Skin Help ... I can't find the answer

OK, this is going to be a stupid question, but I can't find the answer.

I can draw and upload clothes to SL and use them with no problem. I tried my hand at making a new skin and after about a week in PS making it exactly the way I want it and testing it offline to make sure it's what I want ... I can't figure out how to get it on my avatar in SL.

I UL'ed the files, but how do I actually make the skin for my avatar?


Does that make sense?

Edit your appearance, and press the skin button, there should be three boxes labeled "head tatoo", "upper tatoo" and "lower tatoo". If you made your skin correctly, you should select your skin textures as these tatoos.

Before you do that, though, open your Inventory and right click on the folder you want to keep your skin in. Then choose New > Body Part > Skin from the drop down menu. (Or something like that; I'm not at the computer that will run SL just now.)

That will create a new Basic skin. Put it on (double click it,) and drag your textures onto the appropriate "wells" in that one. (Or choose them from the Texture Picker; it doesn't make any difference how you do it.)

The first step is essential, because it will then list you as the skin Creator, which is important if you ever want to sell your skin, or give it away.

If you simply edit the skin you got when you first entered SL, the Creator will be listed as Nobody, which is probably not what you want.

(The same holds true for everything you can make in Appearances, by the way; skin, hair, eyes, clothing ... make a New one first, or edit one you made from New, to have your name appear as Creator.)

Hope this helps!

Actually, although Robin's advice is still good practise, last time I did it they'd fixed that particular quirk, and if you made new clothes in the appearance menu it showed you as the creator. Didn't test it for skins, but it's worth checking that too.

Well, the tatoo method was the first thing I tried and it worked, but I wasn't able to adjust the color. On a skin that someone gave me, I was able to adjust the color after I applied the skin. With my new skin as a tatoo, I can't adjust it. Maybe I didn't build my skin right or something.

I did the skin in color, but later I saw someone else suggest to create the skin in grayscale to let anyone wearing the skin adjust their color. So I desaturated the colors in PhotoShop to keep it as an RGB rather than a grayscale. So when I apply the skin as a tatoo, it looks good on me, but I look like a gray alien and can't change it.

Make sense?

Since I am working on a skin in the moment this answer would be highly appreciated.

I have some experience with tintable skins.

Making a tintable skin from a finished opaque skin will require a bit of tweaking in photoshop (or your favorite image editor) before uploading. Typically one would decide what type of skin (tintable or fully opaque) it will be before designing it, but if the decision is made after the fact then contrast and opacity percentage are the most important things to consider. Deciding this before making the skin allows the skin contrast, body hair, moles, freckles, and other surface textures to be taken into consideration for complex alpha channels.

Here is an excerpt from an earlier post where I touched upon this subject - "The more transparent a skin the flatter it will look in detail and sharpness, and the more you will see the default skin pigmentation bleed through the transparent skin texture. The effect is a trade off in skin detail for adjustability. If done right, the skin can look very natural and still be adjustable. Makeup and tattoos mostly use complex alpha channels, whereas skins will most likely use a uniformly transparent set of alpha channels when the intent is to allow skin pigmentation adjustments with the client."

Here is a step by step for converting an opaque skin to one that can be tinted:

1. Set the opacity of all your layers in the master file to between 75%-85%. Anything below 75% is going to look too washed out. Anything above 85% is not going to allow enough tinting on the sliders. If your master file has multiple layers, include them all in a single "layer set" and set the opacity of that "layer set" to one of the above mentioned opacity settings.

2. Preview the skin inside SL within appearance. You won't be able to play with the tinting using the standard SL preview window, so you're going to need to upload and pay $L10, or use my optional method described below.

The best way to preview skins inside SL without spending the upload cost is to replace the color layers in your client folder (head_color.tga, lowerbody_color.tga, upperbody_color.tga). The things to test will be the "pigmentation" and "rainbow" sliders in appearance. The "ruddiness" will not make much difference.

Another perk of replacing the client textures is the ability to use all the makeup and definition sliders as texture overlays ("wrinkles" will be the only one disabled).

