Gimp and using a .tga texture to make a tattoo

I'm at a standstill. Maybe an easy answer and I'm just not seeing it. I have a upper body template in Gimp. If I have a .tga texture saved on my hard drive, can anybody tell me how to get it on, let's say for example, the chest area of my upper body template.

Thank you in advance.

Dart.

This is where layers come in. You add a new layer above the template. Then you load the tattoo into that layer. Then you will be able to resize and move the tattoo layer until it is where you want it.

if you aim for a nice flat area, such as the stomach, then it will be easy. It gets tricky if you try for a curvy are such as the breast. Then you have to manually stretch and distort the tattoo image so that it will come out correctly when it is pasted on a 3D body.

The background of the tattoo should be transparent, of course.

Then, you leave only the visibile layers visiable, and save (as tga or png, probably).

Upload that image, and either make it an undershirt or part of a skin.

If this makes sense, great. If it sounds like gibberish, then perhaps you need to spend some time with a GIMP tutorial. This is one of those things that is easy once you know how, but to learn from scratch takes quite awhile.

Google for tutorials. Mostly they use Photoshop, but the concepts are the same.

Best wishes,.
lee

Another, perhaps less complicated sounding (though what Lee said is very simple), is once you have your upper body template open, go the the "file" menu drop down and choose "open as layer". That will get you a query box where you can navigate to where you have the tattoo file saved.....click on the file and open it. That will put your texture on top of whatever layer you had active at the time of the open as layers. It's best to make the top layer of your template file active before you open your tattoo texture....to save some confusion if you are new to GIMP.

Once you have the tattoo texture layered on top of your template you're good to go with what you want to do with it. If the texture is not 32 bit (for instance it's a JPEG image) you will need to make it one. Do that by making that layer active and under the "Layer" drop down menu go to "transparency" (which will expand when you mouse over it) and click "add alpha channel". That way any cutting of background, etc will cut to transparency........if you don't do that any cuts will cut to the background color you have set.

Then it's just exactly how Lee discrribed.

Good luck.

Adding layers can also be done by dragging and dropping files into the Gimp Image window or directly into the layers tab from the File Managers or Image browsers. (My preferred way, I rarely "Open" files.)