Skins -- Love 'em or Hate 'em?

SecondSkin all the way!!!!!

-Ghoti

thank you chip and catherine. the whole appearance thing makes sense now. that's actually a pretty cool method. wish i'd thought of it. i might just make me a skin then. the standard green colours are a bit neonish.

interesting vote results so far

I don't use a skin, have never even tried one. There are some beautiful examples out there, I applaud the creators. But a lot tend to look alike, and seem that they have been airbrushed into perfection.

I like me the way I am.

I usually wear one of Chip's and am amazed at the detail. I also have a Munch one I like for it's clean look (and her new ones are sooo nice!), and the Goth pack of skins by..umm..damn..can't remember his name, but they are fun!

I'm a very visual person and love skins. Though I have seen many wonderful avatars without them, I think if some degree of realism is what you are after, the muscle tones and detail of skins are wonderful. And they just keep getting better and better.

To me, it's like a choice of video games. If they are both equally fun to play, but one has very detailed graphics, I would probably go with detail.

I love my Second Skin. I found it has the most natural skin shading and the most flexibility. Now I can wear my skin and still use and interchange my tattoos

Awesome job!!! Also the most realistic skins for men

I can't imagine being without skin, i have had so many people ask me where i got my skins and they ask me where to get them... I send them to Chip Midnight you Rock Chip

I definitely concur, Launa! As Cris mentioned in another post, most of the packaged skins out there are pretty creepy. I spent upwards of 40 hours working on my skin, and in the end, I scrapped all but the torso modifications. I could never get the arm/leg musculature shading to align correctly, or if it did, it would become skewed in certain poses but not others.

So many skins have an anime flavor to them, wheras my goal was to create a very subtle, natural looking skin. Hard to do with the bump mapping, lemme tell ya. I will say that Lukas Thetan has created one of the best, most realistic male skins I"ve seen.

I recently broke down and got finally got one, but unfortunately not one of Chip's. He's got the best quality skins, but the male models would have changed my handsome appearance.

However, what I don't like from the one I did get is the fact that I cannot copy it from folder to folder, making it a manual procedure wearing it with different clothes.

But, I must admit it is always a pleasure seeing my SL honey wearing nothing but one of Chip's skins

- T -

Humm, maybe I'm off base, here, but I don't think you require copying over the skin to your "outfit folder".. at least *I* don't, and here's hoping that isn't just client side. I just tested it by putting on my Night elf folder (no skin inside), it kept on my current skin and just changed everything else. Granted, I'm doing this using my skins - I don't own anyone else's body skins.

Now maybe, TECHNICALLY you have to have "copy" rights on the skin for that to work?

*scratches head and hope she's being helpful and not confusing*

I love my skin!!! Although, technically, I'm white tatooed black..... There isn't an option to be jet black!! what else can i do??? If i want a tatoo, i wear a coolblack t-shirt and it looks like one 8D

Tito,

The skin texture is saved as part of your skin body part. As long as you don't have body parts in your outfit folder, putting on a new outfit has no effect on your body parts - you shold not have to copy the skin for each outfit.

I voted other as I make them so...

I just recently got a Starley Therian skin after not having more than make up for the longest time and I love it but then again I was always a fan of her make up so it was pretty much the next step

yes!! if you find a good and well-painted skin, skins are very good.

avies without skins look so weird and their face is all one color it seems. they dont have the natural looking highlights on the cheeks or nose, which i think linden lab should have done when they made the game, so that all avatars look nicer without having to custom make it.

i make my own skins, dont sell them yet, but i am pretty happy with the way i did them.
they enhance an avatars appearance and is not really a realism thing, more a better-graphics looking thing. in general avatars just look much better with skins!

I agree, Cristiano, the darker skin shades are MUCH harder to get looking right. I'm still having problems with that.

I love making skins and I love the way they look! I admit that there could be something remotely creepy about them (walking around in someone else's skin and so forth -- sounds kind of like a Halloween story) but not unless you remember that most video game characters have skins too. They're just textures, after all. I've been meaning to start playing World of Warcraft and it amazes me how much better looking many avatars in Second Life are than in WoW, not to mention that you could MAKE those avatars in Second Life. And they have skins too (in WoW).

Lately though I have not been able to upload my modifications on my skins because I've been cut off from DSL (though hopefully that will change soon). I've learned so much about making skins just from looking at people in RL and SL and inspecting other artists' skins. Personally I tend to go for a mixture of realism and perfectionism.

