Making Skins?

Ok.... I really really want to try doing my own skin, and tho I have a great photoshop program which I use all the time for effects and basic editing.....I am really at a loss as to how to create a good realistic skin.

So.....I'm looking for some basic pointers here.... aside from the obvious body & head templates....are there any other tips you guys can offer to help me launch into this. On paper, I'm an artist and I'd have no problem with a human form, shading and tones....But with a mouse and photoshop...it' seems like a painfully tedius undertaking. Any suggestions? Do any of you use skin textures that you copy & paste to the template and then adjust? Seems to me this could be a way to go....but again....terribly tedius. *sigh*
Am I avoiding the inevitable here? lol

Might have better luck getting technical answers in the "Texturing Tips" forum (). But just as a hint: most if not all the photoreal skin developers start with a subscription to ... then they do magic. I've read them to say that they do it all in photoshop, though I've never really understood why it wouldn't be easier to start by projecting the images onto the avatar 3D mesh in something like Maya or Blender... presumably they know their trade, though.

Subscription to what?

/me starts drooling for that skin...

yeah. wut?

Aha! Meade was right: some browsers no likey my "img" tags. Had they appeared, they'd have had a pretty link to http://3d.sk .

OMG, yes. *drools at your side and whimpers*

Qie, thank you for the link. Amazing resource material. *checks her CC balance and whimpers some more*

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could get graphics and lighting effects like the one Alicia posted in SL? I haven't seen anything quite that good in any gaming platform, no matter how cutting edge the graphics and physics engine is, and when you add all of the other things going on in SL that the servers and your PC have to deal with, rendering something that good is an impossibility. Someday, maybe. Ten years ago, SL was impossible. Twenty years ago, the internet was virtually non-existent. Things move fast.

Anyway, I have another method of creating a skin. I find an avatar with a skin I like, then I kill it, cut the skin off, tan it and wear it like a pair of leather pajamas. Works great.

This question has been answered several times in the texture forum. The bottom line is that the 3d tools do not have some magic "Make a good skin" button. Your statement "projecting the images onthe the avatar 3D mesh" makes it sound sound simple. But that is equivalent to saying "just paint a good skin using photoshop". Both are perfectly doable and neither is easy.

For the record, my skin was not photosourced. Namssur's are. We both invest similar effort for similar results. I did use a complex workflow involving photoshop, blender, and AVPainter to get the final product. Just like anything else, having a wide variety of tools at your disposal and knowing when to use each is the real key. But, as Chosen himself pointed out to me, it is perfectly possible to make a perfectly photorealistic (and I do mean perfectly, not as in SL) painting using good ol' fashioned brush, oil paints, and canvas.

terribly tedius?

Making skins is hard work. Making lots of things is hard work, to be honest. Well, it is if you want to make really good ones.

If you are not prepared to work hard to make skins, you really should probably be looking for something else to do.