The part you are probably here for, How do I paint my hats?
It's very easy to paint hats in SFM, just right-click your model and click override materials



then, right click again and go to "Show in element viewer" > "Model"

On the element viewer, scroll all the way down until you see materials


then go to the name of the model you're using, it's probably a bit different that the exact name of the model, but it should be similar (pd: some hats have 2 materials, one for RED, one for BLU, or, for 1 style and for the other, just mess around with the 2 depending on what skin of the hat you're using)


then go to $colortintbase and edit that value until you have something that you like


Now imagine that you edited a hat and...

Uh oh! that's not right, it should not look like that in game!

This is where the next part comes in.

Hat fixes fix issues with hats (shocking, i know)
sometimes, hats are not painted correctly, if thats the case, you usually just go to the workshop and search for the name of your hat, and put fix after it.


ok, now. go to the source filmmaker sdk and do what the following images do:








and there we go, fixed!


but what if there is no fix on the workshop?

First, you need VTFEdit [nemstools.github.io], if you already have it installed, then you can ignore this part

go to this location in your sfm folder


select the class you want to fix a hat for

again, the name of the texture is ussualy the same as the name of the model


open the file up in vtf edit, then hit "file > export" and choose a location


then, go to view, channel and "A" channel

and export again


there is 2 ways of making a fix:
on (preferably https://www.getpaint.net/download.html) hit reverse alpha and make a white layer under the main layer
or..... the more terrible option
delete the black part and collapse the layers
either way youve done it, export it as a png or tga

then open vtf edit

and go to file> import and choose your file

click save
and go to your sourcefilmmaker folder in steamapps/common
then go to workshop/materials/models/player/items/[CLASSNAME] (if any of these folders dont exist, you can create them yourself) and save your vtf file WITH THE SAME NAME as the original vtf file for the cosmetic, and youre done!

open any session, heck, you dont even need a session, you just need to go to File>Community>Publish to Steam Workshop > Texture

To help you paint cosmetics just as the painted versions in game look like, you can use the wiki page for paint colors and copy the rgb values (you can't copy paste them into sfm, you have to manually type the values)
And that's it for now! Ill probably add more stuff to the guide as time goes on. Until then, See you later!