Chapter 3

Skinning the head & making Team Colours.

In this chapter we will need;

A text editor (notepad, wordpad, word etc)
A graphics program (Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop etc - best to have one that supports layers)
Modview

You will need to be familiar with how your graphics program works - this tutorial focusses on the skinning aspect, not the finer points of graphics programs.


Welcome to the slightly delayed Part 3.

This week;

1. Tips for texturing the head and face
2. We'll make team colours.

1. Tips for texturing the head and face

Open the clean-shaven face texture in your paint program - face_02.tga.

The face textures use Targa files, not JPEGS, as Targas support alpha channels (transparancies) and other such tricks. You may see the term "shaders" bandied about when it comes to skinning. Shaders are just special textures - perhaps ones that give a glowing, see- through, or shiny effect. We're not going to cover shaders - maybe that's one for the "advanced" course. ;)

OK - so you've got the face open. The face we're going to build needs to have the eyes, nose & mouth in the same position, as it's all proportioned for our model's face mesh.

Have a look through some other characters and see if there are any faces you think would look better on our guy...

Two that are interesting faces in my opinion are Imperial and Jedi Trainer.


Jedi Trainer looks cool.

Lets make a brand new face without actually going through the ordeal of painting one from scratch.

Give face_02 a new layer.

Notice the Trainer face is 1/2 the size of the face we're working on? JO uses different sized mages on different models. No big deal.

Resize the trainer face 200% (double the height & double the width).


In paint shop pro, do this by selecting the Trainer face image, and selecting "resize" from the Image menu - clicking on "percentage" and increasing the height & width by 200%.

Cut out the trainer face and past it into the new layer on our working face image. Position it so the eyes are in the same place as the eyes in the original layer below.

Save the image (it will ask if it's OK to merge the layers for the saved file- click yes, they will still stay intact in our working copy).

Switch to modview and refresh the textures. You'll see a rougher looking face appear (though the nose will be wrong, or black, depending on whether or not the old nose was visible in the image after you cut & pasted the new face in.

Now this face looks like the jeditrainer face on a new mesh (which is exactly what it is). We want a new looking face, so reduce the transparency of the top layer to 50% so the old face shows through making out face look like a blend of the original face and the trainer face.

Check our model in Modview. You'll see the face looks a lot better than the old one. Paste the trainer nose into the top layer of face_02 over the existing nose.


Open up the the other jeditrainer face texture (the side-on head texture), open up the 2 oldrepublicprisoner head sides (head_01, head_02). Give each of these a new layer.

Copy the FLESH coloured areas from the trainer image into the 2 ORP head images. Set the transparency here to 50% too, so the colors will match the face we just made.

You may need to paste the jeditrainer flesh (or parts thereof) in a number of times to overpaint any areas that come out black when you check the skin in modview.

Changing the hair tint.

Cut the hair out of head_01, and paste it as a new image. It's a medium brown colour, but let's change it to a dark brown.

In the colour menu, select Adjust -> "gamma correction" and drag the sliders towards 0 to darken the image.


When it's at the desired tint, copy and paste the darker hair in over the top of the original hair in head_01. You may wish to do this in another new layer so as not to interfere with the one you have set at 50% transparency.

Check the darker haired head in modview;


You can see a few flaws in my skin, a few fleshy pixels where they should be dark, and a few dark spots where it should be fleshy. Just use trial and error to figure where these dark spots lie, and copy and paste areas of correct texture over these flaws to fix them, possibly blurring the edges if the seams are obvious.



Hint: This technique of putting one image over an existing template and then fading the top image to let the bottom one through is also a good way to make custom flesh for bare arms and legs. Though on the top layer you can use a photo of someone's arm stretched to the same shape as the arm underneath.
Similarly, if you wish to use a photograph as a base for a face, put it on a layer above an existing JO face, resize it so the position of the eyes, nose and mouth are in the same position as the original face and possibly fade it out a little so a bit of the original face shows through.

Another good tip is when you have a lot of flesh, and are finding it hard to match the colours between different texture images (eg. Face, neck, side of head) turn all your images to greyscale, then recolour all of them the same hue.


In Paint Shop Pro, choose "greyscale" from the colour menu, then in the colour menu increase colour depth to 16 million colours (as greyscale reduces the colour depth to 256 colours). Then choose colourize form the colour menu, and work with the sliders until you get a nice flesh tone.

Theron adds a tip for photoshop users;
There are several ways to tint skin color in Photoshop, this is possibly the easiest. First (if you need to) use Levels or Curves located in the Image/Adjust menu to spread out the tones in the image. Make sure it's in Greyscale mode by going to Image/Mode and select Greyscale, then go back to Image/Mode and select either RGB or CMYK color. Next use either your lasso, or pen tool to make your selection. Now you'll start coloring. Go to Image/Adjust and select Variations. The hue adjustment in the Variations box is especially helpful for creating skin tones. After your finished with Variations (If you need to) go to Image/Adjust and select Hue/Saturation to add more subtle color variations to the face.



