1. Introducing the Texture Tool
2. Aligning Textures

Applying Textures

We've briefly encountered the Texture Tool in Working with Brushes. Let's now get into the details about the Texture Toolbox. It looks complex at first, but it's an extremely powerful tool.

Load up our practice map firstmap again. I'll demonstrate texture application using these two rooms.

Press Shift-A to bring up the Texture Toolbox. The texture displayed is the current active texture. You can change the functionalities of the button on right. The default mode is "Lift and Select".

Texture Toolbox

Texturing the Floor

The default texture is always "brick/brickfloor001a". I didn't bother changing it because I wanted to keep things simple in constructing our first room. But a room with unadorned brick wall and brick ceiling, not to mention the brick floor, is quite unattractive and claustrophobic. We'll change the texture of the floor first.

While working with textures, it's a lot easier to get direct feedback on your map by turning on textures in the 3D view. So click on the "camera" option in the 3D view and select "3D Textured". You should be able to see all the textures in your map now.

With the Texture Toolbox in front of you, you can still fly around in the 3D view. So navigate until you see the floor of the smaller room, and click it. It should turn red, which means that surface is now selected. Please note the difference between selecting the entire brush versus selecting a surface of the brush. Each cubic brush has six surfaces, and each surface can have a different texture. So when you select one side of the brush with the Texture Tool, you're only selecting that surface.

From the Texture Toolbox, click on "Browse..." to open up the Texture Browser. Your screen will be filled with a large selection of textures supported by CS:S. Personally, I like to resize the Texture Browser window to display more textures on the screen. Realize that some textures in CS:S are not supported by Half-Life 2, and vice versa. So if you're porting a map from HL2 to CS:S, some of the textures might get replaced with different textures.

The collection of textures is huge in CS:S, so it's inefficient to scroll through the entire collection to find the texture you want. This is where the filter comes in handy. The filter allows you to find only the textures with a certain keyword, and Valve is kind enough to carefully name all the textures appropriately.

The textures are named contextually but also accordingly to the material they're made of. For example, if you type "wall" into the filter, you'll only see the wall textures. If you filter "plaster", you'll see a bunch of materials that are all made of plaster. Since we're looking for a floor texture, let's type in "floor" in the filter.

Texture Browser

Scroll down a few pages until you find the floor texture "de_dust/tilefloor02" and double-click on it. The Texture Browser will close and it becomes the current texture. With the Texture Tool still active, right-click on the floor in the 3D view. You'll notice only one section of the floor has changed texture. That's because the floor of the larger room belongs to part of a separate brush. Fly over the the other room and right-click on the floor to texture it with the same floor texture.

While we're on the topic of texture selection, there is something very important to keep in mind when you pick textures. Never use a texture labeled "model" on your brushes! Doing so would result in visual errors in your map in-game. Trust me on this. This is one of the most common mistakes for beginner mappers. Whenver you see the word "model/" in the texture name, avoid it.

There is one notable exception to this rule, and I'll mention it in the Advanced Lighting tutorial. For now, just stay away from model textures.