HOW TO MAKE 2D EQUIPMENT

ICONS FOR SQUAD

1st step: Take a screenshot of your 3D asset.
On the rendering engine of your choice (like Marmoset Toolbag or Blender Cycles for example).
- Choose a fully black background and a white material to your model. It is better to take your highpoly or your lowpoly with
the normal map applied on it for better details.
- Add a directional light above your asset.

- Choose an orthographic view or apply a field of view of 0.1 on your camera.

-Take a screenshot with a 2:1 image ratio.

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2nd step: Create an alpha for your icon.
You may have noticed that the 2D equipment’s icons in Squad vanilla are partially transparent. It means you need to put your
2D icon on an alpha channel. To achieve this, you need to open your screenshot on Photoshop. (Sorry my Photoshop is
installed in French. I really should put it in English)

-Go to your RGB channels and press the little button that I have circle in green. this will select all the white parts of your image.

-Then click on the next button just at his right. An alpha channel will appear just next.

-Deselect everything on your image, make the alpha channel visible, and then color fill the entire image in white on your RGB
channel. After these steps, you should have something like this:

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Then you just need to convert your image on a 256x128px format and save it as a Targa files (.tga). After that, it’s pretty much
done! You now just have to import it to your SDK.

But there are also other types of icons such as those for smoke bombs and grenades which are a bit more complicated to set
up. So, there are a few extra steps.

For a grenade or mine icons, you need to combine the alpha channels of your model and the vanilla icon. Like this for example:

Basically, you take the corresponding vanilla icon. You erase the vanilla model from the alpha channel and replace it with
yours.

For coloured smokes it is even more tedious…

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In the case of a coloured smoke, this is how your alpha channel needs to be.

And how you have to set your RGB channel.

You don’t have to put your asset on the alpha channel but only in your RGB channel. So, what you need to do is select all the
black part on your original image and convert it to the colour of your choice.

There is an exception for the white smoke grenade. For this one, you have to put everything on the alpha. As shown below.

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The grenade launcher icons are also a bit different…

This is your RGB channel:

And this is your alpha channel:

And there is also an exception for the white smoke:

It’s easier to take the vanilla icons and replace the grenade launcher with yours on the alpha channel.

This is all you need to know to make 2D equipment icons as the same quality as
Squad vanilla.
Thanks for reading and I hope it will be useful!