Real Life Skin Textures

When it comes to photoshop I'm not the best person out there. I'm not the worst either. But I came across http://www.students.yorku.ca/~harnock/tutorials/skin.htm this tutorial here on the forums. I'm curious where I can learn about making more textured skins. When I finished the tutorial I realized that my skin looked very glossy. The skin didnt have any texture and it didnt go into full detail on how to get finger nails, skin pallete, and other details associated with skinning. Could someone point me on the right direction for this? (please dont link me to Chip Midnights templates. I already have them)

Thanks

That's a pretty nice tutorial, but you're right, it doesn't do anything to add texture such as pores. Most people use the noise filter for that and it works fairly well. If you go that route there are a few important things to keep in mind - First, keep it subtle. Nothing will mess up a skin faster than too much noise. Monochrome noise works best.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the scale isn't the same between the three skin textures. The head texture receives more pixels of texture per polygon than the upper and lower body textures. A handy way to figure out relative scales is to create a checkerboard texture and apply it to all three skin texture slots. Take some screenshots and then compare the size of the checkers on the three parts of the avatar. That will help you understand the relative scales.

For skin palette colors, I find it useful to sample colors from photograhs to get base, shadow, and highlight colors.

For fingernails using photographic reference helps a lot. You can incorporate fingernails taken directly from a photo or just use it as a reference for painting your own. Locations for finger and toenails are shown on the alternate template sets (mine and Robin's) and also in files located in the "character" subfolder of your SL install directory.

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