greetings good people and welcome back to a new episode of my CS2 skin making tutorial Series in the previous parts we completed the creation of my beautiful Nova Relic skin and baked the needed UV maps and created the TJ files for these maps in this video we will see how to put these files to good use by loading them into the workshop item editor of CS2 and talk about the settings of the new tool so what is this new tool and why do we need it the workshop item editor is the place where you load your skin files in order to set the Skins setting and inspect it also the editor is where you eventually submit the skin to the workshop if you ever got to make skins for csgo then this tool is the equivalent of the workshop workbench generally speaking the new tool is an improvement of the old one as we'll see in a few minutes so where do we find the tool we go to steam Library Counter Strike 2 manage properties DLC and check the box next to the Workshop Tools this will start the installation process of the Workshop Tools on your computer when the installation is done click on play and in the dialogue that opens select the second option that says Counterstrike 2 Workshop Tools click play in the new dialogue that opens click on launch Workshop item tools and wait for the editor and the game to open so this is the new workshop item editor let's start with the left panel this area is called the outliner this is where you create entries of your skins currently we can see three folders for this tutorial we'll only discuss the paint kit folder because that's the folder where you'll add your skins so let's expand it inside the folder there are nine subfolders each folder represents a skin type which are explained in the weapon finishes guide you choose the style of your skin by right clicking on the folder of that style and choose create new paint kit the Nova Relic skin is a gunsmith skin so I'll create an entry in the gunsmith folder by the way you can't use spaces capital letters or special characters in the name just small letters numbers and underscores now that we created an entry when we click on it we get a large group of settings on the right let's start with this section over here in the name section you can change the name of the skin entry however after you save your skin this field will be grayed out so if you later decide to change the name you'll have to create a copy of the entry the Finish field lets you change the skin style if you do change it then the entry will move to the folder of the new style I'll undo that by pressing the undo button above before we go any further I will click on save as to save the skin and this is where things turn stupid you will have to save your files in this folder or any subfolder that you create here if you choose anywhere else to save your files outside this folder you will be greeted with this error let's hope that one day this gets fixed because personally it annoys me more than it should but but in the meantime I'm going to create a new folder here and save my file in it as you can see the extension of the file is econ item this file will contain the settings of the skin if you ever created CSO skins then this is the equivalent of the txt file that we used to create before saving copy the path of the folder because we'll need it very soon down here we find the albo texture field that's where we add our albo map if we click here we'll find many TGA files which contain all sorts of images provided by Valve most of them are examples to textures stickers and sprays rtj files need to appear here as well in order for us to select them and how will they appear in this dialogue we need to copy them to the same stupid path so open File Explorer and paste the path in the address and copy the TGA file there and while we're at it let's also copy the normal and roughness Maps as well and now when I search for the TJ files they appear and and now I can select them we're still on the albo texture so I'll double click on the albo map let's inspect our weapon and see what we have so far but before we do that we can see here that the weapon is set to AK-47 let's change that to Nova because that's what we made that skin for let's press inspect and see what we get so this is our skin well yeah but we still haven't set the settings correctly and that's why it looks messed up first thing we notice is that we don't have the correct Textures in their proper place in order to fix that we need to go back to the editor and look at three things texture scale weapon size and offsets first in the list is the texture scale field this field is more relevant to pattern based skins if you have a pattern and it looks too large when applied on the weapon then you can increase this value and the pattern will repeat itself more and look smaller if you want your weapon to look exactly how you designed it in blender then make sure that this value is set to one and that the ignore weapon size scale is checked these are the default values so there's nothing to change here so that leaves us with the only suspects guilty of messing up the skin the offsets there are three offset values rotation X and Y offsets as with the texture scale these three values are only relevant to pattern skins they are responsible for causing pattern skin drops to look different however when we're dealing with baked textures like the Nova Relic then we want these values to be constant so let's set the maximum and minimum values to zero which will limit the offset values to zero let's inspect our skin again and see how the changes affected the Skin So this looks better than before but still very different from what we made in blender now in order to understand what's going on here with the colors I'll need to explain briefly what the gunsmith style is all about this style gives a metallic look to some parts of the weapon and regular non-metallic look for the other parts it basically combines the patina style which is fully metallic for the finishable parts and the custom paint job style which is fully non-metallic so this is the gunsmith style in a nutshell which brings me to the colors section these colors Define the behavior of the metallic parts of the gunsmith skin the patina tint changes the color of the patina parts of a gunsmith skin so even though in blender we chose a light gray color for the metal part now it has turned to purple thanks to this color so let's change this color to white and this will give us our original color back the rest of the color values are relevant for when the skin wears out we'll get to them in a few minutes let's inspect our skin again and now we see a great Improvement we're almost there but something is still off we see that the pump and the back of the stock look a bit metallic which makes them look brighter than the size of the stock the reason for this is that in the gunsmith style each weapon in Counter Strike has predefined areas that receive the patina Parts by default certain areas like the body of the Nova the pump and the back of the stock get the patina or metallic Parts however a new feature that came with CS2 is that now we can override the default distribution of patina parts we can do so using the custom material mask at the bottom of the the list if we check the box we get the option of providing yet another image so let's open one last time in order to create this material mask so I opened the new session and imported the albo map we baked last video in the material mask anything that gets white color becomes patina and anything that gets black becomes non-metallic so since we want the gray areas to be patina we'll select those areas using the select by color tool pick the white color and fill the the selection using the fill tool for the wooden parts we invert the selection by pressing CR I choose a black color and fill when we're done export the image as a TJ file and copy the file to the same place where we saved our econ item file back to the editor we click on the magnifying glass icon and search for the file and choose it let's inspect the skin to see what happened and now it looks infinitely better of course we still not done we can see that the roughness is uniform across the Nova parts and that's because we still haven't uploaded our roughness map in the editor we can see a value called Paint roughness with the value or pointer at the right we can set a value that will be applied to the entire weapon but we don't need this value because we created a custom roughness map where the metal parts are shinier than the wooden ones so let's load it by checking the use roughness texture and choosing our map and let's also also load the normal map as well to see everything we created last video in action check the use custom normal map and load the normal map here let's inspect our skin again now we have the skin exactly how we made it in blender with rough wood and shiny metal textures and with our lovely Engravings decorating the skin let's take a moment to appreciate this [Music] beauty okay that's enough so this is how our skin looks in Factory New Wear level so how do we check other wear levels for that we come to this section right here using the pointer we can move between zero and one zero is Factory new and one is Battle card this value is just for inspection and won't affect the settings of your skin you can limit the range of the Skin's wear Levels by going down to the wear field below however be sure to include all wear levels in the range use specify according to the weapon finishes guide these are the ranges of each wear level so keep that in mind if you decide to lower the maximum wear by the way this value will affect the settings and will be included in the econ item file that you submit so let's see how we can Define the worn look of our skin and for that let's go back to the colors section the base metal patina wear and grime colors change how the skin looks in different wear levels the base metal is the color of the metal below the skin that's the color that appears if the skin gets scratched I'll choose a dark gray the patina wear is the color that the skin will change into the more you increase the wear level so I'll put another different dark gray and finally the grime is like dust or rust that accumulate on the weapon so for that I'll choose some brownish color I'll set the we level to the Max and see what we get now and now in battle card wear level the weapon looks old and Rusty but if I may say still maintains its beauty one more thing worth mentioning is a nice tool called convar this tool helps you detect whether there are colors in your skin that are outside the allowed range in the weapon finishes guide under the physically based rendering section they mention these values colors for metallic Parts should be between 180 to 250 but they might accept values as low as 90 and colors for non-metallic parts should be between 55 to 220 these color ranges should get the respect they deserve and the proof for that is the direct threat that follows at the end of this [Music] paragraph So using the help of the convar we can detect if we made the unforgivable mistake of choosing colors that are too dark or too bright in order to access the convir tool we need to open the the console to find out which key opens the console for you go check in the settings when you open the console click on the fourth button that says convar and the tool will open on the right side make sure that the page is set to CS2 workshop and then you'll see all sorts of options the one we need is the albo option click on it and go back to the weapon inspection if you see the original colors of the skin that means everything is okay if you see blue that means the colors you chose are too dark and below the allowed range and if you see pink that means the colors are too bright and above the range here's an example of a skin with colors out of range and how the comar will make it look to disable the effect click on albo again and the skin will go back to its original textures when you get bored inspecting your skin you can click on preview to see your skin in game you can set the Skins wear level as we did earlier and that's what we'll see in the preview also you can choose one of three maps to preview the weapon hopefully one day they'll add more maps options when you're ready click on preview and enjoy playing with your skin so this is the workshop item editor in many ways it's better than the previous workbench of csgo at least now we don't have to hack the system in order to view our skins in game but still it can definitely be improved let's hope that valve doesn't ignore this important aspect of the game and invest some resources in develop the editor further in the next and final video of this tutorial we will see how to submit the skin and we'll give you some nice tips that can help your submissions stand out more in the workshop until then take care and see you soon