Skin Tutorial.

Ok looking all through this forum and all over the net I have yet to come upon a skin tutorial for SL.

So I am asking here.
Does anyone have one?

Know of one?


I know how to make clothes, do I simply use the same templates and make the body off of those?

If so where can I get a nice template for male and female skins so I can start making my own.

Any and all help will be much apreciated.

Thank you.

Yes, you use the same templates - you'll also need to use the head one of course, and the foot I guess.

I don't know if anyone has a template like that for skin tones etc. I'd suggest you start experimenting - big blocks of colour etc. OR wearing the template as a skin so you can see how they map over the whole body.

Once you've started that, the fun in PS comes in with highlights, shadows, etc.

Good luck!

Just noticed this little thread. While I don't have too many "realistic" skin tones, I do a fair bit of anime, and many of the colors seem to match SL skin tones. When I get home, I will post up here the three skin tone templates I acquired, one for African descent, another for Asian descent, and a last for European descent. They have proven invaluable to my own small artworks, and parhaps may serve a wider purpose here.

Hoping to have helped (and help more in a few hours),

Yours,
Mika Kyubi (Muromachi)
Kitsune-at-Large

yay mika! looking forward to your uploads thanks in advance!

Dearest Kaia,

Attached to this post are the three graphics I spoke of previously. Please pardon my lack of speed on the matter, as I was unable to leave work at the prescribed time. For this, I deeply apologize. May these color samples be used in good health.

Yours,
Mika Kyubi (Muromachi)
Kitsune-at-Large

Thank you very much.

I wil hopefully be making some beatiful skins here soon.

thanks for sharing mika - those color swatches look great.


tokeya - you might want to get some nude pics (minds out of the gutter, forum trolls ) for reference. You can google artist reference sites for example (often there are a couple of free samples), or there are books at most any library or bookstore that have nude models in various poses. These are great because the lighting usually shows off highlights and shadows and can be an excellent resource when facing those scary templates.

it is the subtlety of the highlights and shadows that bring the skin "to life".

i have only begun to dabble with skins and I must applaud the skin designers because its not easy. however, with patience and practice and few scary uploads i'm sure you we will get there.

good luck

look what i found a few posts down -
/109/98/78649/1.html

A wee little bump here ^-^

both of the links posted here are good learning tools for those who want to learn to make skins and experiment, thank you both for posting this,

I found this tutorial which is pretty good. It's made for Poser but the same technique should work for SL too:
http://www.students.yorku.ca/~harnock/tutorials/skin.htm

Another one:
http://www.tutorialoutpost.com/count/961

For very real looking skin:
http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=31082

Here's the Akira Gomi references in an easier to browse form:
http://www.canal96.com/extra/strange/wwbeauty/

The official templates for the SL avatars are here for anyone who might not know:
http://secondlife.com/community/templates.php


I'm not very good with Photoshop yet and have a couple of related questions if anyone is willing to answer:

1. Is there some way I can fill or paint with a little part of a texture? Not using a texture as a material, that's not what I mean. For instance if I had a photo of someone with beautiful skin and I wanted to snip out a few pixels of the skin texture from her cheek and then spread that evenly over the canvas (or paint with it) to be like the base skin color for the avatar skin I'm making (as opposed to just starting with a solid color). I can achieve this manually with the clone brush by setting it to non-aligned and dabbing the little bit of texture I want over and over and over until I fill the area, but this might take an hour or more and sometimes comes out all splotchy looking. I know there must be a better way to do this, but how?

2. Is there a way I can re-color a completed skin to match a certain color tone? I know how to tint but that just paints a new semi-transparent color on top which has the bad effect of sort of dulling the colors. I know how to use the color balance sliders but I want a more specific way to adjust to a certain color. For instance if I had a caucasian skin and I wanted to re-color it to match the colors in the charts Mika Muromachi posted above. I want to sample a specific color and have the software adjust the colors in the skin proportionally using the color I sample as the seed. Another reason for doing this is I want to make collage-type pictures and take a number of different layers and convert them to make them all look like they fit together color wise.

I spent hours searching for the answers to these questions myself but I don't know the right terms to search on. I have PS5 and PSP9. Can anyone help?

In either version of PS (I think. It's been a while since I saw 5), go up to the "Image" menu, then to the adjustments submenu. Hue & Saturation, Color Balance, and Levels in the appropriate combination will get the job done In PS9 you can also do these effects as adjustment layers (layers menu, add adjustment layer). This is preferable since you can adjust them to your heart's content without permanently altering the base layer.

I know, but... I'm not good enough to get it to come out exactly the right color I want. All I can do is randomly move the sliders around and hope I get lucky. Even if I learned eventually to do it with practice I'd still like to have a more exact way. What I'm looking for is a more scientific way to enter an exact color in RGB form (or a range of colors) and have the software use those values as a seed to adjust the colors in the image proportionally. I'm sure there must be some way to do this. If it's not possible with the basic program with a plugin maybe? Thanks for the reply.

