ok this is probably silly..A Skin question..

How do you upload a complete skin? If you dont upload it as one piece or file, how do you make it one file once its in game?

Anyone have a clue how you do like metallic lip stick colors in photoshop? Or just metallic colors period heh

No such thing as a silly queston.


Skin works off the templates, just like clothing. You've got an upper body portion, a lower body portion, and a face/head portion, for a total of 3 textures required to make one full skin. The textures are applied to the avatar as tattoos. Just right click on your av, select Appearance from the pie menu, and go to the skin tab. You'' see 3 boxes on the left, one each for Head Tattoo, Upper Tattoo, and Lower Tattoo. Apply your 3 textures in their corresponding fields, hit Save, and you're all set.


One common way to do metalics is with noise, motion blur, and gradients. Here is a pretty good tutorial to get you started.

As for doing metalic lipstick in particular, that's a bit more complicated. It starts with knowing how to do metal AND with knowing how to do realistic lips. Metal as a concept is pretty easy, as you can see in that tutorial. Lips as a specific are much more in depth. It's more a question of artistry than tool know-how. Take a look at how glossy lips shine, wrinkle, and crease, and practice painting what you see. Once you feel confident you can make realistic lips, then work on applying the metal technique to them. The metal is the easy part. The lips themselves have to come first.

I'm sorry I don't have a "10 steps to easy lips" for you, or anything like that, but as I said, it's not totally a how-to thing; it's an artistry thing. I havent yet figured out how to really teach art in forum format, but I'm working on it. For now, pretty much all my tutorials are instruction sets for tools. Stay tuned though. I've got a project in mind that may change that significantly.

You upload the three pieces of the skin (Head, Upper Body, and Lower Body,) and make it one complete skin by dragging them into the three Tattoo image thumbnails you see on Skin when you are in Appearance.

You make things look metallic by using the base color as the highlight color in Photoshop (or any other graphics program.) In other words, if you want metallic red lipstick, you use a bright, highly saturated red for the highlights, not white.

I'll put up some pictures to show what I mean in a little while, when I have some time. (Right now I don't, which is why this answer is so brief.)

Ahhh Robin and Chosen to my rescue as always. Im really starting to love CS..im glad i stuck with it..and it helps with so many helpful people pointing me in the right direction

I see that Chosen and I were answering you at the same time. (He just managed to hit the Post button first. )

Here are the quick-and-dirty pictures I promised. The first is dark red lipstick. The second doesn't make any changes to the first at all, except that it uses a bright, saturated version of the underlying hue for the highlights, in place of white. As you can see, it changes your perception of the base material.

The third one has further modifications, to make a candy-apple red metallic, such as you might see on an antique car. Basically, I just added some extra dark reflections and light highlights, using the same dark red and bright red, and then put on a couple of star-brush white highlights for "bling."


Hope this helps!

And yeah, I love CS2 too.