Shape influence on skins

Hello my friends,

I have some Photoshop skills because Im an amateur photographer... so I made a lot of courses (not exactly to create textures, but there's no problem

Im trying to make an example skin, but Im in doubt with some things. For example, I am using a woman image as reference to the skin. Her nose is smaller than the nose of the wire UV that we all use as reference.

How do I set the different noses, mouths, eyes, etc. on the UV? Smaller, bigger, thin, etc.

And there's a way to set the proportions of the shapes, to help this things to fit better? Only "in-world"?

Thanks a lot.

Keep in mind that the UVW is pretty much set in stone. A nose on the UVW must follow the guidelines set out there fairly closely. It will look strange on the UVW (fat, flat, and stretched out horizontally). It is the same regardless of sex, race, or age, and it's up to the skin artist and shape artist to manipulate the texture and shape to achieve a particular look. You have a small bit of leeway on the guidelines set out on the UVW, but must follow them closely or things will get skewed out of alignment. Beware of seams too! Things get pretty tight around the nostrils, mouth, eyebrows, nasal labial folds, and a few other areas; however, areas around the forehead, cheeks, nose bridge, upper eyelid can provide quite a bit of freedom to tweak the look through simulated highlight and shadow. Shape sliders often go well beyond what the polygons can handle realisticly, so it is important to back off of the temptation to "max out" these settings. Most shape settings influence one another as well as the texture, so it is not a simple matter of tweaking one element at a time.

Skinning from sampled photo reference is a give and take process of positioning and distorting the skin features to map correctly to the UVW. Beyond that, avatar shape sliders come into play, and the tweaking process switches back and forth between tweaking the shape and distorting the texture until the avatar skin bears a close resemblance to the model reference. Not all models work well with the SL avatar. Experience can tell you how difficult a project may be. Here are a few examples I've worked on. Each presented unique challenges:








Skinning from tabula rasa, or painting the entire skin from scratch takes an approach from a slightly different perspective. There may be no references, or multiple references. It is still important to consider the UVW constraints and the shape constraints, but the freedom to work without predefined texture shading and highlight gives the artist more leeway in creating the final look.

I would add that probably the first thing you should do is to download the UV templates from Chip Midnight and Robin Sojourner available here:

http://lazarus.map-craft.com/Secondlife_template/CMFF-Master_All_Templates.zip
and here:
http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLPages/AVUVTemplates.html

Create a new skin with guidelines showing. If you need help in this, there's a great tutorial here:
http://www.mermaiddiaries.com/2007/04/day-202-robin-sojourner-woods-texture.html

Now you will have a skin you can wear in SL with all of the UV lines showing. You should study this closely to see how the mesh interacts with the skin and where it stretches and distorts. play with the shape sliders and examine how they affect the mesh. all kinds of animations and mark the distortions. Having a good knowledge of how the mesh stretches and pulls will help you immensely.