After months of work, I'm finally finished with the mod/addon!
This pack includes textures for shirts, sweaters, aprons, hats, and more. Most of them are accurate to their real-life counterparts (though I’ve taken creative liberties with some of them). Now you no longer have to settle with the stock textures!
Now available on the Steam Workshop: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2584209973
UPDATE: The Source Filmmaker version is now available! Get it here.
This pack includes textures for:
-Apple
-CrazyWare
-Best Buy
-Starbucks
-McDonald's
-UPS
-Burger King
-Dairy Queen
-Pizza Hut
-7-Eleven
-KFC
-Subway
-Tesla
-Rally's
-Family Dollar
-Little Caesar's
-Papa John's
-Domino's
-Dunkin' Donuts
And more!
How to Use
To use this, you need both the SubMaterial tool and the Extended Spawn Menu. You can find the textures in the Materials/Browse Materials tab in the spawn menu. Scroll down until you see “Splatoon - Uniform Textures”.
Expand the “models” folder. Find the texture you want to use and right-click it. Copy it to the clipboard, then go to the Tools menu. Select the SubMaterial tool. Paste the texture path into the search bar (make sure it appears exactly as it should or it won’t work) and press Enter. Then use the tool to apply it to the clothing or headgear.
Development
I've been secretly working on this project since June. It originally began as a small experiment--one of the first textures I tested was the McDonald's texture for the polo shirt from Splatoon--however, once I was pleased with how it turned out in the game, I decided to turn it into a full-fledged mod.
I wanted most of the uniforms to be as accurate as possible to their real-life counterparts. I spent months doing a ton of research, in this area. I've looked at hundreds of photos, watched numerous videos, and downloaded many logos (many of them were SVG files--more on that, below).
This shirt's a little too shiny. A few adjustments, here, and...perfect!
Work was done on getting the textures to render correctly in GMod. Different models render some aspects of textures, such as logos, in different ways. On the Firefin shirts, for example, logos appear as they should, without any additional scaling or stretching. For other types of clothing though, such as polo and long-sleeve shirts, they're stretched horizontally or vertically. Thus, I had to scale them so they appeared correctly on these types of gear.
A lot of progress had been made on the bump maps, as well. I edited these in GIMP, using various tools such as the healing and clone tools.
I've also done a lot of work on the material files. The textures appeared a bit too shiny in the game, so I experimented with the $phong, $phongboost, and $phongexponent values until they appeared as they should.
For the logos, I downloaded many of them as SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files. In short, an SVG, or vector graphic, is a computer-made image that is composed of points, lines, and curves that are based upon mathematical equations, not pixels. It can be scaled to any size, without any loss of quality.
I modified them in Inkscape and copy-pasted them in GIMP. Further changes were made in GIMP, for some uniform textures. This is why the logos appear almost crisp and clear.
For some of my textures, I took parts of photos, such as pictures of shirts, pasted them, moved them to the right places, and modified them. Basically, I used these as the basis for the textures. This is why the McDonald's polo shirt looks very detailed.
It took a ton of trial and error to get the uniforms just right. I had to make sure parts of the textures appeared on the right parts of the models. VTFs and VMTs can be edited while Garry's Mod is running, so you can go back into the game and see the changes. During development (remember, it took me two months to finish it), GMod crashed numerous times, and I had to relaunch it, and wait for an hour for everything to load.
In total, I've created about 254 files. This includes textures and material files.
Getting it ready for the Workshop was another task I had to complete. I spent hours creating screenshots and the thumbnail you see at the top of this article, and writing the description for the addon. I submitted it using Crowbar.
Conclusion
What began as a small experiment eventually became a full-on mod for GMod. I had fun making it, and I hope you enjoy using it. Feel free to use this in your work, be it artwork, videos, dupes, or even fangames! This will definitely help Splatoon content creators add more spice and realism to their creations.
New updates to the addon are added regularly. Stay tuned!