Skins Ideas... I was just watching Josie and the Pussycats (for the first time! I should have watched it sooner!) and I saw a dress I want to do a version of as a sims skin now, and that made me wonder, where are some of the odd places YOU get ideas for sims skins? Also, does anyone have suggestions for places to GET skins ideas?
hmmm what would be a good way to research victorian styles?? It might be interesting to try, but I'd need some reference pictures!!
omg, you want ideas, i have them...especially on themed skins. I'm a movie/music-whore (am i allowed to say that?) So.....most of my ideas do come from them.
hmmm in this context that doesn't sound so bad... because it IS an expression... on the other hand it's kind of a bad word... I'll let ManagerJosh make the call. I would LOVE your ideas on themed skins!!!!! Do you ever make your own skins?
no, i don't know how to do anything with skins. I'm needing to learn. Well, i wasn't using the word to offend anyone...lol...if anyone should be offended its me for calling myself that! EEEP!
ooh you're "needing to learn".. does that mean I can CORRUPT you with my skin-making MADNESS!!?? Do you have any paint programs? I use adobe photoshop but I keep hearing there is a free trial download of Paint Shop Pro at download.com
Oh wonderful!!!! I may need to go download it too just so I can see what all it does.... Otherwise I may start talking about layers and stuff it may handle differently!
it worked! i have a free 30 day trial, and if i like it and want to continue to use it i have to pay for it! so .....now i'll wait for further instruction from "skinning master"
heh I just installed it too, it looks like it opens photoshop files!! That's cool! OK first think you need is skin bases... hang on, let me upload mine to my website and give you the url for the .zip file, ok? Once you have the bases, you have to get used to what you're seeing... the far right is the front of the body, just to the left of that is the back of the body, and the far left is the arms outstretched so the wrists would be at the top and bottom of the image... if that makes any sense. Seeing the shading helps you figure out what you're seeing.
OK once you get that you need to know how the File Names work that let the sims game know what your skin IS and where it goes! B goes at the beginning, to let it know it is a BODY file. Then you need the proper NUMBER CODE for the MESH or SHAPE file the game wraps the skin around. Then F for female, M for male, A for adult C for child. Then Fat, Fit, or Skn for fat, fit, or skinny sims body type. Then Lgt, Med, or Drk for light, medium, or dark skin tones. then put an underscore_ and make up your own name for your unique skin at the end! It should look something like this: B100FAFitLgt_myfirstskin.bmp Always save it as a .bmp file for the game to be able to use it. You need to change it to INDEXED colors before you save it... I'm trying to find how to do that in PSP now...
...I guess you just save it as 8 bit color .bmp file when it gives you that option... hmmm.... does anyone here USUALLY use PSP who can help us!!!??? :whitekitty:
OK, anyway, it looks like the tools are a lot like photoshop in many ways. The "magic wand" tool is your best friend! Use it to select an area of similar color... like the SKINTONE area of a skin, and then go to the SELECTION area and invert your selected area to get the CLOTHES! This is a GREAT trick when you're trying to select an outfit that has many colors!! You can copy the clothing without the skintone, and then paste it on top of the base of a DIFFERENT skintone, and that way you can make an outfit available in all skintones without having to RE-DRAW the outfit over. Here's a good starter outfit to learn with: http://pages.ivillage.com/faeluna//sims/FaeStarterBase01.psp I included a pretty basic skin I made that's a female skin with dark blue jeans and a pink t-shirt and white tennis shoes. It's high contrast colors so that should make it easy to work with selecting stuff, and I also added each part of the outfit separately too, so you can mess around adjusting the Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast on each part separately. I hope this helps you get started!!
oh yeah.. and on the Magic Wand, if you hold down the SHIFT key while clicking on an area, you can hold down the SHIFT key and then click on a different color that wasn't selected before, and that will ADD it to the selected area! You can also change the TOLERANCE in the Tool Options, to change how sensitive it is to a change in color. Like if you're working with light pink, medium pink, and dark pink on a shirt, and you want to select the light pink area ONLY, you'd make the number LOWER like a 5 or 10 so it only picked colors within 5 or 10 degrees of being the SAME color. If you wanted to select all 3 tones of pink, you'd make the number BIGGER like 80 so you'd only have to click once, and not add each pink separately! I hope this all makes sense... Let me know if you have any questions!!!! :whitekitty:
