Valve has made the game free-to-play and are building a streamlined item submission system that is supposedly going to make it easy to create items. And selling them to Valve, if they are popular enough. It wont make you rich, but its a fun exercise, I can make something that can be used by thousands of people and Ill learn a thing or two about low poly modeling.
So I decided to give this a try, and my choice of hat is a Spanish civil guard cap, it has a very simple design and should fit the general style of TF2, something that few new items does. It seems like the more insane and colorful it is, the better people like it, but I hope it can be popular in Spain at least!
I decided to model and unwrap the model in 3DS Max, though I have decided to use Blender for the final export, because the tutorial Im following uses that program, and I don't want to create more potential sources of error than I need to!
I have had thoughts of making it a multi-class hat for all the nine characters to use, but Im starting with the Demoman.
I later changed the texture to be grey, though its black in real life. Valve made the hats in the game paintable, from shock pink to green, black and white, so I chose it as a neutral starting point, and it also makes the hat look worn, like most other items in the game, like the characters weapons.
Here is a shot of the model with the games inbuilt shader, that can be adjusted in the items config file, and can mimic cloth, metal and in-betweens. In the reference photos it looks like the hat a vinyl-like finish, so I chose to use the same shading as the games weapon models. In the image I have made a note of some surface normals that are a bit bugged and confuse the shader. I need to sort this out even though it looks ok in Max and Blender. Bug hunting is boring :(
Reference photos:
