Have you seen my husband... Victor?
Heehee...my all time favorite movie is the Corpse Bride. So what better way to start the series on Avatar Skins than to make Emily, the Corpse Bride :)
I get requests for a skin tutorial almost every week. Ive been avoiding it, cause its really not something Im good at. But Ill give it a try here just for fun :)
In this Part 1 of the Avatar Skin series, we will work on a Goth-type skin (specifically, the Corpse Bride :D). My goal is to describe all the general steps involved in creating an Avatar Skin. We will create a base set of skin textures and apply it to our avatar.
I chose a Goth-type skin to start because I want to focus on the process of creating Avatar Skin, not on all the texture work. A Goth-type skin is usually less complex than a realistic-looking "normal" skin. If I dont pull out all my prim hair, I will try to do "normal" skins in the future :)
Because there is a lot of texture work involved, I cannot provide step-by-step instructions. Instead, I will describe the texture work as best as I can. At the end of this tutorial, you may not have a usable Avatar Skin. However you should get a better understand of all the steps involved in creating one.
Creating Avatar Skins is a challenging and time-consuming process. And since the best way to view a texture is to upload it, you will probably spend a couple hundred L$ in uploads to make your first skin. Think of it as the cost of a cup of coffee :P
This tutorial assumes that you are very familiar with Photoshop (or another paint program). Also, you should be familiar with creating clothing for Second Life (including how to create Alpha channels). Trust me, the first thing you create in SL should not be an Avatar Skin! ;P
***Update: I received a comment from Misae pointing to a wonderful resource: Eloh Eliot has free skin files in PSD format for people to use as a learning tool. The only stipulation is that anything created with these files be also free. Here are a couple links to the files: Vint Falken's blog and Eloh's files.
Overview
Second Life Avatar Skins consists of 3 texture file: Head, Upper Body, and Lower Body. Theres a matching texture template file for each of these textures.
You are probably familiary with the Upper Body and Lower Body templates. The Upper Body template is the same one used to make tops and shirts. The Lower Body template is the same one used to make pants and socks.
These 3 texture files are placed in the Tattoo layer of an avatar. If you open the Appearance window, the Tattoo layer is in the "Skin" tab.
Creating Avatar Skin uses exactly the same process as creating clothing. It just happens to be a piece of clothing that completely covers your avatar from head to toe. But the process is the same: you create a texture in a paint program, create Alpha channels as needed, upload the texture, then apply it to your avatar.
The big difference is the time it takes to create the texture. The professional SL skin designers often take weeks, even months, to develop a complete line of skins. So you can spend as little or as much time as you like in developing Avatar Skins.
Getting the Texture Templates
You probably have texture templates that you use for making clothes or other designs. For the purposes of this tutorial, you will need the SL Avatar UV templates from Robin Wood. Robin Wood's Head template has a shading layer that saves a lot of time for creating simple Avatar Skins.
You can download the templates from here. For this tutorial, you will need the "layered Photoshop (.psd) Files". You should download the "All (7.6 MB)" file, which contains all 3 texture templates.
Once you have downloaded the "Layered-UVs-PSD.zip" file, go ahead and uncompress the file.
Preparing the Avatar
Ideally, we would create one set of textures in Photoshop, upload the textures, apply it to the avatar, and thats it.
Realistically, we will be tweaking the textures many times, uploading after some major changes, apply it to the avatar so we can see how it looks, and go back to tweaking. Creating a decent Avatar Skin is a repetitive process, each time adding more things until you achieve the desired look.
So before we can start working on making textures, we need to prepare our avatar to use our new textures.
Open your Inventory window. Click on the "Create" option from the top menu bar. Select "New Body Parts >" and "New Skin".
This will create a "New Skin" object under your "Body Parts" folder.
Right-click on the "New Skin" object, select "Rename", and change the Name to "Tutorial Skin".
Right-click on "Tutorial Skin" and select "Wear".
And heres our inner newbie...Pretty scary, isnt it? :P
Right-click on your avatar and select "Appearance..."
At the Appearance window, select the "Skin" tab.
Notice the Head Tattoo, Upper Tattoo, and Lower Tattoo texture boxes are empty. We will be creating textures for each of these boxes.
In my case, I have created a special shape and a set of eyes for Emily. Depending on the Avatar Skin you are making, you can just use your "normal" shape and eyes.
I also have a prim hair (a modified LeAnn with a custom texture). Hey, I gotta have hair ;P
If you have a specific shape or eyes you would like to use, you should "Wear" them now so you have a more realistic view of the skin.
Creating the Base Head Texture
Because there are 3 templates involved, I prefer to create a quick set of base textures. We can then upload these and apply them immediately to the avatar. Then, we can go back, do the detail work on the textures, and have a decent avatar to preview with.
