Easy-Peasy Sprays - How to make good-looking sprays

A quick guide to male simple, good-looking sprays-- and with a streamlined process!

Intro

Sprays.

What more needs to be said?

Whether it's a crude meme, custom-made insignia, animated image, or just straight up hentai, sprays are an incredibly iconic part of TF2-- and source games as a whole. You can't have a source game without having sprays.

Unfortunately, most people tend to just slap a .jpg in and call it a day. The problem is this often means the spray either looks bad, or doesn't work. I, for one, am a fine connoisseur of high-quality custom content, no matter how stupid, so I want to share my process for quickly and easily making sprays that look nice.

The Basics

So, sprays; what are they and how do they work?

Sprays are custom images you can set in your settings that you can plaster on any surface with the T key (by default). You need to make sure that "Enable Sprays" is turned on in your Advanced Options menu (or do "cl_spraydisable 0" in console). They're disabled by default! Also keep in mind that sprays are essentially disabled on casual servers; nobody else but the sprayer can see them. You must join a community server if you want to see other people's sprays.

TF2 accepts a multitude of different image formats, but I can go ahead and tell you not to waste your time just slapping in any old image-- there's an art to crafting a good-looking spray.

Before we start, you may be asking; what do I need for this? I must have to install something.
The answer is nothing. At most, you need an image manipulation program (something like paint.net or GIMP works just fine).

You may have seen other guides suggesting you install VTFEdit, and while that's a fantastic program, you don't need it. Only if you REALLY want to be in control of your spray, I guess.

Anyway, let's get started, shall we?

Basic Walkthrough

This section is the barebones of what you need to do. I won't include any fancy image stuff to make the spray artistically look nicer; see the next section for that.

Let's take this image as an example. Art plug! :D

So, theoretically, I could just use this image as-is. But that would entail converting it to either a JPG, BMP, or TGA, each having their own drawbacks and making the process of the spray look nice incredibly asinine. Instead, we're going to convert the spray to a .VTF file.

What's a VTF file, you ask? It's a Valve Texture File-- the native image format of the Source engine. These natively support alpha (transparency) and even animated images.

To convert your image to a VTF, use this site[rafradek.github.io]. The process to do so is pretty simple.
If anyone knows who made this tool, let me know and I'll credit them.

1. Upload your image.
   
2. Change the scale if needed. The tool should do this automatically.
   
3. Set the texture format to DXT5. This is very important for images with transparent backgrounds.
   
4. Name the file whatever you want. Doesn't matter.
   
5. Click "Save as VTF".

Now, cut/copy that file and navigate to your TF2 installation folder. If you don't know that by now, it should be C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Team Fortress 2.
Go to \tf, and make a folder called "sprays". Put your VTF file in there.
This is all just for organization, so you can keep your sprays organized.

Now, open TF2 and open Options > Multiplayer. Click "Import Spray..." and use the VTF file you made. And voila! Your image is a good-looking spray.


Of course, that's not all there is to sprays; read on to learn how to make fading sprays, animated sprays, and learn tips to make more artistically-inclined sprays look even better.

Fading Sprays

Fading sprays are a staple of more, ah, artistic sprays. The image changes depending on whether the player is close to the spray. They do this by taking advantage of a Source engine feature called Mipmaps.

Mipmaps are essentially the base image of a VTF texture procedurally scaled down in size that fade. Lower-resolution textures are easier for your computer to render, so the game automatically uses lower quality Mipmaps when you're far away from a texture to save on GPU. We're going to take advantage of this feature to make one of the Mipmaps a different image.

The process is the same as before, but you want to upload your "near" image first. I'm using a troll face for this example.

Then, scroll down. You'll notice smaller copies of the image with "Choose Files" underneath them. Generally, you want your "far" image to be the 2nd image, right after the big "near" image.

The tool automatically sets any Mipmaps below the one you upload, so you only need to set 2 images.

Ideally, it should look like this.

Then, just download the VTF and put it in your Sprays folder. Voila!

Animated Sprays

Definitely one of the rarest sprays to see are animated ones. Let's learn to make them, shall we?

Our lovely tool actually innately supports uploading .gif files. No trickery required!

However, a massive disclaimer: animated sprays are limited to EXACTLY 3 FPS.

Unfortunately, that does mean you may have to remove frames in order to make the gif look nice. This also means that you're going to have to figure it out yourself, because it's very much a case-by-case basis. It's a very trial and error process to get it looking nice.
Your spray must also be less than 512kb in size. Sorry, but you can't put the entire Shrek movie as your spray.

Either way, this website[ezgif.com] is going to be your best friend working with .gifs. I use it frequently.

Besides that, I have very little to say on animated sprays because it's such a case-by-case basis, and it's rare that they'll even come out looking good. I recommend sticking to static sprays if you don't know what you're doing.

Artistic Tips

This final section is for art nerds like me that draw and stuff, and want to make a custom-made spray from the ground up. This is no longer a walkthrough, and more of a miscellaneous tips-n-tricks guide.

Sizing

It's important to keep in mind that a spray, at the maximum size, is just a bit taller than a dispenser.
Depending on the contents of your spray and what your intention is, this means you may need to scale it down or crop out part of it to make it look the way you want. I like to be eye-catching, so I try to limit any character to mid-torso or higher.
Also, while not *technically* required, it's recommended to make your image a square. It'll automatically be cropped to fit inside one anyway, so you might as well work with the bounds you'll have. If you want to be specific, I recommend a power of 2, such as 512x512, 720x720, or 1024x1024.

Standing Out

Something I like to do with my sprays is make them stand out. The simplest way to do that is to give them an eye-catching border. Give your image a white border around the content, and a small, hard drop shadow; it makes it look like a sticker.

There are other ways to go about doing this (such as giving the image a "glow", or my favorite; making a character pop out of a shape, Smash Ultimate style) and ultimately what you decide to do, if anything, is your artistic preference.

Miscellaneous Tips

These are just other miscellaneous tips that might help you with your custom spray. No particular order, and I may add suggestions from the comments.

• Using bright, saturated colors helps your spray stand out more, due to TF2's carefully-chosen desaturated palette for the maps.
  
• If you want ideas for what to draw for your spray, try looking up custom Discord emoji references.
  
• You can try to make your spray stand out just a little bit more by animating it. Give it a second frame, and have it switch between the two frames; something like a character waving or laughing.

[Maddesu]

Amazing guide

[Ankha | JIDF Killer]

I liked the guides logo more than the art