Category:Material System

Introduction

In the Source Material System, the visible Surface of a Brush, Model, Sprite, etc. is defined by it's Valve Material Type (VMT) file. Breakable physics prop models also derive some additional material properties from their Prop Data configuration.

Generally a Brush Material is a VMT designed for use with World Brushes (stored in game_dir/materials/), and a Skin is a VMT designed to be mapped onto a particular Model (stored in game_dir/materials/models). A Texture is a VTF file, used by either a Brush Material or a Skin - but rarely both. Usually VTFs are stored in the same folder as the VMTs that use them.

• Each VMT file defines which Shader and Shader Parameters to use to render the textures, which VTF textures to use to 'paint the polygons', and a number of surface collision effects such as the sounds and decals to use when bullet hits the surface.

• Each VTF or Valve Texture Format file, is basically a rasta image file or pixel-map. Most material surfaces will use more than one VTF; eg in addition to the ($basetexture) colormap or diffusemap , a normalmap, specularmap, etc. Specialist types of VTF include Animated Textures, Normalmaps, Heightmaps etc

• See also UV Mapping

Basics

• Creating a Texture using VTFEdit
• Material Creation - The basics of material creation.
• Materials for models - These are slightly different to Brush Materials.
• Materials for Brush Displacements - These are slightly different to ordinary Brush Materials.
• Decals - How to make decal and overlay materials.
• Skybox (2D) - How to use and make the cubic materials used for the sky.

Advanced topics

• Material Proxies - Advanced materials that can vary based on changing data.
• Water Shader - Description of the special water shader.
• Half-Life 2 Shader Fallbacks - Fallback settings of Half-Life 2 shaders on different platforms.
• DirectX Versions - How shaders are rendered on different versions of DirectX.

Useful applications

• See Category:Tools and Category:Third Party Tools