
Nice one.
But is there a way to transfer Portal textures to another game on SDK? Say, TF2?
[QUOTE=Niven;23023347]Nice one.
But is there a way to transfer Portal textures to another game on SDK? Say, TF2?[/QUOTE]
Transfer the Portal files I guess, not sure though, Kave has started work on a Portal MP and hasnt been able to do the Portal textures yet.
[media]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz61CRJOzQg[/media]
It might be possible though to make a custom model and apply the textures.
Edit:
Someone did it wrong
[img_thumb]http://dl.dropbox.com/u/8063698/doin-it-wrong.png[/img_thumb]
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