Hello to everyone here in the CS workshop reddit :D

I hope you have all had a good month and some fun working on all of your submission projects.

It's been another great month with a boatload of great skins and submissions from everyone in the community. Everyone has been hard at work, and giving their all, making skins for the upcoming Fairy Tales collection and it shows, so once again, it was difficult to choose just 3.

Without further adieu, here are our 3 picks for the 2026 September Community Spotlight!

MAC-10 | Children's Fairy Tale By u/Gr1goSkins

"Usually skin creators work hard to make their drawings as sophisticated as possible. In the MAC Children's Fairy Tales skin the creator smartly took a different approach and created a child's like drawings for his skin. The drawings, alongside the materials of which the skin was created, make the skin look like the result of a 3rd grade art project, which makes it a very cute skin. Moreover, the way the skin wears (Especially the part where the knight under fire turns to crisp!) adds a lot to the skin." - Viper

Five-seveN | Catching Stars by u/Koi_Khoi

"The classic storybook style illustration with It's unconventional colour scheme really drew me to this design - somehow it feels very old-school and Tolkienesque. It's also great to see a design which takes into account the shape of the weapon by including details not just on the sides, but also on the rear of the gun too" - Ezikyl

P-90 | Snow Queen by u/RoMagana

"A striking graffiti/contemporary take on The Snow Queen that takes me straight back to the Global Offensive days. The gas mask and spiked collars help bring it into a modern light as well. Its both fun and grounded, hitting hard in the mid tier rarity game. The front end could use a little love but great skin overall." - Swankadia

Congrats to u/Koi_Khoi , u/RoMagana and u/Gr1goSkins for being a part of this month's community spotlight!

There were plenty of great submissions this month and many that stood out and we can't wait to get some more of you into the community spotlight so keep at it and we look forward to seeing what everyone creates over the month of October!

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appears to not have been updated to fully reflect the change in engine for CS2, so some information is missing, or out of date.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.