Skins in Unturned are special materials which can be applied to in-game items that are stored in an inventory tied to your steam account. Many of these can be traded to other players and sold on the community market. Any skin can be added to this inventory, but first it has to be accepted through voting in the curated workshop. Accepted skins will be credited to their creator, and if sold they will receive a percentage of the revenue.

Any item in Unturned can have a skin created for it, however not all of the items have been unwrapped yet. The unwrapped meshes can be found in the Unturned/Bundles/Sources/Skins folder and imported into Unity.

Once in Unity you can alter the default item material to your liking, preferably adding custom albedo, metallic or emission textures.

When uploading skins to the workshop please provide the source files used in Unity alongside your bundle and data files. This allows me to add any extra needed assets if you prepared the minimum visuals needed for the item, or fix small issues.

Before the skins you upload to the curated workshop appear you will need to provide your payment information so that Valve can give you your revenue share, and agree to a revenue split (between you and any team members) in your workshop configuration.

Promotional skins can be sold directly, distributed with product codes or given to owners of a specific game, this is up to you.

There are some systems to create generic patterns that can be applied to any item. Skins with an interesting pattern will be added to the uncommon drops list and boring patterns will be part of the common drops list. If it's a really awesome pattern it may be considered for one of the lower tiers in a mystery box.

Skins designed for specific items will go in mystery boxes. Generally their tier is based on how awesome they look and how well they make use of the geometry of the item.

You can create secondary skins to match the theme of your skin which will automatically be applied as well. For example this allows scopes or magazines to match the color palette/style of your skin. If one of these is not present for the attachment you can provide a tertiary skin that will be fallen back to.

To help keep the game's art style consistent there do have to be some rules regarding skins seeing as these will be directly integrated into the game:

1. Flat forest/snow/desert/urban camouflage is reserved for in-game items like the ghillie suit. You are, however, allowed to incorporate patterned camouflage into your skins.
   
2. Generic patterns must tile nicely in case tiling/offset/rotation is added to those in the future.
   
3. Specific skins for sniper rifles should have, at a minimum, secondary skins for the various scopes.
   
4. Avoid altering iron sights in a way that changes gameplay, such as by adding glowing dots to sights that don't have them on the base skin.
   
5. Textures should be kept to a reasonable resolution, ideally 2048x2048 scaled down to 1024x1024 for large items and 1024x1024 scaled down to 512x512 for small items.
   
6. Dark colors should not go below (30, 30, 30). Anything much darker than that looks bad.
   
7. Only use trademarks/copyright/etc that belong to you.

More rules may be added in the future.