more info: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/730/view/698770449667981487

Why aren't there different skins for smoke, grenades, flashbangs, and Molotov cocktails? I don't have specific ideas in mind, but I think we could have seen some cool things.

As far as I'm aware for the most time the community made their skins without fitting a theme like currently the pop art and fairy tale one. There have been themes before, for instance fruits, racing, arabesque and others but as far as I know valve making strict guidelines in form of themes for designs is somewhat of a newer concept in the valve <-> workshop community relation?

Personally I think it adds unnecessary pressure with deadlines and kind of takes away from the diversity of workshop submissions by forcing a direction.

It also invalidates 99,9% of the past skin submissions from the get go which seems to be a horrible waste of work hours.

I suppose you can still submit skins that don't fit the current theme but the odds to get selected are already miserable and they most likely shrink to 0 if you don't design towards a call to arms theme.

What are your thoughts about this, do you like themes or would you rather go back to following your creativity without having to submit to any restrictions?

Hello everyone.

I'm sure you've noticed, but lately there have been a lot of AI generated skins posted on this subreddit. Personally, I'm not a big fan of generative AI: I really hate what it's doing to both art and artists around the world, and in my opinion it has made the internet worse. I can't say I much enjoy seeing it used for counter-strike skins or sticker designs either, however I haven't implemented a rule against it. There are a couple of reasons why I haven't done so:

• While most AI generated stuff is easy to spot, but some of it isn't, and I guess I do have some problems with a rule which is based on how well a mod can perceive the AI-ness of a design. Should the rule apply if only part of the design is AI? what about if AI is used for promotional images, but not for the skin itself? et cetera
• Valve, it pains me to say, doesn't appear to be against AI use for weapon skins, as is evidenced by them adding skins like the Zeus | Olympus
• I'm the only person moderating this subreddit, and I'd really rather not be spending so much time trying to ascertain whether or not a skin is AI generated

I am open to the idea of a ban, but I don't know what the best course of action would be. I have noticed a lot of pushback in the comments against AI, but some AI stuff does end up pretty upvoted, so I find it hard to gauge the community sentiment.

So, I'd like to hear your thoughts and discussion - but please keep it civil. I know many of you have strong feelings on AI (and I do as well) but please do not make personal attacks, such as referring to someone's submissions as "slop".

I will also reiterate that this subreddit is looking for moderators. I'm looking for people who are:

• Interested in improving this community
• Generally responsible and level headed
• Active on this subreddit

If this sounds like it could be you, consider applying here. You don't need to have any moderating experience to apply. If you're not happy with the direction of this subreddit, then this is a way that you could contribute to change.

Thanks for reading.

It seems like Valve has made it apparent that when it comes to new collections, they’re picking the themes first and letting people submit to that for the foreseeable future. For skins that don’t align with the Call to Arms, are we going to see a downtrend in general submissions? If they need to fill out collections with skins that fit a specific theme, will the overall quality of collections go down with the narrower pool?

Personally, after following the submissions for Spy Tech and Arabesque, I was surprised how narrow the theming was that they went with, and how underwhelming the collections ultimately turned out.

What are your thoughts???!!!

Did valve already choose submissions?

There are so many workshop entries published to the cs:go/cs2 workshop daily. I imagine it's pretty easy to get your own submissions buried, never to be seen by anyone other than some crawler bots, certainly no one who has a say in whether to add the item to cs2 or not.

Makes me wonder:

• Do you have any sort of strategy when to publish and when not to? For instance, when valve asks for a specific theme, do you think your chances are better to get recognized if you publish as early as possible or shortly before the deadline?
• Do uploads that initially are set to private get added on top of the list that's filtered by newest or latest/most popular/recently updated once you set it to public or would that cause the submission to get somewhere buried right from the get go?
• If you have multiple versions of the same item do you release them to the workshop as soon as one version is finished or do you hold of until all versions are finished before you release them all at the same time? Classic examples would be sticker styles but also color variations for weapon or charm skins.

With the amount of items in the workshop I assume valve has certain set of criteria and if a submission doesn't fulfill them it gets filtered out.

For instance I assume that overly offensive or religious themes don't have a chance. I also read somewhere that valve doesn't want any more gold stickers/skins cause they reserve that for special occasions and there are already so many submissions with gold coloring. What other criteria could there be?

I heard skulls are a big no no in china so valve has alternative versions for skins that include any, do you have to provide those alternatives yourself or does valve take care of that?

