The Current State of Modding

Modding has gone through a few iterations, waxing and waning over the years, and I have been having conversations with some steam friends about it over the past few weeks so I think I'll do a post about it, to get my ideas down on "paper". As usual, I'm just rambling here but I know some people take their scene history to heart so take it with a grain o salt. Also for the sake of understanding this article I would like to define four camps in the games development biosphere. The two in modding are the scene - the mod creators - and the community - the mod consumers. In "the industry" there is the indies and the AAA.

Video Tutorial: Models from Dota2 to Blender

I made this one as much for myself as for anyone else.

Rendering a transparent background (alpha channel) in blender 2.6

So after scouring the net for this and getting quite frustrated, I figured it out myself. Short and sweet: In your render panel (the camera) under 'shading', change the 'alpha' dropdown box to 'Transparent'. Et voila. Render with a transparent background (you may need to make sure you have the 'RGBA' button pressed in the 'output' pane on your render panel as well).

EDIT: If you're trying to bake alpha from one mesh to another, you'll need to create a new material on the lowpoly mesh, scroll down and tick the 'Transparency' box, and slide the 'Alpha' down to zero.

Decompiling Portal 2 Models

I have been trying to decompile some models recently and I found out it's harder than it used to be. Luckily this guy has it sorted. I'm going to copypaste that post here, just in case that one gets deleted or something.