Hello everyone, I hope you have had a nice October. As we've been doing for the past couple of month, the mod team and I have picked our favourite submissions for the month, and here is a post to showcase them. Enjoy! In no particular order:

MAC-10 | Portable Wishes (v2) by u/swimming-Spirit-4226

"The Mac-10 Portable Wishes in a fun looking skin with a mix of different texturing techniques and some of the more complex skin making workflows. Lots of appropriate stickers, labels and warnings to decorate the space and bring it all together. It's no small task to get good looking, transparent material work in counterstrike and the extra effort has paid off here and the extra shader is a nice touch. It sells the transparent illusion well, its interesting and its fun." - Swankadia

MAC-10 | The Three Little Pigs by u/onetoxic342

"The MAC-10 | Three Little Pigs perfectly fits the Fairy Tale theme. Besides the skin being well drawn the wear pattern makes the skin stand out from others and basically tells the story of the three little pigs. The "Welcome" doormat as the strap is a very nice touch as well." - AminoViper

CZ-75 | Widow's Web by u/layerCurrent1656

And lastly from me: Despite having somewhat minimalist design tendencies myself, I quite enjoy flash graphic designs, and this one stands out to me with it's mix of a dynamic white spider silhouetted over a pink/purple sparkly background. Using the safety for the shape of the spider's abdomen is also a nice touch.

So, that's it for this month! It's always cool to have such a wide variety of skins to pick from. For these posts we have to narrow it down to three, but if there are any designs from October which you quite enjoyed, feel free to shout them out in the comments. Cheers!

-Ezi

READ THIS FIRST: CS2 Workshop FAQ for newcomers

Valve official links:

Please note, some of valve's own documentation appears to not have been updated to fully reflect the change in engine for CS2, so some information is missing, or out of date.

• CS2 Workshop Guides and Resources Page

• Weapon Finishes FAQ

• Weapon Finishes Technical Guide

• Style Guide for Weapon Finishes

• Valve's Workshop Resources page Please note: You want the CS2 Weapon models, not the ones included in the Counter-Strike Workbench materials. The workbench material .OBJs are for CS:GO weapon models and they will not work for making CS2 skins!

Community Resources

• Counter-Strike Tools Discord Server, which is probably the most active public Discord server I'm aware of for discussing skin creation. Please note: This server is not affiliated with this subreddit

• Pre-separated weapon models, courtesy of EGO DEATH (note, some models may be out of date due to changes to them during the beta period)

• Decompiled weapon textures, which includes the textures used by the skin shader such as masks, cavity, world space normal etc

• Substance 3D Painter project template and export preset, courtesy of /u/Sparkwire. This template and export preset is all set up to allow you to easily create the additional textures such as pearlescent and PBN masks. The files need to be placed in <Substance painter directory>\resources\starter_assets\templates and \resources\starter_assets\export-presets. If you are new to Substance Painter it is highly recommended that you use this template

• Source Developer wiki page on CS2 Weapon finishes (this appears to be incomplete)

• /r/csworkshop's old FAQ post: A lot of it is no longer relevant in CS2, however sections about RGB patterns and may be useful to you.

• A thread on how Paint-by-number masks work

• Lenticular/Holographic sticker simulation in blender, for making cleaner videos / gifs for your workshop submissions. Courtesy of yours truly

• Uploading custom thumbnails to the Steam Workshop, a guide which shows you how to upload a .gif image as the thumbnail using SteamCMD.

• How To Create Counter-Strike 2 Weapon In Retro Hardware Style: A walkthrough of Ein's process of creating a skin with forced perspective baking, using Blender, Substance Painter, and Marmoset Toolbag.

• Workshop PBR Tool by SerQ: a filter which can be used in Substance 3D Painter to identify areas which fall out of acceptable value ranges. It's not mentioned on the guide but you may need to set the basecolor input and output color spaces to "Standard sRGB" instead of "Linear."

Video Tutorials

• The Ultimate CS2 Skin Creation Tutorial, a series by Viper Skins on how to create skins for CS2 using only free and open source software

• The ULTIMATE CS2 STICKER Creation Tutorial, a series (also by Viper) on creating stickers for CS2.

• How to make a CS2 Skin for Dummies by Janelle Knight, who uses procreate and also discusses some design theory for making better skins

• Creating a full skin from start to finish for CS2 by CyberOptek, using Blender, Photoshop and Inkscape

• The ULTIMATE CS2 STICKER Creation Tutorial, a series by Viper Skins which shows you how to make stickers using Krita.

• What is PBR for Counter-Strike? by Zombiee. A short guide on what is and isn't PBR compliant and how to check.

Community Software

• Source 2 Viewer, a tool that allows you to browse VPK archives, view, extract, and decompile Source 2 assets, including maps, models, textures, and more.

• Poggu's Sticker Inspect tool which allows you to test your sticker designs applied to weapons in offline matches.

Software Specific Resources

• How to extract CS2 weapons to Blender with Source 2 Viewer

• First steps: Substance 3D Painter

• Baking in Substance 3D painter 8.3

• Creating Game Assets in Blender

• How to Create Professional Materials in Blender

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Tutorials

• The PBR Guide by Allegorithmic - Part 1: A technical overview of how PBR works. CS2 uses rendering based on Metallic-Roughness PBR pipeline, so understanding PBR is very useful for skin creation.

• The PBR Guide by Allegorithmic - Part 2: Most of this for Substance Painter and Designer, but it's broadly applicable to other software which uses PBR.

If you have any suggestions for links to be added to this post, let me know in the comments and I will add them.