Quake3World

Is it possible to convert half life VTF files to TGAs or JPGs to be used in quake maps? I can't find any where that says how to decompile textures from VTF back into either of these formats and I'm beginning to wonder if it's even possible.

Neeeeeeeeevermind figured it out

Just a friendly reminder that porting over textures from one game into another violates license agreements. If you're doing it to gather inspiration from or some other usage, then that's up to you.

Even if they're manipulated and changed?

The official stance is that if you're manipulating existing content, you're reverse engineering the product, which is illegal. If you're doing say, 10% original content, 90% custom content on that texture, it's still rather "gray area" even if it looks completely different. Ideally, you would be creating from scratch using the originals as a reference. What you do is up to you but as a matter of both the legalities and respect for the original artists, I would probably just make everything from scratch (more experience for you too, yay).

That said, modifying existing textures is a good learning experience to try out different techniques, but I wouldn't distribute them if they have any copyright on them. Go find yourself some free texture resources or even better, go out and snap some photos.