I only do females but most of this will apply to males.
You’ll need these: Photoshop 6.0 – CS6 or PS CC .. The newer ones do a lot more. I got mine by way of torrent. Then you’ll need TxdWorkshop and ped editor will come in handy to show you what skins you have in your game.. I use Paint.net for certain results, I’ll explain later. All these are free.
Alpha masking (making things invisible):
First open your TXD file in TxdWorkshop. Some skins only have one plate (pallet), some have as many as 10-12. To mask something out you have to save the image uncompressed in the PNG mode. To uncompress look in the right upper corner where it says PROPERTIES. Uncheck compressed and save it somewhere like on your desktop or create a file for it. After you alter an image and load it back into TEDWorkshop don’t forget to re-compress it .. also don’t forget to click SAVE TXD or the image won’t stick.
Things to remember: You can’t mask out everything. Say you mask out a blouse but there’s no body image there. It will turn out as a big transparent hole. You can also erase something partially, like 20-30% to make it shear like bed clothing. This takes some experimenting.
You can also make an entire model invisible .. Save it as PNG and erase the whole pallet or in most cases all the pallets. If you want the model bald just mask all the hair pallets. And so on. The heartbreak is sometimes you mask out a blouse shirt or bikini top and load her into the game and see huge invisible holes on her body. The riggers often save pixel count by excluding all skin that isn’t seen. To fix this you’ll need to know how to work software that’s made for dll files (skeleton) and program that space back into the model. This I can’t help you with.
I learned PhotoShop hands on. There are many tutorials but most of them are given by a person who never learned that old sayings, everything is easy once you know how. Of course 90% of the YOUTUBE stuff has a guy with a horrible accent or a mouth full of mush who moves the courser so fast you have no idea where it is.
Paint.net: This works for me when I have many files to alter, like hair often has 4-6 files. Thing is Paint.net has a memory, Photoshop doesn’t, at least not that I know of. So what I’ll do is load all the hair pallets into p.net and redo them. After you’ve done the first all the rest will come out exactly the same (tone, color, density) because it will remember what those settings were.
Lets walk through a typical reskin (one of mine): I take the body pallet and save it to the desktop as a BMP (not PNG because there is nothing to make invisible). Asian men like their women white like powder. Those DoA girls, except for Lisa, are always too white. So how do you give it some human-looking skin tone? The easiest way is to use the “Curves” feature in PhotoShop or P.net. As it gets darker it will gain contrast. This can get ugly but you can smooth it out with the “glow” feature. Sometimes the skin with gain a lot of red as it gets darker. In case you didn’t know green is the opposite of red, as yellow is to blue. So in Photoshop or P.net go to Hue ans Saturation and add a little green, very little. The red will go away.
For a face the first thing to do is mark the eye and cut or copy it. You don’t want the eyes to bet the same treatment as the face skin. After you have the face you want, paste the eye back to its place and save as BMP. Import the body and face to TWork and compress them, then save txd.
Who to replace: All my skins become gang members. Why? They’re easy to find. Too bad they want to do al that gang sign crap, prolongs the wait. So you recruit the skin and check it out with your camera. Quit the game and manage the details you found. If you photograph them at night with the perfect distance from the car’s lights they look a lot sexier than in the day, IMO. I’ll never understand how many of these uploaders wand the model to be so close you cn’t tell if it’s male or female .. get close!
The Heartbreaks: As I mentioned, the missing skin (not always though, sometimes it’s all here but you’ll have a make a nipple or two if none are there). 2) Shoulders: Shoulders are problematic for most riggers, that joint and it’s correct movement is difficult. 3) Where the neck meets the body .. it has to be the same color. The best fast fix is to take a color reading with you PS color tool, then go to the head pallet and paint the neck with that some color. 4) Sometimes you’ll find a pallet you want to mask and you can’t find something that has remained as you look at your model through your camera, like a belt buckles. or some buttons or a piece of jewelry. Keep looking, it’s there. 5) Indoor takes: Much of the time the pieces you’ve masked out will show up when you’re indoors. I have no idea how to fix that. I mask out all the weapons in my uploads and if I’m indoors I can still see shadows of them. 6) Feet and shoes often come out buried partially in the ground. Ask you rigger about that. 7) One-piece bodies are much easier than a pallet where arms, legs and torso are separated. You see those pieces have to come together and if the edges have somehow, through your painting, been discolored you’ll have an ugly line at that point where they join. Best to start with a DoA model, a newer one.
Leave a message if you have a dilemma, I’m friendly but I only speak English and Spanish.
Credits:
modeeper
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