Lets start with the Head. Open the "SL Avatar Head Layers.psd" file in Photoshop (or your preferred paint program).
Select "File/Save As..." and save it as "Tutorial Head.psd".
Go to the "Layers" palette. Click on the "eye" next to ALL layers to hide them. Then click on the "eye" next to the "Eyebrows & Eyelashes" and "Shading" layers to show just those 2 layers.
Go to the bottom of the "Layers" palette. Click on the "Create a new layer" button on the bottom of the "Layers" palette to create a new "Layer 1" layer.
Move "Layer 1" to the bottom, below the "mouth" layer.
Click on the "eye" next to the "mouth" layer to make it visible.
Change the foreground color square and pick a base color for your skin. If its a Goth skin, you might want to choose a very light beige. In Emily's case, shes more cyan :) If its a "normal" skin, then pick a desired skin-tone.
Hint: You can use the "eyedrop" tool to sample colors from a picture. This helps a great deal in picking base colors.
Click on "Paint Bucket" button. Make sure that the new "Layer 1" is selected. Click on the drawing to fill the drawing with the base color.
Notice the drawing already has shading for major facial features (from the "Shading" layer). This gives our skin instant definition without having to draw it in by hand! (thanks Robin, you are awesome :D)
Thats it! We are read to save and export the Head template.
Click "File/Save" to save your changes.
Click "File/Save for Web...".
At the "Save For Web" window, change the Preset to "JPEG High". Click the "Save" button.
Note that the drawing is at 1024x1024 resolution. You normally want to use this level of resolution while working on the skin. But for final output, you may want to reduce the resolution to 512x512 so it would load faster.
Also, using "Save For Web" reduces the quality of the color but creates much smaller files. If exact color is very important, you should use "File/Save As..." and select "JPEG" instead.
Creating the Base Upper Body Texture
Next is the Upper Body template. The Upper Body (and Lower Body) templates are a lot easier than the Head. We just want to fill it with a color that matches the Head.
However, the Head template uses a combination of 2 colors: the base color you chose, and the shading. The shading at the neck seam is a grey color (Red = 90, Green = 90, Blue = 90). So we need to create 2 layers and put these 2 colors onto those layers.
Open the "SL Avatar Top Layers.psd" file.
Select "File/Save As..." and save it as "Tutorial Upper.psd".
Go to the "Layers" palette. Click on the "eye" next to ALL layers to hide them.
Go to the very bottom of the "Layers" palette. Click twice on the "Create a new layer" button on the bottom of the palette to create 2 new layers.
Click and drag both of these 2 new layers to the bottom of the "Layers" palette.
Make sure that the bottom-most layer is active ("Layer 1" in this example).
Click on the foreground color square. Select the same base color you used in the Head template.
Click on "Paint Bucket" button. Click on the drawing to fill the drawing with the base color.
Select the layer just above the bottom-most layer ("Layer 2" in this case).
Click on the foreground color square. Enter the color values for a grey: Red = 90, Green = 90, Blue = 90.
Make sure the layer above the bottom-most layer is active ("Layer 2" in this example).
Click on the "Paint Bucket" button. Click on the drawing to fill the drawing with the grey color.
Make sure the layer above the bottom-most layer is active ("Layer 2" in this example).
Change the Opacity to 30%.
Thats it for the Upper Body template!
Click "File/Save" to save your changes.
Click "File/Save for Web...".
At the "Save For Web" window, change the Preset to "JPEG High". Click the "Save" button.
Creating the Base Lower Body Texture
The last one is the Lower Body template. We need to do the exact same thing as the Upper Body template: turn all the layers off, create 2 new layers, fill 1 with the base color, and fill the other with the shading color.
Open the "SL Avatar Bottom Layers.psd" file.
Select "File/Save As..." and save it as "Tutorial Lower.psd".
Go ahead and repeat the steps in the "Creating the Base Upper Body Texture" section above.
Applying the Base Textures
Now that we have the 3 texture files, its time to upload them and try it on our avatar :) Note that this step will cost L$30 (L$20 if you just use the same texture for Upper and Lower Body).
Go ahead and upload the 3 textures files: "Tutorial-Head.jpg", "Tutorial-Upper.jpg", and "Tutorial-Lower.jpg".
Right-click on your avatar and select "Appearance...".
At the Appearance window, select the "Skin" tab. Click on each of the 3 Tattoo textures and select the corresponding texture you just uploaded.
Tada! You just made you first complete set of Avatar Skins :)
You may notice a slight gap between the Head texture and the Upper Body texture at the neck. We will fix that in Part 2.
Now we are all set to start tweaking those texture files...
Victor darling, WHERE ARE YOU?
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