Tools of the Trade

[Habber T Mancer]

Though I've been participating in map tests for as long as I can remember, I've only made a handful of maps and they were uploaded, tested, and deleted years ago and Meet your Match kind of killed my enjoyment with TF2 so I put it down for a while. But, I've been playing with Hammer again lately and came to realize a lot has changed in the 4 years since I touched it...

In short, what programs and tools do you guys use these days? Even a lot of the resources that are pinned in the forums seem like they've been superseded or added on to like ABS, so I have no clue where to restart my mapping journey.

 

[Moonrat]

I think that it's still mostly ABS for everything and Compile Pal for compiling.

 

[Zeus]

Heres what i use for stuff

Mapping

• Hammer
• CompilePal

Modeling

• Crowbar
• Blender

Texturing

• VTF Edit
• GCF Scape
• Gimp
• Substance Painter

 

[Pocket]

The Slammin' Source Tools version of Hammer immediately replaced the original for me; even just the stability and being able to preview displacement blends in real time is a massive game-changer. I imagine the improvements made to the compiler will be too, once I get around to having a map to compile again.

 

[Xbmann]

When working with blender, some good tools to look into are SourceIO and SourceOps, or alternatively Blender Source Tools

 

[Zeus]

When working with blender, some good tools to look into are SourceIO and SourceOps, or alternatively Blender Source Tools

Didn't know those existed. I like that source ops generates you'r qc file

 

[Pocket]

Wait, you've been making props without export plugins? You absolute madman!

 

[Zeus]

Oh no I've used blender source tools haha.

 

[Habber T Mancer]

Seems we've all learned something here. Thanks for keeping me in the know everyone,