Skins

Humour is usually at the expense of someone else, either fictional or real. I'm sure if I started selling anything of value, someone would do it to me too, but I'll still find it humourous.



I totally agree with you. However I speak in context of the thread and the person who started it was looking for full perms skins to sell, which essentially means being a middleman for the purpose of profit.

You must be out of your mind! A highly detailed 1024x1024 skinset in photoshop wouldn't take 20 hours, even for making high quality skins for UT2004. Making skins for set templates (skinning at its simplest, dont even have to worry about the custom model mapping aspect) is a cakewalk, and nowhere near the 50 hour mark.

My skins generally take somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-30 hours to create. I'm sure it all depends on the artist and workflow. There's an old saying among freelance artists... "speed, quality, or price... pick two."

"speed, quality, or price... pick two."

And if it's quality and detail you want, go to Chip... if it's speed, simplicity, and cheapness, try me.

To the original query poster... can't remember who now, heheh... I do skins with mod eyeshadow that are cheap & simple (and getting better with time and I'll happily do you an exclusive set for your avatars for a fixed price and conditions. Gimme a pip in-world if you're interested.

Bear in mind that I haven't sold any of my skins yet. I'm still on the learning curve so to me 50 hours seems minimal -- but I've also been told by a couple of skin designers that 50 hours was not an unusual time investment. I'm sure once I have my base skins set up and I'm only tweaking shades, makeup, musculature, etc., the timeline will drop drastically.


My point stands: Even at the 30 hours quoted by Chip, that's not a casual pastime one can laugh off if it's stolen by the unscrupulous.

50 Plus hours, interesting. I wonder what a competent Photoshop Artist would charge someone to teach them skins, including round trip airfair and lodging accomodations to learn the procedures and complexity involved in making good skins and or where to learn it. If you have any suggestions as to how you or they learned, send me and IM in game. I mean, do they have a Graphics Arts Degree or did it come by just reading PS instructions? Hmm..I don't know about reading instructions and knowing the terminology as from what i've read it's all speghetti, something a bit intricate I would probably need a College Course at minimum but; it would be interesting to learn. I would even consider a Partnership with total Shape/Skin packages as a business and learning from each other.

I will do it. I am a very skilled photoshop expert. Wouldnt take me more that about 3 hours. And I will charge my normal freelance rate. If you interested in paying that is. I charge $100 per hour, so for $300 dollars per skin, youll have to sell alot to make a profit. BUT.........because I love SL so much, I will make them for less, I enjoy the game and creating for it, So we could work out a deal, like a 70/30 split me being the 70% of course.

Hi Audi!

Ummm... have you ever actually made a skin for SL? I would do that, if I were you, before I quoted a customer a 3 hour rate.

Because you might find that it takes considerably more than 3 hours. The UV maps are... difficult to work with. Some things, like the palms of the hands for instance, are so warped and twisted that if you draw a straight line on the map, you get an unusable, wavy line on the Avatar. All of these little problems need to be compensated for, to make a usable skin.

I'm very comfortable with Photoshop, and I've been making 3D textures for many years, and there's no way I could make a competitive Skin for SL in 3 hours.

In fact, I'm just now seriously working on my first skin, and I've already spent more than 20 hours, just figuring out where things actually land, and how to reverse-warp the painting so it's all where it should be.

There's a reason that skins in SL are relatively expensive.

Just thought I should mention that, before you find yourself caught in a situation that takes far, far longer than you expected.

Agreed. I've lost track of the hours I've spent adjusting things like lip lines & eyebrows 1 PIXEL AT A TIME until they fell in just the right place or didn't smear across the face as the map warped them.

I noticed someone mention "full 1024 skin textures"... I always work at 1024 pixels or higher in Photoshop, but all textures are reduced to 512 for the finished product. I use full detail settings for SL and really the difference is almost imperceptable save for the time taken for a skin to rez (if it ever does) particularly after SL has compressed the image. I find the time taken to perfect and test the texture in the first place can dramatically minimise any detrimental effect of using a smaller texture, and I genuinely think both the customer and the populace at large benefit more from this than oversized skin textures.