1. Open up the Dota 2 Workshop Tools.

2. Open the Material Editor from the toolbar above.



3. In the Material Editor, go to File and Click New.



4. Make sure your shader is set to Global Lit Simple which it should be by default. If it’s not, then just click on Shaders and change it to that. There are other options too. Feel free to experiment.



5. Save the material. Preferably in the same folder as your addon folder (steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/content/dota_addons/<addon_name>) under the materials directory where materials are generally stored. This will help the tools automatically compile the required formats read by the engine. I’ll save mine as test2_color.vmat

6. Once the material is saved, the preview should pop up. Your Material Tab editor should look like this. It’ll be all set to defaults.



7. Time to import your textures. You need to save it in the same directory as your vmat and under the same name. The format of your textures can be anything from the following - psd, tga, tif, pfm, mks, png or jpg. It should look something like this.



8. Once it’s saved in the right place, go back to the Material Editor. In the Properties > Variable panel, look for the Color property and click on the folder icon to load the directory browser and change your texture to what you want.



Once you load it in, the preview box should now have your texture updated.



9. Save the texture. You should now be able to find the texture inside your Asset Browser for use in the other tools.



10. Additionally if you want to improve your textures, you can just open it up in the Material Editor and enable options in the Properties Panel to load in more stuff like the Normal Maps, Translucency Variants, Specular Maps and etc. If they are named correctly, they will be looked up automatically if not you can always find their location and set them up.

Not just that but different Shaders (change by clicking the Shader button at the top of the Properties Panel) offer different options and the ability to import different maps. Check them out and tweak them to your needs.



11. For all content you create within the tools, a game compiled version will be automatically generated in the steamapps/common/dota 2 beta/game/dota_addons/<addon_name> folder as long you have the directories set accordingly in Step 5. In this case you can find the vmat_c and vtex_c files for what you created automatically generated here.

That's it for this guide. I'll do a more in-depth tutorial on how all the material property options work and the rest of the stuff you can do with the material editor in the future whenever time permits.

Until then if you got any queries, feel free to buzz me on my Facebook [www.facebook.com]or Twitter.