Can Warpaint Textures be Used as Brush Textures?

The title is the TL;DR, you don't have to read the whole thing. Also, sorry about the poor state this was in at initial posting- for some reason the forum refused to post until I refreshed the page several times, which cut off a lot of the text.

So, I encountered a problem. I have two areas in my map that were in neutral territory between Red and Blu. One will be a "beneficial to both teams" kind of area, with heath & ammo packs aplenty, and the other will be an area that's hostile to both teams, with hazards such as live explosives, spinning sawblades, bottomless pits, etc.

In order to properly tell the players where these areas start and end, the "beneficial to both teams" is themed purple and yellow (think, The Administrator, Ms. Pauling, Merasmus on a good day), and the "hostile to both teams" area is themed (dark) grey and green (think, Grey Mann, Olivia Mann, Zepheniah Mann, Merasmus on a bad day). After a very long time digging into the materials of TF2 and HL2, I found a reasonable amount of (dark) grey, green, and yellow textures. Not a lot, especially of green, but a serviceable amount for one map.

There are, like, four purple textures in the entire goddamn game.
I had to make do with some really, uh, "creative" use of textures, such as cropping out the purple part of the striped wallpaper from Mann Manor, a purple-adjacent dev test texture, something from a grain silo, and some tile floors from HL2 that look kinda purpley if you kinda squint.

I usually want to use as little packing and custom content as possible in maps, so I was looking around; there's a ton of purple textures on all the new warpaints that they're doing. Just, in general, they can be really nice textures. Is there a way to point the editor to use those textures? They are in the game, after all.

henke37 said:

Normally you'd just be able to use the existing materials, but the shader used is likely not suitable for what you want, so you will have to craft material files of your own. But that's little more than a tiny boilerplate textfile in most cases.

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Cyberen said:

Yes, anything you can find, you can make a custom vmt or vmf for. You just need a VMT if you know the filepath to the vtf.

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It sounds surprisingly doable :0 ! Now I just need to find where the file locations are, and how to write the custom material files googlin' time

L.A.1o2 said:

while I know a little (not a lot), you can create a custom texture and then convert it to vtf with vtfedit, like the custom "Coming soon" sign in my wip map cp_mall (https://tf2maps.net/downloads/cp_mall.11730/)

and this map is really beginning to peak my interest, I can't wait for it!

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Thank ye ! To possibly tame your interest a bit, it's a ctf map, but I'll consider changing it to 5cp if there isn't much interest in that gamemode.

The main theme of the map is separation, thus the name ctf_schism. It separates the intel capture point from the intel room(s), and instead of just playing the same intel to 3 captures, each intel briefcase is in a different place, every capture opening up more of the enemy base. The first intel cap will be extremely easy to get, but the next one gets less and less easy to capture and deeper into the enemy base until the last cap, which should be about as difficult as a standard ctf map, but with lots of flank routes and potential escapes for intel carriers. Also no crits on cap because that's bs imho, especially since this map is supposed to make the first two captures easier, lol. I've heard of people attempting this concept before, but I wanted to try my own hand at it.

Unrelated, I love the setting of malls, thought of that when I saw your map. I have a (different map from this one) themed around a mall also, which actually was the "secret" one I was talking about having funny skybox problms on, hahaha.