Skin Question

I'm curious about designing my own skin (I love my purchased skins but I want to know nayway). The templates available here are for upper and lower bodies, while an avatar skin is all one piece. Can someone please explain how this is done?

Jujudoll,

A skin (even the ones you purchase) comprise of three parts, known as tattoo's. You have a head tattoo, an upper tattoo and a lower tattoo. Make all three using the templates and your graphics program, and uploaded these to Second Life.

Then:

1. Click Inventory > Create > New Body Parts > New Skin.
2. If you look under the Body Parts folder in the inventory, you will see your skin and it will be called "new skin"
3. Double click on it to wear this new skin and right click your Avatar to edit your appearance.
4. Click on the skin tab and you will see three boxes which are currently blank, for the head, upper and lower tattoo. You need to fill these boxes with the skin you have created and which has been saved in 512 x 512 format as a .tga file. If you have uploaded these files correctly, you should find it under textures in your main inventory.

Once you select all three parts, you will find your avatar wearing the skin you just created. Save the skin and name it something other than new skin and you are good to go.

Hope this helps.

Good luck.

Thank you so much, I really had no idea! That is so helpful

ayesha i am also trying to create my own skins ive looked at the things youve said to jujudoll and i understand those parts what i do not understand though is how do you make the head skin with eyes mouth and other parts do you just use the magic wand in photoshop select the templates parts with the wand and fill them with the skin texture or am i thinking the wrong way id love to beable to make my own skins becaus its something ive always wanted to do but not sure on how the skins are created on the templates or even where people get he skin textures to use id appreciate if you could give me some pointers on anywhere i could go to get skin textures online and how to acheive thecutting out of the eyes or does that autmoatically happen when the skin texture is placed on the uppr and lower body part you create in secondlife???

Go here:
http://www.slboutique.com/chipmidnight/

If you look on the head template it will show you where the mouth/eyes/nose goes. You either draw or paste the parts there.

Hey Jesseaitui, that template link is awesome. Does the same exist for a male template?Thanks
UB

That same template is used for both male and female. The only real difference between the two is in how you shade and colour it.

Geez, hawk, seriously, paragraphs and punctuation are your friends!

Thus said: usually people paint the skin/clothes on a new layer, and not directly over the template. I know I always end up with a truckload of layers, when painting clothes. Not all of them will show in the final design. They are just "working layers", the templates being a prime example of this.

Hi Hawk,
My first advice to you would be to check the stickies at the very top of the design and textures forum. Even if these appear to deal with clothes, read them because there is a lot of common instructions for making clothes and skins.

In a nutshell, what I do is use some photo's and blend these into the templates to make skin. An excellent source for photos is http://www.3d.sk/, but if you are just starting out, look for some royalty free sources to start out with. The templates are an excellent guide for placement of body parts, and once the eyes, nose, lips and other bits are all in the correct place, use the clone stamp tool in photoshop to pick out bits of skin from one section and blend it into the other.

It's important to blend seams, so use the seam and edge matching guides to make sure that similar colored and shaded skin is placed on seams to avoid any obvious lines at points where the templates join each other and wrap around the avatar.

Good luck and do let me know if I can help further.

hi all,

what would this particulary PS tool be called in GIMP.

thx for any help.
anik

Anik........

"Paint using Patterns or Image Regions"

It looks like a little ink stamp.