CodeWalker and Photoshop, or a browser — two ways to skin a weapon

#The manual route, honestly described

1. Open the .ytd and export its textures. A weapon usually has between four and a dozen.
2. Work out which one is the visible body. Names are rarely helpful, so you find out by editing one and looking.
3. Open it in an image editor and place the logo somewhere that looks right in a flat 2D view.
4. Save it back in the compression format the original used, with the same mip levels.
5. Re-import into the .ytd, rebuild the resource, restart the server, and look at it in game.
6. Discover the logo sits on the underside of the magazine, and start again.

The step that costs the most time is the third. A texture is a flat sheet with no obvious relationship to the shape it wraps; a rectangle that looks like the side of the receiver is often the inside of the handguard.

#What the browser route changes

The difference is not the editing, it is the placement. The mesh is loaded, the triangles facing the flat side of the weapon are found, and those are rasterised back into UV space to produce a mask of the area a player actually sees. The artwork then goes on the largest calm rectangle inside that mask matching its aspect ratio.

So the answer to which texture, and where on it, is computed from the model rather than guessed from a thumbnail. The compression format and the mip chain survive because the file is written back into its original dictionary rather than rebuilt from scratch.

#When the manual route is still the right one

• You are changing the mesh, not the texture — a new rail, a longer barrel, a fixed UV map
• You want to hand-paint the whole weapon rather than place artwork on it
• You are building the weapon from scratch and need control of every material
• You are learning how the format works, which is worth doing once

For putting a crew logo, an emblem or a camo tile onto an existing model, the manual route is a long way round to the same place.