Make Your Own Animated CS:S Spray

There was a time when ‘Lan Gaming’ was synonymous with Counter-Strike in India. Back when Warcraft III was brand new and almost no one out here played it, all of us were FPS fanatics and CS was all we played in gaming cafés. So no matter how many Battlefields we fight on, or how many matches of DotA (Defense of the Ancients) we play, CS will always have a special place in our heart.



Now before this article sounds like a tribute to CS of some kind, let me get to what I wanted it to be about – Making your own animated Counter-Strike: Source spray. For the clueless that play CS like a brain-dead frag-fest, Sprays are the images you can, well, spray on a wall in CS. Why are they so important you say? Well they're the only thing you can customize in CS, so this is your ticket to set you apart from the crowd.

To get started you’ll need a copy of Adobe Photoshop (I used Adobe Photoshop CS3, but older versions should get the job done too) and this program (which is made by SMiDDY). Next on your list is an image of something you’d like to animate and use as a spray. Keep in mind that the spray is going to be quite small, so don’t choose a very detailed image. If you can’t find an image just animate text like I did...



Before you start making your image, decide how many frames your animation should have. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, a frame is a still image from an animation; after all an animation is nothing but a series of still images that create the illusion of motion. The reason you’ve got to decide how many frames you need before you get started, is that your maximum spray size is restricted to 120KB. If your animation has 5 frames or less, your image resolution or canvas size should be 128x128 pixels. If you’ve got more frames, you’ll need frames of 92x92 pixels which is really small. For this tutorial, we shall open a new frame of 128x128 pixels by clicking on File-> New...