Well, it' official.

[WarLocke]

I got off of my butt this morning and decided I'd get around to doing one of the projects I've been procrastinating on: skinning a Freedom Force character. I made it a point to select a character with a simple costume, since I was new at this. And it still came out crappy, lol.

I suppose I may have done better if I had, say, learned how to use GIMP beforehand. But my copy didn't have any help files for some reason, so I had to spend a few hours just figuring out how to do what I wanted to do with the dang program.

Unfortunately, Network 54 is acting up for me at the moment and won't let me log in, so I can't put up a pic to display how crappy Concrete turned out, but I'll put one up as soon as I get the mess cleared up.

Amazing that a simple two-color costume can look so bad, heh. <_<

- WL

[WarLocke]

OK, apparently Network 54 totally redid their site, or something. I suspect I had to start a new account because my old one isn't around anymore. Which sucks, because now I'm limited to 1mb of webspace. 8mb was a much nicer number.

Anyway, here's Concrete:



I purposefully chose a mesh and concept that was simple, without bulbous armor or protruding bits, and I still can't get it right. The black is too black, the cutout doesn't show the muscled layer underneath, yada yada. <_<

- WL

EDIT: OK, so I guess Network 54 doesn't like having pics linked anymore. Here's the URL, if anyone's interested:

http://network54.com/Realm/WLRealm/FFSkin_...Concrete_01.JPG

[Roland]

I can't even see it by following the link. Even if I cut & paste it into a new browser! They've been having horrible problems with forums lately, at least from my experience, so who knows what's going on with them. :P

BTW - I guess this means I WON'T be hiring you to skin some new models for Morrowind? ;)

[DeeBye]

I suppose I may have done better if I had, say, learned how to use GIMP beforehand. But my copy didn't have any help files for some reason, so I had to spend a few hours just figuring out how to do what I wanted to do with the dang program.

GIMP's "help" files are very incomplete, at best. Most of them consist of 2-3 vague sentences per command, and some of them say "not written yet".

Your best bet is to browse some of the online GIMP resources.

Here are my GIMP bookmarks:

The GIMP Homepage
This has a pretty comprehensive documentation section, and a few must-try tutorials to help you get used to the feel of GIMP. The "links" section is a nice launching point, but I find that most of the links are out-of-date.

Grokking the GIMP
This is pretty much the Jarulf's Guide for GIMP. 'Nuff said.

Yahoo! Groups : gimpwin-users
This is a message board specifically directed at using GIMP under Windows. I think Google Groups has a similar board, but I don't seem to have the URL bookmarked.

Try a Google search for "GIMP tutorials", and you'll get a bunch of informative links. The best way to learn GIMP is by trying it out. You can read all the help files you can stand, but unless you actually try things in practice, you'll never get the hang of it. Do as many tutorials as you can find.

You can even adapt some of the many online Adobe Photoshop tutorials to GIMP, as they function quite similarly. They handle layers the same way, and the tools are not-so-remarkably similar.


-DeeBye

[WarLocke]

BTW - I guess this means I WON'T be hiring you to skin some new models for Morrowind?

Eh... No chance in hell. If I'm having this much trouble with Freedom Force skins (which, if you haven't played it, are usually much smaller onscreen than a Morrowind character) there's no way I'd try modding Morrowind, lol. :blink:

That said though, I've been trawling about, reading several FF-specific skinning tuts, as well as some of that "gronking the GIMP" site, and I think I'm learning. I've actually figured out how to get musculature to show through costumes -- or at least light-colored ones. Dunno how well it would work with a black costume.

I'm going to learn this stuff, or poke my right eye out.

- WL

[Albion Child]

If you can't view the pic through the link, click on the link, add a space after the URL, and hit 'enter.' I need to do that with almost all links from these forums (or whatever the plural is).

Thanks to whoever taught me this.

[Brimstone]

:huh: still can't see it....Sorry, WarLocke, but I guess I'll have to take your word for it that you suck :D

[WarLocke]

OK, I set up an account at Hyperphoto, so I should have image hosting, at least. They say you get 50mb of space, but that seems like a stretch. Anyway, here's my first try at Concrete.

Shudder. I canned that skin, and started over from scratch. I've already learned enough to correct some of the mistakes (for example, I can get the base skin's musculature to "show" through the red bits of the costume, so you can see the individual fingers), but others are still bugging me (the muscle-tone trick I'm using doesn't show through dark colors well, or black at all).

I've got a second skin I'm working on that looks a bit better, but it's nowhere near done. Phantom's white bodysuit looks nice and muscles carry through fine, but I'm stumped as to how I'm going to get the gray fog/whorl designs I want onto the costume without them looking artificial. Eh.

- WL

[Brimstone]

:lol:

This Album/Image is Password Protected.
If you know the password, please enter it here:
(Passwords are case-sensitive)

And the hits just keep on comin'.... :P

[WarLocke]

Augh, ok, try it now. I set it to public access.

I thought the password bit was just for who could upload to it. :ph34r:

- WL

[Brimstone]

Yay! It's a working link! Now, quick, take it back down before anyone else sees it! :lol:

I'm just kidding, man. I have no room to pick on your skins; I've never even considered making my own. Hey, practice makes perfect, so keep at it. Post us a link to the next one...I may need someone to pick on that day! :P

[WarLocke]

Phantom

I really don't like Hyperphoto. Apparently the gallery pages are "dynamic", which means I can't link them directly to this forum as pictures, bah. The above link should show a decent-sized image of Phantom, though.

Phantom is a phaser, sort of like Shadowcat. She can't keep herself ghosted as long as 'Cat though (this is a limitation of the FF engine, but I'm lucky in that it dovetails with the character concept).

Some notes about the image:

1) Her final skin tone will be just a tad lighter, since I haven't masked out some of the greyscale layer I used to show her figure through the bodysuit.

2) Her hair needs some work. The highlights need to be darker, at the least. I'm pretty sure I can do that by fiddling with the hue, but getting them selected as a new layer/mask will be a pain.

3) The bodysuit needs to be anti-aliased (note the little jaggies? They're pronounced because the base skin was only 256x256 pixels). I can't seem to figure out GIMP's Burn or Dodge tools, so I'll probably be creating a channel mask of the 'suit and blending the edges from there. A channel mask here would also make it easy to fix the greyscale layer (since I only need the greyscale for the bodysuit anyway).

4) The facial features I may or may not work on. They're adequate as-is, but if they're not too much of a pain to mess with, I'll probably try changing them.

5) I'm still not sure what I'm going to do to finish the bodysuit. Ideally I'd want a faint pattern of grey covering most of it (looking something like a light fog), but I don't think my skillz are up to that yet. But plain white is just bland, and putting on solid patches of grey would look just ugly, I think.

Eh. Well, it's pretty much decent and playable as-is; I just need to finish the details. This stuff isn't all that hard after all. :ph34r:

- WL

EDIT: Wha? Dang Preview option killed my title. Post title should be "Work in Progress." :angry: