Making your own CS2 skin
Unleash your creativity!
A brief introduction
With the arrival of Counter-strike 2, Valve added the ability to create and edit skins directly on Steam with the ability to quickly upload a skin to the workshop. Thanks to the reworked steam workshop tools, that have been improved massively.
Let’s get started
Before we get started, we need to make sure we have the Workshop Tools installed. Load up CS2 and go into the settings. In the settings, you should be able to find an option for downloading the workshop tools. It should look a little something like this:
After we have selected the option to install the workshop tools, we can close out of CS2 and relaunch it, then you will see an option to enter the workshop tools.
After selecting the workshop tools and clicking play the workshop tools start up, go ahead and click on “Launch workshop item tools” and you should enter the workshop tools.
Getting the design
Now we need to come up with our own design, you can get an image from the internet, but make sure there is no copyright or anything attached, since you are obviously not allowed to use someone elses work. If you have found the right image we need to convert the image to a TGA (Targa) file. We can do so by going to any website that can convert that sorta thing, so I’ll let you find that on your own.
Applying the design
So, now that we have got the design, we want to test it out in-game. What we need to do is make sure we have our TGA (Targa) file ready to use. We go into the “Custom paint job” section on the left and click on the folder icon to open the folder in our file explorer, in here we can place the TGA file we want to use on our weapon.
Once we have placed our TGA (Targa) file into the workshop folder, we can reference it in the workshop tools. For example: If you have a dog.tga for example we want to reference that in the workshop tools. The path would look something like items/assets/paintkits/workshop/dog.tga
Once we have done this we can click on the gun icon or the crosshair in the top right of our screen to inspect the created skin.
If we inspect it, in my case, the skin looks something like this:
Now, this has been quite an easy example. Converting any image to a Targa (TGA) file. There are plenty of tutorials out there on the internet, going into more depth about making CS2 skins, like MarkayCS and ViperSkins. They both make amazing tutorials about CS2 skins and are definitely worth checking out.
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