I bought two skins at 5,000 bucks each, so that about 40 real dollars for the two of them, right?

After wearing them a few days, I decided I didn't like them because the lips are kind of fuzzy and don't stop where my lip shape stops, and the eyebrows are too high up, so to keep from having a flesh colored eyebrow shaped raised area you have to set your eyebrow density to zero. The eyebrows are high enough up that the don't move very much when facial expressions are applied, so they look kind of masklike.

They are non-transferrable, so I can't even give them away.

I have two avatars, one male and one female. I wear a skin on the female av (one of Chip's), but not on the male av. This isn't really by choice; I just haven't come across a male skin that appeals to me. (Sorry Chip, but I prefer a clean-shaven look. Which is odd, since I wear a beard in RL, but there you are...)

Has anyone ever tried a translucent skin? I mean, one that just adds highlights and shadows, but is 50% transparent (more or less). If it works right, the underlying skin tone would come through, just a little lighter or darker in spots. You could then adjust your skin tone (and makeup) with sliders.

I use a skin. But I initially just wanted nicer nipples. But you can't have smaller nipple tattoos without the ginormous SL nipples showing through. Now I've added tatts and the whole thing. Only very slightly translucent. If I made it less opaque the SL monster nips show through again. It still needs work. I'm just lazy.

I make an experimental texture for a female skin that applies over the head portion only. It was meant for a "Goth" type skin, and utilizes the skin grain layer, an 8 bit (black and white) TGA file that resides in the character folder of the SL install. It works fairly well at adding detail to the face and is 100% transparent to the color sliders. This means the highlight and shading is the only information that shows through. It works similarly to the way Overlay layer effects do in Photoshop. Of course, as you go darker in skin tone, the details get lost as the shaded layers get multiplied into a darker color overlay. It's too bad the skin grain layer for the rest of the avatar body is used in duplicate for both the upper and lower body sections. This makes it impossible to create a full body skin using this method, but it does add nice details to the face

In response to the original subject in this thread, I am obviously a biased skinner The whole reason I started doing skins was because I joined SL after playing some highly realistic 3D games and was immediately dissatisfied with the look of my avatar. Skinning was not as widespread in SL back when I joined, and I wasn't happy with anything I saw others creating. I knew I had the skills to make what I wanted, so I did. I am very grateful that so many other players feel the same way as I do (both skinners, and those that appreciate skins). They have inspired me to innovate and stay in this unique environment for the challenges that it offers.

Baked or french fried.. skins please!!

I like skins myself. I prefer to have mine on all the time really. It keeps all my stuff inside and helps prevent embarrising leaking.

I like my second skin. It enhaces the facial reatures I picked, and with a bit of ajusting looked much better than my original. Some mens' skins do alter the face in odd ways (most notably munchflower's), though the bodies are wonderful.

So yes. I am a big fan of skins.

When it comes to skins, I'm sitting on the fence. I have lots of demo skins I've collected from several vendors, but I have yet to find one that suits me. This thread has given me a few new leads to check out. Ultimately, I may make a decision sometime after we get our new rendering engine.

I love the freedom to be so colorfull and color-free with our skins. no longer does dna determine which group we must be a part of, we can be what we feel inside. funny how many cool purple people out there too *hugs Wynx and Treebee*

I started out the game with two skins from a shop called Face "something." (Can't remember the correct name.) They looked VERY cartoonish to me, and although I love anime, it wasn't what I was looking for, although they were lovely skins.
So, I got a job in the game, and saved up my Linden. Then I decided to go looking for a skin that I liked.
I came across the shop En Nomine, owned by Munchflower Zaius. And found what I was looking for. I bought one of her Limited Edition Skins for 3,000 Linden. It was allot of Linden for a newbie, but it was SO worth it. I asked around, and the one I bought is one of the ones that is not as popular as the others (there were 4, I believe). I have NOT seen anyone who has looked like me since buying it, and I totally love it. It is a Sidhe (Faerie) with long ears and a back tattoo. I then bought some hair for her, then a flower crown, and 5 outfits. I only run around as her now.
When I get enough Linden, I am going to buy a second skin from the same place. It's either the Nymph or Sylph skin, it has colored flower tattoos all the way up and down it.