Skin Techniques

I've been working on creating my own skins for Second Life. The process is maddening. The thing that gives me the most difficultly is musculature shading/highlighting. I have an insane amount of trouble getting that right.

I'm looking for general help on creating skins. Would anyone be willing to share their techniques, workflows, templates, tools, tips, or any sort of suggestions or help? It would be very much appreciated.

As for what I do: I start in Photoshop CS with the templates created by Chip Midnight. I make excessive use of layers. I try a lot of shading / highlighting with white or black in the general right shape, gaussian blur to get the falloff, then set the layer to soft light and adjust the opacity. I try to shade around major body features, such as around the nose, under the buttocks, and then highlight on what I think the furthest point of the feature would be. I don't use any lighting tools; when I do the shading and highlighting, I imagine that the light is either straight on, or straight with a slight downward angle. I just use a little bit of noise filter for a skin sub-surface scattering effect.

I've tried using photos for skin, with reference photos, but I don't have a lot of luck getting them into shape. I've also just tried using them as layers to provide a kind of template, but not a lot of luck with that either. So I just use photos as an outside reference.

I try to preview the skins with a little program made for previewing SL clothes. I don't feel like it gives me a lot of help in seeing what the skin will look like in SL.

If you want to see what they'll look like in-world without endlessly editing, uploading, editing, uploading costing you a ton of lindens, log into the beta grid and do your uploading/tweaking/uploading there. It doesn't get charged against your "real" account.

I haven't created any skins yet (only portraits & nudes), but all I can add really is that using blacks & whites are no-no's for me in shading & highlighting since the pigment of skin is so varied & multi-faceted - to get a real feel there are so many tones. Using such extremes can detract from the overall effect, that's not to say that what you are doing is wrong as a gaussian filter & opacity adjustments could tone those colors down so much that it doesn't look like you have used blacks & whites.

The other thing is to carefully study musculature of the body - don't laugh here, but get some medical books from your local library, this will help when you have that mental image of where all the curves & sinews are, also try not to look at the whole thing at once - this I'd find very daunting myself, work in small areas & definately use the beta tool - it's a creators heaven!

I'll pass on some of Chip's advice. Find the character folder in you SL install and look at the tga files.

And my own advice: mess around with copies of them as layers in your skin files. Some show the musculature. I was able to use one of these files and use my skin tone layer as an overlay and got thoses pesky knee and calf muscles with no muss, no fuss. Also helpful for getting the toes in the right place.

Heck, I never know that the .tga files were in the Second Life folder. Never thought of it. Thanks, that will help.

On shading and highlighting- the black actually does a great job on shading, when manipulating the layer enough. The white, however, is harder to work with for highlighting. It seems to either get too severe, or unnoticable, with nothing in between. For the highlighting, should I use a color more in line with the skin tone, or a color that represents the light (yellow light instead of white light?)

I actually have quite a few resources to use for seeing the muscle tone (medical, drawing musculature, photo references). I just have trouble translating that to the UV maps.

I didn't realize that I could upload textures for free on the beta grid. That would be quite useful.

You guys are ALL way ahead of me, so maybe you can answer what is probably an easy question. I have spent several hours searching the internet for the answer without success. (Which probably means the answer is right under my nose.)

I can create a skin texture in GIMP and export a tga file. I can import this as a texture into SL. I can use the texture in clothing, no problem. My question is: how do I turn the texture into a skin that I can put on my avatar?

Thanks in advance for any help - even if it's just a pointer to a place where I can find the answer.

TT

Right click on a folder in your inventory and choose new/body part/skin. That will create a skin named "New Skin." Wear it and then go into appearance mode. In appearance go to the skin tab. Along the left side of the skin thumbnail images are three texture boxes for tattoos for head, upper body, and lower body. Drop your skin textures in those boxes.

Somehow I was expecting it to be at some more basic level - something under the tattoo layer. I guess that explains why standard tattoos cannot be added to a purchased skin unless it's modifiable. Now it's all falling into place.

Hmmm...and that also explains why you can't make a skin that makes an avatar transparent.

Thank you!

TT