Skin Questions

I've been grinding away at trying to create a good skin.

I'm wondering if its better to create a skin from scratch or is photosourcing/painting combination better?

What are the pros and cons of each?
How do you choose colors that show up correctly in SL? My colors show up to bright or to dark. Never in the middle for some reason.

How do you get the skin to look like.. Skin? I've tried noise filter, Nagels brushes, bluring, overlay, and a whole bunch of ways but I'm just not getting a good skin.

Then comes shading which I have not figured out. I believe some good skins artist create use photo references in small amouns for the nose, eyes lids, ears, and mouth then everthing else is painted. But the subtle effects are enough to make the skin appealing to the human eye.

I'm really jumbled on where to start since I cant find anything that work. Sorry if this seems rather cluttered and all but its eating away at me.

Have you looked at the tga files in the SL install? There are files that create the default skin in a folder named "Character". These might really help you with shading when you are creating a hand painted skin.

As for painted versus photosourced, I think it is really a matter of taste. There is a huge variety of skins and skin techniques in SL. Personally I prefer photosourced, but I have no way of knowing which is going to suit your taste.

Ypu might get more specific and useful advice if you post pics of what you have so far and how you would like it to be different.

There is no better. It mostly comes down to which tools are you most familiar with. I personally used 2 different 3D tools as well as photoshop. But the heavy lifting was still done in photoshop. In terms of pros and cons, the 3d tools understand the mesh and how things wrap on it. They can, within some limts, handle complex lighting setups. But don't think that some 3D tool is going to have a magic "Generate Skin" (thanks Nam *laughs*) button in it. You're going to spend a lot of time getting your textures, bump maps, color maps, etc. all ready. Photoshop, on the other hand, has extraordinary 2D painting capabilities. That's the plus side. The down side is you have to deal with the mesh yourself.



Trial and error. The simplest way is to make a default skin with no textures on it. Then replace teh default texture files in the SL directory with the output from photoshop. Rebake and presto -- instant feedback and no upload charges.


Yes, this is the big mystery. There is no simple answer. I used a custom generated bumpmap and colormap and blender to get the desired effect which was simply the fine texture on the skin. I still used photoshop for all the other painting.

Well, I stared at my husband's girlie magazines for maybe 30 hours to understand how light falls on a female skin.


No worries, we all started there. But there are no simple answers to your questions. That's why serious skins take as long as they do to create. For your reference, mine has about 300 hours into it.