To fill or paint with a little part of a texture, just make it into a pattern by itself. To do that, draw a marquee around the area you want to use, and go to Edit > Define Pattern. Then you can use the Clone Stamp, or the Paint Bucket to fill any area with those pixels.

I'd recommend making them seamless first, though, or it's going to look like a bunch of little squares, especially if you've chosen a very small area. To do that, use the marqee, but just Copy, and Paste into a New document. Then go to Filter > Other > Offset, and offset it half the width and height of your document, making sure that "Wrap Around" is enabled. Blend the seam you'll see in the middle, using whatever tools seem appropriate for the task, and use that to Define Pattern.

You still might see a definite repeating pattern, depending on the texture you started with, but it should be muted, anyway. And often, working on a skin, a Gaussian Blur will take care of it if it's not too obvious.

To spread the few pixels evenly over the canvas, just use Free Transform (Command/ctrl T), and spread 'em out! If what you want is the color, doing that and then making a mask to confine it to the area you want will probably work better, anyway, since Photoshop will blend them as evenly as it can as soon as you accept the transformation. (It will look like huge squares before that, but it shouldn't afterward.)

Automatically recoloring everything proportionally to match a specific color was introduced in PS CS. I'm afraid that the only way to do it in PS 5 is to do it manually, as Chip said. Don't overlook Blending Modes and tinting, though. Sometimes Soft Light or Hard Light will do it, without dulling the colors underneath. Worth a try, anyway!

Hope this helps!

Damn, I really need to upgrade to CS. I had no idea they added that capability. How well does it work?

There's lots of wonderful new stuff, Chip! Get CS2, you'll love it. The Smart Objects alone are worth the price of the upgrade, if you use them right.

As for the Color Matching, it depends. It can be very easy and powerful if you know what you are doing, or a total mess if you don't. Which I guess makes it like the rest of the software.

Here's the dialog.



As you can see, you have to have to both the Source and Destination images open, and then you can pick the layer you want to color match, or you can pick "merged" to color match the whole thing. The matching will only happen on the active layer in the destination document.

You can further fine tune what's getting matched by selecting portions of both images, and you can tell the software whether to use those selections, or ignore them. And you have sliders to tweak the matching, too, obviously.

As for how it looks in action, I'll let you decide.

Here are two faces from two very different images that I made. (I'm using paintings to avoid any possiblity of copyright issues, of course.)



Humm. I have to break this up into two different posts; I'm using too many images.

(continued)

As you can see, the skin tones are very different.

If you just use the default Color Match settings, and match the merged picture on the left with the one on the right, it's not very pleasant, because the backgrounds are very different. It comes out like this.



However, if you use the Extract filter (another thing that you don't have, but CS does; it's a kind of Knockout knock off, ) to isolate the skin from both figures, and use those layers or selections, and tweak it just a bit, you can get this. (The settings used for the skin are shown in the dialog above. For the hair, I just used the default, after making the Extraction on both images.)



So yeah, you can get pretty close very quickly. If you're matching a lot of things that have similar backgrounds, like a whole series from the same photo shoot, then you don't even need to do the selections. I think that's what it was really designed for, and it works beautifully for things like that.

It also works quite well when the image is already in layers, like a skin would be. For Snowglobes purposes it would be a snap to use.

But download the demo for CS 2, and take a look at some of the tuts. A lot of the new things are hidden in menus and stuff, but they are wonderful! I'd list some of my favorites, but I'm afraid I'd start to sound like an infomercial.

Hope this answers your question!

(Edited to add bit about the hair, which I also added.)

cs2 is awsome chip also has stretching called warp, which gives you 16 points to morph a texture with, great for photoreal skins.

but I have an issue with it that i cant seem to get past.

32 tga save wont save transparancey without apha channels like adobe 7 does. On top of it I still even with aplha channels can not get it to save transparent. so i end up working in cs2 save psd file then open and saving in photoshop 7 lol.

but there are some really great features in cs2

you can even try it out for 30 days before you buy.
http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/newfeatures.html

Yep, Chip, Warp is an Envelope, and is available every time that you are using Free Transform. It's wonderful for clothing too, or any place where you need to stretch something to match something else.

And if you Warp a Smart Object, you can double click on the Smart Object in the Layer palette, and just paste another image in there, and it will automatically warp that, exactly the same way, when you Save the Smart Object and go back to the Photoshop document. It's really slick and easy, and it's the way I do all my collars and things now, because I can just switch fabrics, and not have to worry about placing the new one. It's done!

KatanaBlade, I thought I'd told you how to manage it, and make CS2 work exactly like PS7.

1. Finish your image, just the way you are used to doing it.

2. Go to the top of the Layer Stack, and then hold down Shift+alt+ctrl (Shift+Option+Command on a Mac,) and tap the E key. That will make a new composite layer, combining all the visible layers. (Note: if you are following this with an older version of PS, make a new layer first.)

