Adding Your Pets To Maps

Gain companionship when mapping

It may be wise to hide or prominently feature your furry companions in the map. Seeing them during the design process can really help lift the spirits and give motivation when mapping.

I have been adding my cat, Jane, to all of my maps in hidden places, but also outside spawn during development.

jane the cat inside my map

Adding your animal is very easy, follow these steps!

1) Take a picture of your animal using your favorite camera (or camera phone, for those who are more modern than I!)

2) Scale/crop the image to be a power-of-two (square number)... Save it as a .jpg

3) Import the image into VTF EDIT (https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/VTFEdit)

Very important that you chose import to go from the jpg image and SAVE to go to vtf.

4) Save it to the location you want eg. "D:/Program Files (x86)/Steam/steamapps/common/pirates, vikings and knights ii/sdkbase_pvkii/materials/mrmapper/jane_cat.vtf" WITHOUT QUOTES.

5) Make a .vmt file next to the VTF with the following content ( CALL IT THE SAME NAME AS THE VTF )

"UnlitGeneric"
{
    "$basetexture" "mrmapper/jane_cat"
}

6) Restart Hammer World Editor and Use the material in the world!

I hope this helps some of you.

I have some older maps with some pets of mine that have sadly passed away, I really enjoy visiting those old maps to be with them again.