Question about customizing--particularly textures.

Hello. I haven't ever posted here and I hope I'm doing this in the right place. Anyway, please don't think me too stupid, but I've looked all over for the information I need and I was hoping someone could help me, please.

I have downloaded the eye, hair and face templates and am a little confused about them. Well, the eye template was very straight forward and I already whipped off a texture for my eyes that I am satisfied with, but I have so many questions about the other things.

First of all, I know how to use PhotoShop and can make targas, etc., although I don't even know if it would be necessary, in this case. One of the things I am having a problem with is my hair/eyebrows.

When I edit my appearance and first tweaked my hair, I noticed that my eyebrows automatically changed with it. However, my hair in real life is blue-green and I was trying to get my character's hair the same without the eyebrows being affected. I want to keep my hair the color it is in-game but I want to make my eyebrows much darker.

Then I tried fiddling with the hair texture and I found that, when I use a different texture for the hair, only the hair was affected and the eyebrows kept the texture they were using before. I went into the eyebrow options and tried to change the texture there, but it only changed the hair again. Where do I find the option to change the eyebrow texture?

Also, I want to mess with the hair texture in PhotoShop, but I am confused about what all of the different layers are for. I read through the downloadable documentation on customizing, but it didn't touch on anything too much, in particular.

What it did talk about more in-depth than anything was about the eyes and what all of the different sections are for, but I am pretty confused about that, too. For one thing, I don't know how to edit a face. I downloaded the template, but it is a diagram and I guess I'm on my own for the actual texture part of it, which is scary. Heh. Are there any basic templates (besides that one) for absolute beginners for hair and face? I've got the eyes all figured out.

Sorry about all of the questions. I hope someone can help me. I'd appreciate it. Thanks.

Eyebrows: There is no seperate eyebrow texture per se. If you want your eyebrows to be a different color than your hair you have very few options. One is to draw your eyebrows in the face template and apply it to your skin like a tattoo. The other is to make a hair texture the includes the color you want for your hair, then set your eyebrow color in the usual way. However, this has very limited flexibility and only works for certain color combinations.

Hair Texture: Most of the layers in the hair template are guides and have no use in the actual texture. Only the greyscale layer that looks like hair matters. The rest can be turned off or deleted if you don't need them.

Face Template: The diagram you mention is the actual face template. It shows the different areas of the texture and how they map to your avatar model. Unfortunately, if you want to make a full or partial face texture you're on your own. Your artistic ability better be impressive.

Thank you for the reply. I had considered painting the eyebrows right onto the texture. I wish there was some way to test it out and see how it looks before uploading it, though. ;/ Oh, well. I'll try some things out and come back and complain later if I still have trouble. Heh, heh. Thanks.

Not being able to preview is kind of a pain. My only tip is to try to get one side of your face correct, then copy and mirror it for the final texture. It might save a little time while you're experimenting and it will insure both sides match.

Julian is right -- the only way to test a face texture is to upload it, check it and see if it works.

I do a lot of hair textures for my shop and here's a piece of advice: If you choose a hair texture that is pre-colored (i.e. you did the coloring yourself in Psd or PSP) then in order for it to show up right you have to have all the sliders to "white" on your hair color (otherwise, of course, it is tinted). This means your eyebrows will end up white. If you make your hair texture gray-scale, you can "tint" it any color you want in SL but the eyebrows will always match the hair color.

One tip that I just discovered myself about faces: Get on 3dcommune or something and look at the face textures for Poser. You can use this as a kind of reverse guideline on how to draw your own face textures. I found a free poser Face texture the other day and tweaked it to fit the SL uv map. That particular face texture had eyebrows drawn in, so when I uploaded it to test it's look, I discovered that the pre-drawn eyebrows were dark enough to cover the eyebrows (either that or the new face texture erased them because it didn't have an alpha for the eyebrows). So, the eyebrows showed up as they were on the texture and looked not half bad at all.

So one way around it might be to draw a face texture that alphas *only* the eyebrows -- like a face tattoo. I have face jewelry on my av doing this -- and it seems to work just fine. The face jewelry isn't half bad if you ask me . Just make sure to work within the guidelines on the template and *do* follow the suggested alpha as a guideline (don't use it as the final alpha, just don't go outside the lines) they give if you plan on just doing some kind of face tat type texture. It will solve a lot of headaches.

You know what i think we need? A board just for people doing AV textures. Wouldn't that be cool?

Zana

Hello. Thank you both for replying. I'm sorry I am so late in responding back... I made a face texture the day I last posted and tried it out in the game and took a screenshot to show you here, but I haven't found the time, since then, to spend much time in the game or come here and read the replies or post my picture and, when I had any time, I didn't think of it. Sorry about that.

So, anyway, here is a picture of the texture I ended up with. It took me ten tries to get this:



What do you think?

As for what you said, Zana, I know what you mean about the grayscaling or coloring... I was thinking of doing a hair texture and coloring it and just not changing the color in the appearances option, but I haven't decided yet. As for where your eyebrows went... Hee! That sounds funny... I read about a week ago that, when you texture the face, the features that you're replacing are hidden under whatever part of your texture is opaque and covering them and I have found this to be true. For instance, when there is no transparency on part of my texture, anything under it doesn't show through and, when there is some transparency, anything that comes with your face originally, before you textured it, is still there, showing through to whatever extent the transparency allows.

As for making a separate texture for eyebrows, that is a good idea and I'd like to do it. I'm only worried about whether I can get it right within, say, a hundred tries or so. Hee! I noticed when I did this texture shown here that there is a regular head texture, an upper and a lower. I am worried that maybe I would have to figure out from scratch where the eyebrows would fall on an upper texture... Or would it be exactly the same position as if you took your entire head texture and cut off the bottom half? I guess I might try it sometime. I haven't decided yet. Again. Hee!

Anyway, my trial has probably expired by now... I don't know because I haven't been on for the past few days, but I did ask someone when the $9.95 lifetime membership would be available, and they said it would be with the next version release which they're hoping is coming within the next week. So I should probably be back again soon to see what else I can mess around with. Hee!

Thanks again for your replies. Take care.

Looking good, Rain. You got the hang of face textures and details a lot quicker than I did.

The way it works is simpler than you might think. There's a head texture, an upper body texture and a lower body texture. They aren't upper and lower halves of a head texture. That's what it looked like you were saying. If you use the upper and lower textures your head texture will stay exactly the same so no worries.

The upper and lower body textures use the exact same templates as clothes and work just the same as a face texture.

Oh, I see. Yes, I thought they were upper and lower halves of the head. Then how do I use more than one face texture at once like Zana suggested? Can I have a face texture and a separate eyebrows texture? Thanks again.

Oh, and the reason why I got it somewhat right so quickly is because I do nothing but customize for every game I play and I do a lot of art, as well, so I am used to such things. Thanks a lot. Take care.

I could be wrong here but I think what she was talking about was making a head texture that is transparent except for elements like eyebrows, facial jewelry, etc, the layering that over your regular face and makeup textures you created in the appearance tool.

Yup, that's exactly what I was saying Julian.

Zana

I thought you were talking about using a face texture without eyebrows and then another texture with just eyebrows. No? Can that be done, even? I get the idea you can only use one at a time.

You can only use one texture of each type at a time. However, nothing stops you from combining those textures in Photoshop.

That's what I figured. Oh, well. I would've preferred being able to use two rather than painting the eyebrows right onto the face, which is what I did. Okay, thanks.