3. Hold down ctrl/Command and click on the Thumbnail image of that composite layer in the Layer Palette. That will select all the non-transparent pixels, according to the amount of non-transparency.

4. Go to Select > Save Selection, and accept the defaults.

6. Save as a Targa (.tga) file. When the dialog appears, after you click Save, choose 32 bit. You are ready to upload to SL, and I assure you that your Alpha will be there, and be exactly what you are used to.

All of this takes a few steps to write down, but will take less than a minute to do. It's only 4 mouse clicks, after all.

If you can't manage it, even with this, let me know and I'll put together an Action that will do it for you. (That goes for everyone else, too, of course.)

It's really, really simple.

And, of course, if you feel so inclined, you can use the free Solidify filter from Flaming Pear on the composite layer, before you save, and make sure that your white halos are gone forever.

KatanaBlade, it just occurred to me; you're not trying to save the file with more than one Alpha channel, are you? Because you can't.

To save correctly to a 32 bit .tga file, you must have 4 channels total; Red, Green, Blue and Alpha. No more, and no less.

If you have more than one extra channel, no matter what you call them, Photoshop doesn't know which one you mean to use, and so it ignores all of them, with the result that you don't have an Alpha channel when you try to upload. (Or perhaps you have a plain white one, I'm not sure, but whatever you have, it's opaque.)

Remember; There can be only one!

The work around, in case your normal workflow includes saving selections to reuse later, (which are all Alpha channels, by the way,) is to save them to empty layers, instead.

That way, you can just command/ctrl click on the Thumbnail image of the layer, and load the selection. It's not quite as easy as Load Selection from the Select menu, but it works, and doesn't interfere with the .tga image.

Let me know if that's what it was!

hehe, yeah. I'm not happy about that either, but now that everyone else in the world is using CS it's proving to be more of a problem than a benefit. 7 isn't saving proper alpha channels so if you send a file to someone with CS it won't load with a correct alpha. It took about six times of that happening to get me in the habit of saving a proper alpha, and since I'm now doing that anyway... It was fun while it lasted!

Thanks for the Tips.

I am not doing anything different in good old reliable photoshop 7 than I am in cs2. it just doesnt work. I've tried all you suggested over and over and over a long time ago lol. It just doesnt work. I know how to save as a tga for the life of me and I swear that part of cs2 is BROKEN on mine lol. How did I come to that conclusion. My friend uses it too she had the same problem in cs and she installed cs2 from her other computer and she doesnt have that problem and followed my instructions to the T lol. i just have the problem in cs2 and not photoshop 7.

You are aware that Adobe experimented with PS 7.0, and changed the way that .tga files were saved, yes? It caused a huge problem and uproar, and they changed it back almost at once, but for a little while targa transparency was based entirely on image transparency, and (as I understand it,) the alpha was saved internally where no one could see it or edit it.

If that's what you've been using, then yeah, nothing else will save the .tga like that, and there's a reason for that.

But if you've followed all of these instructions, and it's not saving the targa properly, then I agree that your copy is probably broken. Have you tried reloading the Targa plug-in in the File Formats folder in your Plug-Ins folder? That ought to fix it.

If you've done that, and it's not working, I suggest that you call Adobe.

I mean, this isn't cheap software, and you deserve to have it working properly.

this i didnt try, can i just browse my disk and get it from there? or is there a link that i can get it from?

Hi! It's probably not on your installation disk; it's not on mine, anyway (I use a Mac.) You could try re-installing the program, and make backup copies of the whole thing on a CD so you can get fresh new copies of the bits if you need them. But that seems like a lot of work.

I don't know if the plug-in has been changed from the one they used to fix the 7.0 behavior. If it hasn't, you can download it here. I'd try that, anyway, before installing the progam again. (Besides, if it's bad on your installation disk, it will just be broken again anyway.)

I know that plug-in won't work with earlier versions of PS, but I don't know about later ones. Maybe someone else here does?

If that doesn't work, I'd call Adobe and tell them that you suspect that the plug-in has problems. You can't possibly be the only one that has this problem, and they might know just what to do, or be able to send you to a place where you can grab the CS2 version.

Snowglobe, thanks for those awesome links

KatanaBlade, I've attached a test PSD file. It's straight from Robin's great T-Shirt template (thanks, R) but I've merged all the layers (which you would normally not do) and sized it down to 256 just to keep it small and simple.

Also attached is the TGA my PS exports.

If you wanna load up this PSD in your PS, save as to a 32-bit TGA and post the result back here, we'll take a look and see if we spot anything funny.

Thanks for the information. I'll try those techniques. You gave me an idea for something else I can try too; there's a tool in PSP called Picture Tube that sort of sprays images around. It's normally used for leaves and blades of grass and things like that, but I could make custom tubes of the textures I want to use and do it that way.