3. Start to make new "curve","levels","brightness & contrast" adjustment layers to each of the separate skin components, if such layers exist. The point of these adjustments will be to counter the washed out effect of a semitransparent skin by boosting the shading and contrast of the skin slightly. These adjustments can be hard to fine tune without overexposing the highlight areas and losing detail in the shadows. Return to step 1 or 2, wash, rinse, and repeat. This will take a little time. Results may very depending upon the complexity of the textures in the master file.

4. (Optional) If the skin has layers that isolate body hair, moles and other areas of the skin that would normally remain unaffected by tinting, these layers should be placed above the skin "layer set" and kept fully opaque. Please note that these layers must already have transparent backgrounds.

That's about it. Good luck Az and Vyper!

Thanks for the explication.

As Eloise mentioned, for making clothing, you can remove the article you want, and use the "Create New (thing)" button in Appearances, and it will show you as the Creator.

However, since you can't remove your skin, all you can do is modify the one you are wearing. Mods always retain the Creator's name; so if you Mod a skin that someone else made, their name will be listed as the Creator even if you replace all three textures, so there's nothing of their work left on the skin.

That's why, for skins, you need to Create a new one using "New Body Parts > New Skin" from the drop down menu you get by right clicking in your Inventory. (Command-clicking on a Mac with one mouse button. I'm on the right computer now, so I can see what the menus actually say, by the way. )

Hope this helps!

Robin and Namssor ... thank you very much. I think that makes it all clear now.

Too bad I already spent the Lindens to UL something I can't use. That's what I *HATE* about skins/clothing. To fully see exactly how it will all interface in-game, you have to pony up the $$$. If you end up wanting to tweak it, you've got to pay again.

It's not as bad as you think. I preview skins by replacing the client side color layers and hitting the <client/character/rebake textures> option to refresh. I have actions set up in Photoshop that auto-save flattened and resized files in the client directory. The whole process takes about 5 seconds from edit to preview. It's quite effective. The only time I pay L$ is when I make that final upload onto the servers after roughly 500-1000 previews per skin. Now that Johan Durant has so kindly created and offered the SL clothes previewer to the public, I find myself using both methods. I use SLCP for about 70% of the work, and the final 30% inside SL for shape, seam, and prim testing. After all is said and done, I've spent a grand total of about L$30 for a single finished skin, as it should be!

Also, there's the preview grid, where you get about 500 free uploads before you run out of cash

I'm on a Mac, so I can't use the SLCP, and I usually forget to use the Preview Grid or the Client Side trick.

But look at it this way... how much money are you actually spending here?

A single L$10 upload costs a little over three and a half cents in US dollars, at today's exchange rate. You can upload all three skin textures, and check them out, for about a dime.

Test prints of my RL artwork cost more than 5 times that, and yet I don't hesitate to do as many tests as it takes to get exactly what I want.

So I wouldn't fret much about wasting that dime. You got more than a dime's worth of knowledge and experience out of it, and you're all set to be a "gray ghoul" next Halloween!

Well, back to square one. I've made exactly what I want for a skin, but I can't figure out what frikkin' format to create it. I've searched the forums and Google, and I can't find a guide that tells me exactly how the skin needs to be made. Do I make it in grayscale or color? Do I include the alpha channel in the TGA or do I break it down into all the various TGA files that are in the client side character folder?

Grrr .... back to Google

I found this in the forums:
http://www.succubuscoven.com/male_skin.html

It has the three skin files as grayscale. When I created my skins in grayscale like this, I end up with a gray body in SL ... and I can't change the color.

Someone please tell me what I'm doing wrong. I know I must just be retarded or something. I've got to be missing something simple.

I understand where you're coming from, but for me it's the time, not the dime. I'll take a free 5 second preview over a 60 second preview no matter how cheap it is. That's a time savings of over 15 hours at 1000 previews. If I figured those into my rates that would be a pretty big savings I could pass onto the client.

Skins are, in SL, pretty much like clothes. You need three textures to upload, each 512 X 512 ideally (other sizes will be resized to this internally for skin/clothes). One for the head, one for the upper body, one for the lower body.

