The Glitter style takes your sticker artwork and adds a layer of view-dependent sparkles on top. As the weapon moves or is inspected, tiny flakes catch the light and flash in shifting rainbow colours, just like real glitter. Wear behaves the same as the other styles where the sticker scrapes away over time based on the alpha channel of your sticker artwork.

What You Need to Provide

At minimum, a Glitter sticker only needs two things:

1. Sticker artwork: Your design. RGB is the color, and the alpha channel is the wear mask (exactly as you'd author it for other sticker styles).
2. A glitter mask: Controls where and how strongly the glitter appears on your sticker.

Everything else (the glitter flake pattern, scratches, grunge) has sensible defaults provided by the shader, so you don't need to touch them unless you want to.

The Glitter Mask

The Glitter Mask is separate from your sticker artwork and is defined in the alpha channel. The most important thing to know:

This means if you supply no mask at all (or a fully black alpha), your entire sticker will be covered in glitter. That's a perfectly valid starting point, many stickers just glitter everywhere.

Tips for authoring the mask

• Paint white over areas you want to keep clean and readable — faces, fine linework, logos, text. Glitter sparkle is additive and bright, so it can easily wash out small details.
• Use gradients and mid-grays to fade glitter in and out smoothly. Hard black/white edges in the mask will produce a visible hard edge in the sparkle.
• The mask only controls sparkle intensity, not colour — sparkle colour comes from your artwork (see below).

Your artwork's colour affects the glitter

The sparkles are tinted by the sticker colour directly underneath them. Glitter over a red area flashes red-ish, over white it flashes full rainbow, and over pure black it won't sparkle at all (anything multiplied by black is black). If a region of your design is very dark but you still want it to glitter, lift it slightly above pure black.

Glitter Options

These are the style-specific settings you can tune:

Glitter Scale (default 1.0)

Controls the size and density of the flakes.

• Higher values → smaller, finer, more numerous sparkles (subtle, "fairy dust" look)
• Lower values → larger, chunkier flakes (bold, "craft glitter" look)

The flake pattern tiles, so very low values on a large sticker may make the repetition noticeable. Test at inspect distance.

SFX Colour Boost

The brightness knob for the sparkle layer. The glitter is added on top of your artwork, so:

• Too low and the effect gets lost, especially on busy or bright artwork
• Too high and sparkles will bloom hard in-game and can overpower your design

A good workflow is to start moderate, then check the sticker on a weapon in-game under both bright and dark map lighting before settling on a value. Remember this multiplies with your artwork's colour — darker stickers need a higher boost to read the same.

Advanced: Custom Glitter Normals

The style ships with a default glitter normal texture that works well for almost every sticker — you do not need to make your own. But if you want a distinctive flake pattern (different flake shapes, clustered flakes, directional streaks), you can supply a custom one.

What the texture contains

Each "flake" is a small cluster of pixels sharing one random normal direction. The randomness of those directions is what makes flakes flash independently as the view angle changes.

How to build one

1. Generate a flake layout. Create a texture (e.g. 512×512) filled with small randomly placed shapes — dots, squares, shards, whatever flake shape you want. This becomes your alpha channel. Gaps between flakes should be alpha 0.
2. Assign each flake a random normal. Every flake should get a single random unit vector, biased toward facing outward (positive Z) with some random tilt — think of real glitter lying mostly flat with slight random angles. A tilt of up to ~30–40° off straight-up gives a good flash distribution; fully random hemispherical normals also work but flash less often.
3. Encode the normals octahedrally into the R and G channels. Octahedral encoding is a standard technique (most texture tools and a short script can do it) that packs a 3D unit vector into two channels. This is not a regular tangent-space normal map — don't just export a normal map from your paint package and expect it to work.
4. Make it tile. The texture is repeated across the sticker (and sampled twice at offset positions for density), so seams will show as a grid in the sparkle pattern.
5. Keep flakes flat-coloured. Don't anti-alias or blur flake interiors in R/G — soft gradients between random normals produce smeary, noisy sparkle instead of crisp pinpoints. A hard 1px edge is fine.