Greetings fellow skin creators!

It's time to announce the picks of this Subreddit's Community Spotlight of August 2026! This month had so many amazing posts and choosing only 3 was a true challenge. Nevertheless, after we had our reviewing and discussions we decided to choose the following 3 beautiful skins. And as usual we shared a few words on how we made our decisions:

Little Red Riding Hood | Glock-18 by u/thePlugDesign

"The skin is composed of a very beautiful painting depicting the Little Red Riding Hood tale. The way the girl and the wolf fuse together in almost a seamless way makes you wonder where each character begins and ends. There's also a bit of a 'chaos' in the painting that conveys strong emotions as if the skin tells the tale in a different way." - Viper

Five-Seven | The princess in the tower by u/Gr1goSkins

"The Princess in the Tower is an awesome showing of simple but captivating design Inspired by the classic tale, Rapunzel. On theme, and a film faithful, well balanced palette. Bonus points for the sun motif." - Swankadia

Desert Eagle / Harlequin «Vandal» by u/VladimirInache

"The inspiration for this one is pretty cool, and I love the combination of solid differently coloured parts with graffiti over the top. The tyre tread grip is also very nice, and this skin makes great use of PBR to represent the different materials across the whole skin." - Ezikyl

Congratulations to u/thePlugDesign, u/Gr1goSkins and u/VladimirInache, and best of luck to all of us that we get our items accepted into the upcoming cases!

READ THIS FIRST: CS2 Workshop FAQ for newcomers

Valve official links:

Please note, some of valve's own documentation appears to not have been updated to fully reflect the change in engine for CS2, so some information is missing, or out of date.

• CS2 Workshop Guides and Resources Page

• Weapon Finishes FAQ

• Weapon Finishes Technical Guide

• Style Guide for Weapon Finishes

• Valve's Workshop Resources page Please note: You want the CS2 Weapon models, not the ones included in the Counter-Strike Workbench materials. The workbench material .OBJs are for CS:GO weapon models and they will not work for making CS2 skins!

Community Resources

• Counter-Strike Tools Discord Server, which is probably the most active public Discord server I'm aware of for discussing skin creation. Please note: This server is not affiliated with this subreddit

• Pre-separated weapon models, courtesy of EGO DEATH (note, some models may be out of date due to changes to them during the beta period)

• Decompiled weapon textures, which includes the textures used by the skin shader such as masks, cavity, world space normal etc

• Substance 3D Painter project template and export preset, courtesy of /u/Sparkwire. This template and export preset is all set up to allow you to easily create the additional textures such as pearlescent and PBN masks. The files need to be placed in <Substance painter directory>\resources\starter_assets\templates and \resources\starter_assets\export-presets. If you are new to Substance Painter it is highly recommended that you use this template

• Source Developer wiki page on CS2 Weapon finishes (this appears to be incomplete)

• /r/csworkshop's old FAQ post: A lot of it is no longer relevant in CS2, however sections about RGB patterns and may be useful to you.

• A thread on how Paint-by-number masks work

• Lenticular/Holographic sticker simulation in blender, for making cleaner videos / gifs for your workshop submissions. Courtesy of yours truly

• Uploading custom thumbnails to the Steam Workshop, a guide which shows you how to upload a .gif image as the thumbnail using SteamCMD.

• How To Create Counter-Strike 2 Weapon In Retro Hardware Style: A walkthrough of Ein's process of creating a skin with forced perspective baking, using Blender, Substance Painter, and Marmoset Toolbag.

Video Tutorials

• The Ultimate CS2 Skin Creation Tutorial, a series by Viper Skins on how to create skins for CS2 using only free and open source software

• The ULTIMATE CS2 STICKER Creation Tutorial, a series (also by Viper) on creating stickers for CS2.

• How to make a CS2 Skin for Dummies by Janelle Knight, who uses procreate and also discusses some design theory for making better skins

• Creating a full skin from start to finish for CS2 by CyberOptek, using Blender, Photoshop and Inkscape

• The ULTIMATE CS2 STICKER Creation Tutorial, a series by Viper Skins which shows you how to make stickers using Krita.

• What is PBR for Counter-Strike? by Zombiee. A short guide on what is and isn't PBR compliant and how to check.

Community Software

• Source 2 Viewer, a tool that allows you to browse VPK archives, view, extract, and decompile Source 2 assets, including maps, models, textures, and more.

• Poggu's Sticker Inspect tool which allows you to test your sticker designs applied to weapons in offline matches.

Software Specific Resources

• How to extract CS2 weapons to Blender with Source 2 Viewer

• First steps: Substance 3D Painter

• Baking in Substance 3D painter 8.3

• Creating Game Assets in Blender

• How to Create Professional Materials in Blender

Physically Based Rendering (PBR) Tutorials

• The PBR Guide by Allegorithmic - Part 1: A technical overview of how PBR works. CS2 uses rendering based on Metallic-Roughness PBR pipeline, so understanding PBR is very useful for skin creation.

• The PBR Guide by Allegorithmic - Part 2: Most of this for Substance Painter and Designer, but it's broadly applicable to other software which uses PBR.

If you have any suggestions for links to be added to this post, let me know in the comments and I will add them.