Custom textures: Where oh where is what I am looking for?
Okay, we have all been there at some point. Your making a room and you want it to look just right, but your browsing the textures given and you are just not satisfied with your options. Not one good looking texture to convey the appearance you are trying to create. You even search around and cannot find exactly what you are looking for.
So This is why this thread is here. Where do all of you great mappers get your texture resources?
At this moment, I am particularly looking for a skybox texture that is better than skybox_card_cranes
I use to grab the skybox textures from Gamebanana, more precisely, I use to grab Komaock's skybox textures, that guy is amazing creating those.
useful tools and stuff here on TWP 
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There are great ones on GameBanana. I included a few of my favorites in the FGEMOD, already converted for Portal 2's skybox format, you can try those.
i actually was there and a whole lot of other places. Everywhere its all sky, space, and nature stuff. Nothing like what I want. I am trying to find fog, cranes, hanging cables, and large delapidated buildings and chambers. Just like the skybox_card_crane texture, but with better resolution and without those huge black gaps in it
That sounds like you want a 3D skybox. 
i was thinking about that, but i already got so much in this map already, I didn't want to break the compiling limits
If you want 3D things to be close enough that you can really see them, you want a 3D skybox. 2D ones are for things like clouds and sky that are so far away there's no perspective on them. But the perspective on the cranes would have to keep changing.
good things there is a mini-crane, then. Too bad there isn't minis of everything else.
However that does come in as an idea. Where would I begin with editing the actual models themselves, scaling them down, changing animations, stuff like that? Obviously there is a program that the makers used to manifest these models in the first place
There is one thing that could be done. It's possible to decompile a model, then edit the .qc file adding a new line '$scale [value]' (if it doesn't already exist) to scale the model down (by default, models are scale 1.0, and any value under that will make the model smaller... Example: $scale 0.05), then recompile the model again. This way you could have mini-versions of any model you want.
I know you will scream at this post because it requires a lot of programs and work 
, so I offer you this, if you send me the models you want to minimize, I'll do this for you.
useful tools and stuff here on TWP [spoiler]
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On the scaling down thing - I recall reading somewhere that they should be scaled down to 1/16th of the size. So if you're gonna do that, then..yeah. Try it at 0.0625 for scale.
EDIT: Source - http://www.optimization.interlopers.net ... er=notices