Then use your "lasso" tool to select the lips, and recolour them slightly redder;



You can also play around with reddening the cheeks, or applying makeup to female characters in this manner.

2. Teams colours.

Team colours are easy if you are comfortable with the colourise feature (as you should be by now).

Let's open up the 3 legs variants; legs.jpg, legs_blue.jpg, legs_red.jpg.


Copy and paste our customised legs.jpg into legs_blue.jpg and legs_red.jpg.

In legs_blue.jpg select the red area.

You can do this by using the magic wand to select everything within a certain colour tolerance, or you can manually use the lasso (set on point-to-point) to mask off the red area.


Then use the colourise tool and set the hue slider and saturation slider until the red turns the desired shade of blue.

In this case there's nothing much to do with the red legs at all.
Do the same for the torso; paste a copy of torso.jpg into torso_blue.jpg and torso_red.jpg, masking off various coloured sections and using the colourise tool to make the red bits blue (for torso_blue.jpg)...


I decided to turn all the gold trim grey in the red-team skin to make it a little different to the default Skin. I did this by using the lasso tool to select the various areas of gold and turning the gold bits grey (in torso_red.jpg). An easy way to make grey is to set saturation at 0 in the colourise toolbox.



Do the same for the boots - copy the original boots_hips.jpg into boots_hips_red.jpg and boots_hips_blue.jpg and colourise the bits accordingly.

In modview, expand the "skins available" option, and double click "red". You should see your red team skin when the textures reload;



Now check out the blue skin.



Notice how the gloves still have a red design. If we look at our available images, there's no team version of basic_hand.jpg. That's because the prisoner we based this skin off had flesh coloured hands in all skin colour variations.

This isn't a problem however. Open up basic_hand.jpg and save it as red_hand.jpg, and save as (again) as blue_hand.jpg.

Now open up red_hand.jpg (blue_hand.jpg should still be open from the last "save as").

Recolour the hands accordingly - turn the red patch blue for the blue_hand.jpg image, and maybe turn the yellow trim on red_hand.jpg grey.

Now we go to our text editor and open up the file in the /oldrepublicpilot/ directory model_blue.skin.

Remember this file tells the model where to look for its textures. Locate where it says;
r_hand,models/players/oldrepublicpilot/basic_hand.tga
and
l_hand,models/players/oldrepublicpilot/basic_hand.tga

Change these to read
r_hand,models/players/oldrepublicpilot/blue_hand.tga
and
l_hand,models/players/oldrepublicpilot/blue_hand.tga
Now the blue skin will look to our newly created blue_hand.jpg for the hand texture.


(Don't worry about the tga / jpg discrepancy - JO will firstly look for blue_hand.tga, then if it doesn't find one, it will look for blue_hand.jpg)

You will need to go file -> new in modview to clear the old model (well, the model's old skin file, really) out of memory, and then re-open the model.mvs file to see the new blue hand.


Do the same for the red hand if you decide it's worth losing the gold trim for the red team's glove.

Now here's a fun idea that isn't done too often. Our team colour designs are pretty similar to the original default model, especially the red team. So lets change the faces of our team skins so all three characters look different!

Let's make the blue team skin a chiss.

Open up the 3 images used for the model's head textures; head_01.tga, head_02.jpg, face_02.jpg.

Save each one as blue-*.jpg - eg blue-face_02.jpg, blue- head_02.jpg, blue-head_01.jpg.

Use the colourise tool to turn each into an appropriate shade of blue.


Now we need to tell the skin file to use these 3 new blue textures for the blue skin's head.

Now we go back to our text editor and open up the file in the /oldrepublicpilot/ directory model_blue.skin.

Change head_01 to blue-head_01, head_02 to blue- head_02 and face_02 to blue_face_02. Save. Return to modview. File -> new to clear the old skin file out of memory, and reopen our model and examine the blue team skin;



Sweet - now he's a Chiss!

Let's give the red skin a goatee beard.

Open up face_02.jpg and save as red-face_02.jpg. Open up the old face_01.jpg (the original prisoner face we didn't use). Cut out around his moustache and his beard (not all the beard, just a goatee shape).

Copy & Paste this into red-face_02.jpg



Now go into model_red.skin in your text editor and look for face_02. Replace with red-face_02 and save.

File -> new in modview, reopen model.mvs and you should have a bearded Red team guy now;



Summary
OK, so we've blended 2 faces together to make a new, unique face. We've tinted the hair using gamma correction.
We've made a consistent flesh colour by turning various textures to greyscale, then recolouring.
We've copied our default images into the team colour images and masked off areas to be retinted.
We've edited the skin files to point to brand new textures (new faces for teams, new blue gloves)


Next time. Getting the skin in-game. Taking screenshots. Making icons. http://boards.theforce.net/message.asp?topic=8874551

jp-30

==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ==== ====