About skin who can tell me

When I look at the finis face skin templates in my photo program photoshop Elements and in SL, I can see that in the upper right corner it is a little bit where there are no color, looks like it is transparent?

Next question, I have tried to make a skin with and without Alpha, and I can`t see any difference, do I have to use Alpha? If yes why?

I ask because I would like to learn to make skin for fun

If someone have a link to some place for skin beginner where I can learn about it, I would be happy for that.

Sorry I know my English is poor, but I hope you understand what I mean.

That upper right corner is for eyelashes. I think most respectable skin makers prefer to use prims there. (^_^)

You don't really need alpha for skins, you just need to make sure the seams line-up right for each side and layer. Look for Chip Midnight's templates to get you a head start. (^_^)y

http://goodies.onrez.com/shop/chipmidnight/

Put an alpha channel in your skin texture only if you want the skin to be partially or fully translucent/transparent. Often good skins will be somewhat transplucent, in order to allow the avatar's base skin color to show through. This makes the skin's apparent tint adjustable in-world. It also makes the detailing of the texture more subtle, which can help keep it from looking too over-blown. (Overly detailed skin can often look freakishly pock-marked. I really hate that look.)

You don't have to do it that way, though. Fully opaque skin textures can look great too.


So you know, the most likely reason that you couldn't see any difference with or without an alpha channel before was that your alpha channel was probably white in all the areas that matter. Those areas would have been opaque with or without the alpha in that case, so of course you saw no difference.

The empty space around the subject areas in each template is never seen, so it doesn't matter whether you make that part opaque, transparent, checker-boarded, polka-dotted, or whatever. But in the actual subject area, the alpha level will make a huge difference to the skin's appearance. Put alpha black in there, and the skin texture will be completely transparent. All you'll see on the avatar will be its own base skin color, exactly as if you'd never even made your own skin at all. Put alpha white in there, and your skin texture will be totally opaque; completely obscuring the base skin color from view. Put in a shade of gray, and your skin texture will be translucent, which will mean you'll be seeing a blending of the base skin and your skin texture on the avatar. Put in a gradient, and you'll see the avatar's skin grade from the base color to your texture.

There's a lot of room to play there. For certain details like deep wrinkles, scars, or tattoos, you might want to go fully opaque, while on the more uniform areas, you might want more subtlety, so you'll go with a bit of translucency. Or maybe you'd rather go the other way around. Make most of the skin totally opaque, but "punch out" a tattoo from it with full black in the alpha channel for that part. That would allow the user to adjust the color of that the tattoo in-world by changing the base skin color, without affecting the appearance of the rest of the skin in any way.

There are tons of possibilities. Play around. See what you can come up with.

All head textures require some form of alpha channel. They need to be 32 bit to deal with eyelashes. Eyelashes require transparency in order to look correct on the skin. Without transparency in the upper right you will get an overly thick "mono-lash" in whatever color you've painted in that area. The simplest thing to do is leave the entire upper right region, outlined by this file... head_alpha.tga... in the character folder of the SL client, completely transparent on a skin that is opaque in all other areas. This lets the default slider vaules bleed through based upon this default alpha (which can not be eliminated). If you want black eyelashes just push the pigmentation slider all the way to 100%. If your skin is slightly translucent (letting default color bleed through) you will want to paint the eyelash color into the upper right corner to avoid having the eyelashes change color along with the skin pigmentation (unless you want that effect). Again, you can refer to the head_alpha.tga file for reference on what area to paint in eyelashes.

The other skin texture sections of the avatar body below the neck line can be 24 or 32 bit. There are no restrictions.

Prim lashes are a completely separate entity from the skin. Almost all skin designers will deal with the default lashes first in the most natural way possible. Eyelash length can be shortened to the point of being almost nonexistent. Only then will skin designers work with attachments. Not everyone wears prim lashes, so it is best to cover all areas of the avatar textures first.

A third alternative in dealing with eyelashes is to paint them around the eyelids on the face (not the upper right corner of the head texture). If this effect is done subtly enough it can often enhance the look of realism without prim lashes (which do not move in synchronization with blinking avatar eyes).

Oooh, good point, Nam. I wasn't thinking of that when I wrote my post. Thanks for the correction.

Thank you for all the advising, I hope I can find out more now, not so easy to understand, but I have to try and try.