I'm going to have to agree with Chosen here. There are several different paths to getting a high quality skin. And none of them are easy. All of them involve significant artistic interpretation. Yes, there are tools such as blender that can do some pieces for you in an automated fashion. However, all that does is transfer the "art" part of it from a question of photoshop and brushes to a set of decisions in terms of shaders and other arcane 3d settings. In the end, you start with a blank slate and end up with something. No matter what tools you are using, someone had to tell the computer in some fashion what to end up with. I know of no tool where you can just press the magic "make me a good skin" button.
It would be tempting for the unitiated to take what nam does and say "Oh, how easy.. just grab some model reference photographs, paste em onto the avatar mesh, bake it out again, and *presto*, I'm golden... *laughs*.
reality goes something more like this...
a) paste the images to the mesh as decals
b) setup your lighting
c) setup your ambient along with any surface shaders
d) bake out the textures
e) swear and curse for hours while you cleanup the seams
f) now start looking at the vaguaries of the SL avatar lighting system because your "perfect photograph" skin looks awful in the lighting engine of SL
g) now start pondering WHY, exactly, the avatar mesh was design by crack smoking monkeys and start fixing all the defects cause by the almost incomprehensible mesh
h) now start making compromises... lots and lots of compromises, trying to balance out various design constraints. Do those butt cheeks look great when you're standing up? Perfect because they look awful when you're bent over. What about the neck, inner thighs, sides of the torso, etc. etc. All of these areas of "issues" that need to be balanced.
You migth argue that once you're good at it, the first 4 steps are going to be easily repeatable. Unfortunately, it is the later steps that will actually make what you did in those first 4 steps look good. It is also those steps that are going to take a lot of time.
All of this was just a long winded way of saying what Chosen said. Bottom line is that there is no simple way of producing anything of quality. Not food, not furniture, and not SL clothes and skins.
It would be tempting for the unitiated to take what nam does and say "Oh, how easy.. just grab some model reference photographs, paste em onto the avatar mesh, bake it out again, and *presto*, I'm golden... *laughs*.
reality goes something more like this...
a) paste the images to the mesh as decals
b) setup your lighting
c) setup your ambient along with any surface shaders
d) bake out the textures
e) swear and curse for hours while you cleanup the seams
f) now start looking at the vaguaries of the SL avatar lighting system because your "perfect photograph" skin looks awful in the lighting engine of SL
g) now start pondering WHY, exactly, the avatar mesh was design by crack smoking monkeys and start fixing all the defects cause by the almost incomprehensible mesh
h) now start making compromises... lots and lots of compromises, trying to balance out various design constraints. Do those butt cheeks look great when you're standing up? Perfect because they look awful when you're bent over. What about the neck, inner thighs, sides of the torso, etc. etc. All of these areas of "issues" that need to be balanced.
You migth argue that once you're good at it, the first 4 steps are going to be easily repeatable. Unfortunately, it is the later steps that will actually make what you did in those first 4 steps look good. It is also those steps that are going to take a lot of time.
All of this was just a long winded way of saying what Chosen said. Bottom line is that there is no simple way of producing anything of quality. Not food, not furniture, and not SL clothes and skins.
*laugh* I almost got coffee up my nose. Crack smoking monkey..what a visual.
On a side note I tried to find that post, unfortunatly it seemed to have gotten buried, or I just didn't recall the title the thread was in. Maybe I am the one smoking crack? *checks for a monkey tail* Nope no tail!
I'll keep practicing in photoshop, I might get there one day!