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In our opinion, no artistic medium offers a better opportunity to express a PC gamer’s individuality and inappropriate sense of humor like a personal decal “spray” projected on your enemy’s spawn room wall during a multiplayer match. While Valve has made it a mostly painless process to import spray images into their Source engine-based games, the difficulty still lies in creating an original image you can be proud to vandalize next to an enemies corpse. And since no game offers more opportunities to grief friends and enemies than Left 4 Dead, we’re going to show you a flawless technique for creating your own ‘writing on the wall’, pun absolutely intended.
What you need:- Photo editing software, GIMP
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You’ll need image editing software such as Photoshop or Paintshop, though less expensive (and free) alternatives such as Gimp are available that offer the same tools required for this job. For user convenience this tutorial will use Gimp, though it is important to note most modern editing programs consist of similar tools, options and terminology, so don’t worry about specificity of tools. Other programs will follow the same guidelines.
After opening Gimp, select File > New, which will bring up the New Image dialog box. All sprays have a resolution of 256x256 pixels, which you should input into the Height and Width boxes (make sure the units are set to pixels). Now in the Fill Width box, make sure you set it to Transparency. This will make the background invisible, so when you use a spray in-game you will only see the graffiti, and not a white square box. After pressing OK, you are now ready to start working on your blank image!
Next, let’s customize the interface to make designing our spray a little easier. Select File > Dialogs > Tool Options. This opens the Tool Options dialog box, which will change in context with the tools you select. If you would prefer to dock it with your tool selections, click the area of the Tool Options menu that says Text (if the Font Tool is selected) and drag it under the tools on the main Gimp window where it says “You can drop dockable dialogs here”. Also, open the Layers dialog box through File > Dialogs > Layers, which can be docked the same way.
At this point you have a few options for designing the look of your graffiti. We recommend visiting www.dafont.com or another website that provides free-to-use user made fonts. There, you can find some great styles in the Handwriting category under Script (it is important to note each artist has conditions for using their font, usually found in a Readme file bundled with the font download). Once you’ve chosen a font, download and install it. Open My Computer > Control Panel > Fonts, then drag-and-drop the font (extracted from the .rar file using WinRAR) into the Font folder to install it. Remember the font’s name so you can easily find it for the next step!
Comments are closed on this article
bjtalbot
March 23, 2009 at 9:42am
Thanks for the great how-to!
I was able to make a spray for left 4 dead...but the same spray doesn't work for TF2..what gives?
Shaun Rykiss
June 07, 2009 at 10:51am
Glad to hear the how-to was helpful!
Unfortuantely you need to jump through a few extra hoops to import a VTF into TF2. You'll have to manually copy/move the VTF file into the following directory:
C:\Program Files\Steam\SteamApps\USERNAME\team fortress 2\tf\materials\VGUI\logos
Then go back into TF2 and import it from that directory and it should work! I guess it was just an inconsistancy in the infrastructure between TF2 and L4D. Good luck!
Shaun Rykiss
February 04, 2009 at 11:01pm
I simply use winRAR as my default compression tool, but 7-zip works great too and is worth looking into.
Svetty Parabols
February 02, 2009 at 8:51pm
as long as you save it as an uncompressed .tga, you should be able to get the game to recognize it and load it...but i have been wrong before.
Unless you guys are using a *cough* bootleg *cough* copy >: )
Shaun Rykiss
February 04, 2009 at 10:59pm
You are correct, partially at least. You CAN import TGAs, however they must be formatted as a 24-bit RGB or a 32-bit RGBA .tga file. And PNGs are not supported at all. Converting to a VTF is easiest, and if you happen to be making an animated spray you must convert the animation into a VTF. Plus importing an image in-game converts it to a VTF anyway. Thanks for pointing that out though!