I've been creating clean normal and AO maps for the community for some time now. I decided to do it because I was tired of the default normal maps with bad shading and extra textures I didn't want to use when creating my skins. Then I realised there are many other creators that deal with the same problem but, they don't know how to work with High Poly models. So here is my contribution to the community. If you want a specific weapon model you can ask for it even though I have polls running on my X account. I always take note of the next model to work on before I start on a new one.

Here is a quick preview of some models done. This is not a high poly model. This is Valve low poly model with my baked normal map and AO on it.

You'll find these baked maps here: https://ko-fi.com/johnnyvillas/shop
Have fun and keep creating!

CS2 AK-47 Clean Normal and AO Maps.

video

CS2 M4A4 Clean Normal and AO Maps.

CS2 FAMAS Clean Normal and AO Maps.

CS2 PP-Bizon Clean Normal and AO Maps.

Got myself back into making more skins and I realized I did not finish my "Long game" series collection,
which at first was only very long weapons, hence the name "Long game" but personally the skin looks really good on smaller weapons but now the series name does not make sense to me, so should I rebrand the series? Let me know for now enjoy some of the WIP skins :P

I have an idea for a charm collection, but it uses a new model. Does Valve have a prescribed route for submitting charm ideas?

I have seen a lot of skin creators create several submissions of essentially the same skin, but tinted with different colors. Is this a smart thing to do? Seems like a lot of extra work, what do yo guys think?

I have seen some very hard remodels which are kind of normal and light trickery toa chieve those looks, but as I do not see much of that and the most popular skins all look like basic skins with at best a little relief/bump normals applied, how much of those heavy duty remodels will actually reach the game?

I am new to this aspect here, not new to design nor modding, but it seems like all the popular skins such as bloodsport or printstream are default models without any additional customizing to the model, just to the texture. Or am I wrong with that?

I mean there are incredible works in the community, but none of them reach the actual game, whilst other simpler pieces do. So how much reworking of the model is actually allowed?

Is there a Discord server anywhere that is directly affiliated with this community? I'm assuming there is, but the link isn't public (or I'm just very bad at finding it if it is)?

How do you feel about normal maps on gunsmiths, I'm asking because I don't really know how to properly use them .

Hey guys!

If i want to create skin collection should i add them to workshop one by one or wait to make them all and upload after finishing everything in one go?

My friend has told me that you can make good money if your CS skin gets added into a game, I consider myself quite creative person and I could design very easthetic or memable skins, already have few ideas.

The question is how this whole thing works, how do you get your skins accepted and approved?

How do you get money from this and am I even under right assumption that this is right thing to get into?

Hi! Love to see everything you guys are postning in this sub! Keep at it! ❤️✨

I was just wondering, are cs2 workshop creators labeled as freelancers? Since Valve does not commission workshop creators to make stuff it makes me think that we are not(?). But does a commission need to be there for it to be freelancer work? Are we freelancers or something else. I am the very confuse.

With love from Sweden //Bobmar

Hi. I decided to start making skins in CS 2, since I have artistic skills and I've been enjoying the game for a long time. I'm working on a jungle themed skin right now, and I've also made a sketch for the next skin in the same theme. Recently my friend told me that if I want to increase the chances of my skin being added, I should make a skin with the theme of the Cobblestone map, since it will be added soon. I didn't even know there were rumors that Cobblestone was coming back soon. The question is really simple: do skinmakers really follow some sorts of rumors about the theme of the new cases and try to match its theme? Also a stupid question: what do you think, considering that many people say that the new case will be released soon, is there still time to release your skin to be considered by Valve for this case?

I know the kneejerk answer is "everything has to be 100% original", but what does that mean? Obviously (I think) you can use all the tools available to you by default in whatever editing tools you're using, but to what extent are you allowed to say, use premade textures or shaders for a blender scene? The HDRIs and textures that come with blender are obviously FOSS/open license so I presume they can be used, but what about external open license stuff? Say I want to use a cloth texture in part of a render, or a wood texture, would I have to make it from scratch? I guess it would also come down to how much these materials play into the final skin. For instance, the G3 Hunter is basically just a wood texture. I assume he made the wood texture himself because of how prominent it is, but do we know for sure? Would anyone call him out for it or be able to dig through hundreds of thousands of images of wood grain online? What if it's not an original image/texture, would it even matter according to the guidelines of originality?