You should, because skins tend to full coverage of the av by their very nature, only need an alpha channel in there if you've got partial transparency in any of the bits over the UV-mesh. If you've got a black & white alpha channel you don't need it. The bits you've transparencied out will not be shown anyway, because they don't get used from the map.

I'm 99% sure you need to have the image in RGB (and maybe + alpha) to upload it into SL. I've never actually tried uploading greyscale, but I think you'll find it doesn't work, the uploader is relatively stupid and will expect RGB(±alpha) and complain if there's not enough bits per pixel.

Nam, I absolutely agree! I wish I could always remember to use the Client Side trick, but I usually don't; and rather than kick myself for it, I remember that I'm not spending that much money.

Vyper, you need to upload your skin in color. As you already know, if you upload in grayscale, you'll have a gray skin. The only way around that is to upload in Grayscale with a fair bit of transparency in an alpha channel, and then IMHO your skin will only look dead, not actually gray.

Skin has a lot of tones in it, and the sliders don't. So, even if you are using transparency, I'd upload a colored skin, if I were you. If you must use a flat tone for the skin, for some reason, I highly recommend that you use Burnt Sienna (a warm brown tone) instead of gray. Your skin will look much better.

Use the Client Side trick that Nam describes, and take a look at what a gray skin will do in SL, and I think you'll agree that the effect isn't what you were hoping for.

Another question: I am more into creating clothes then skins so that part is more important for me.

I am creating some pants and want to preview them. Both slcp and the actual ingame preview only show me the pants sticket to the body texture. But as the pants are supposed to be wide I will use the sliders as soon as I create the clothes. This stretching moves some parts of the texture to places I don't want them. Is there a solution to actually preview a wider shirt or pants with the texture?

Yes, but it's a little tricky. So if anyone knows of a better way, I'd like to know also.

Here's what I have done:

Overwrite the clothing texture over the appropriate color layer in the client for either pants or shirt. Upload a 50% transparent white texture, if you don't already have one, and apply that to the corresponding body section for either pants or a shirt. You should now see a washed out version of your clothing texture. It will still have enough detail for you to see all the elements in the texture. You should also be able to distort the clothing item, although it won't distort as much as a fully opaque texture when you add bulk or flair to the clothing item. The reason for this is that the distortion sliders react the strongest to 100% opacity and not at all to 100% transparency. 50% transparency will reduce distortions by half, but probably give you a good idea as to where things will distort the most.

I hope that makes sense

I think I mis-spoke when I said grayscale ... what I was uploading was an RGB file, desaturated. It "looks" like a grayscale, but is actually a color image. I assumed that would allow me to set the color from within SL rather than force a color upon whoever wears the skin.

Extremely clever solution, Nam! Yet another reason to try to remember to use the Client Side trick!

Lolita, what I said before about using a shade of reddish brown instead of gray still applies. Try them both, but if you are using human skin tones (as opposed to blue, or stark white, or something else Not Found in Nature) I think you'll like the brown tones better.

When I first started to do under paintings for oil paint, I used shades of gray and found that it took huge amounts of work to make a realistic, lively skin tone. When I started to do Burnt Sienna under paintings on the skin, making them look like living skin was a snap.

(It's because of the subsurface scattering, and I could go into a lot of detail that would probably bore everyone so I'll spare you all that. But do try it. )

Hope this helps!

Is there anywhere an example of a female skin that could be used as a starting point for photoshop practice?

This thread will probably help you:

/109/5f/50269/1.html

My advice would be to start with clothing textures, then advance to skin textures. You'll be able to manipulate distortions and seams in the texture wrap a lot easier with fabric textures than with the subtle gradations of light and shadow on natural looking skins.

Once familiar with areas like the spot where the side of the neck meets the front and back shoulder seams, the ankle seam, and many other tough texture blending spots, you can apply that knowledge to a skin texture with a lot more confidence.

Many thanks!

I had already started making clothing textures, and spotted some of the problem areas. The area around the crotch seems to be particularly awkward.