Difference between revisions of "Tutorials:Body Shop Recolouring Tutorials"

Revision as of 10:22, 26 January 2007

Introduction

Want to create beautiful clothings, fun makeup, interesting hair, and stunning skintones? This is the place to start, with all sorts of tutorials to teach you every aspect of recolouring Body Shop content.

Clothing Tutorials - Start Here!

If you've never created any Body Shop content before, you should start with clothing. There are two main sets of tutorials that will help you begin creating clothing. If you are using the GIMP, a free graphics editor, you should use the Gimp tutorials. If you are using Photoshop or other higher-end graphics editors, you should be able to follow Faylen's series of skinning tutorials.

Whenever you first do a tutorial, you should do the exact same project they show you, exactly as they tell you to do it. This way you can be sure you're doing your first project correctly. When you finish each tutorial, experiment with the techniques you have learned, trying something similar, a project of your own, before moving on to the next tutorial.

Vashti's Gimp Tutorials

Vashti's tutorials are great for beginners, and give a lot of information on using the GIMP.

Tutorials: Basic Clothing Recolour using The Gimp

Tutorials: Gimp Clothing Tutorial 2 - Using a New Texture

Tutorials: Gimp Clothing Tutorial 3 - Changing the Alpha

Faylen's Skinning Tutorials

If you are using Photoshop or another graphics editor, you can probably follow these tutorials fairly well to figure out how to make new clothing recolours. If you are confused about what tool to use if you are using a different program, try your editor's help file.

Tutorials: Faylen's Skinning Tutorial 1 - Basic Clothing Recolour

Tutorials: Faylen's Skinning Tutorial 2 - Selective Recolour, Adding a Simple Texture

Tutorials: Faylen's Skinning Tutorial 3 - Adding Textures

Tutorials: Faylen's Skinning Tutorial 4 - Working Around the Mesh

Tutorials: How to Add Shadows and Highlights

Other Basic Tutorials

These tutorials are also beginners, designed to introduce them to creating clothing.

Tutorials: Modding with Paint.NET

Toolbox Tutorials

These tutorials relate to clothing, but are specific techniques, tools, and tips helpful to beginners and more experienced skinners alike, for trying something specific.

Tutorials: How to Make a Bump Map for Clothes

Tutorials: How to Make a Top out of a Picture

Tutorials: How to Recolour Custom Mesh Clothing

Tutorials: How to Adapt Skintones and Clothing to Custom Meshes

Tutorials: Beyond Photoskinning: Transformation and Displacement Mapping in Photoshop

Tutorials: Creating Textures from Images

Tutorials: Exporting UV Maps for Better Clothing Recolours

Tutorials: Skinning from the Inside Out

Hair Tutorials

Creating realistic hair textures can be extremely challenging. There are a lot of different techniques you use. Which one(s) you choose depends on your project, your expected outcome, and your level of skill.

Tutorials: Hair Recoloring Tutorial - Teaches how to recolour and manipulate Maxis texture to make new hair textures. This is the easiest technique.

Painting Hair in Photoshop - This isn't a sim tutorial, but one on handpainting realistic hair textures in Photoshop. You'll need a graphics tablet to handpaint hair, but it's the best way to create completely original hair that looks truly realistic. Enayla, also known as famed fantasy artist Linda Bergkvist, has some tips on her method of painting hair at her site, Furiae. Click on Gallery, Tutorials, Painting Hair to get to it.

Eye Tutorials

Tutorials: Custom Eye Colours Using Photoshop (Beyond Just Recolouring)

Enayla also has a tutoral on how to paint eyes (using a graphics tablet) at her site, Furiae. It's in the Gallery section, under Tutorials, Painting an Eye.

Eyebrow/Eyelash Tutorials

Though there aren't any tutorials specifically on making eyebrows, this thread explains exactly how you can make new eyebrows using source pictures: Tutorials on Creating Eyebrows - Solved :). This thread explains a little bit more eyelash-specific: Eyelashes?.

Makeup Tutorials

All Body Shop projects follow the same basic rules: you use your texture as "paint" and your alpha tells it how much of that "paint" to apply in those areas.

Makeup, like skins, are some of the hardest Body Shop projects to make, simply because there is no one way to do them. It's just a matter of messing with things till you get something you like. The closest tutorial is Tutorials: How to Make a Sim's Face Using Source Pics - makeup from source pictures is made in much the same way, just on a smaller scale - one feature rather than the entire face.

Go through that, see if it makes sense, and then just start playing. Experiment. It will likely take you a long time to get something that looks pretty good, but that is part of the learning experience. If you want to accomplish something specific, like, say, a semi-transparent lip gloss, examine existing makeup that accomplishes that well. Look at other custom content items by other creators: make an actual project of them so you can see how their alpha and texture interact to create the effect that you like, then try to reproduce it.

Again, it's not easy or quick, but if you're persistent, patient, and willing to just spend a lot of time experimenting and playing with it, you'll likely stumble upon something that looks good to you.

Skintone/Simming Tutorials

Skintones are one of the hardest things to recolour, with many textures and requiring a lot of time and effort to do anything but recolouring an existing skintone. If you want to photoskin a skintone, the technique in How to Make a Sim's Face Using Source Pics explains how to pull apart a texture to apply pieces of it to a face. The exact same technique is used, just over and over on the whole body, to create a photoskinned skintone.

Tutorials: How to Make a Sim's Face Using Source Pics - Explains how to sculpt a sim's face in Body Shop, and how to do custom texturing for that face.

Tutorials: Realistic Faces for Skins - Similar to the above, using a different technique. Google translated from German.

Tutorials: Making a New Skintone for Beginners - Explains how

Tutorials: How to Adapt Skintones and Clothing to Custom Meshes

Want to paint skins like Enayla? Check out her article, Thoughts on Skintones, at her site Furiae. You'll find it under Gallery - Tutorials there. She's been drawing amazing fantasy art for years now, though, and you'll need a graphics tablet to truly do it well, but there ya go.

Where to get textures for skintones:

• 3d.sk - By far the best, this site offers thousands of high-resolution photos of all sorts of people, in various states of undress (so yes, there is non-sexual artistic nudity there, you are warned). You do have to pay for a membership, but the prices are incredibly reasonable, the service is great, and the quality and range of pics is just not available elsewhere at any price. If you're serious about creating an all-new photoskinned skintone, pick up a month or two of membership here.

• Skins.be - Celebrity and model wallpapers, mostly female. Can be useful here and there.

• Fashion Spot - This particular post on the Fashion Spot forums links lots of great, high-res pics of female model faces, with and without makeup. And in general, there are tons of pics threads on there, of specific models and celebrities, types of makeup, and just about anything you can imagine. It can be a lot of fun to explore.

• Backgrounds Archive - Check out the celebrities sections, male and female, and people. Lots of nice, big pics that may be useful in skinning.

Body Shop Modding Tutorials

These are tutorials on how to modify Body Shop content in certain ways - they're not exactly recolouring, but not meshing either.

Tutorials: Changing the Hair Used with a Hat

Tutorials: Changing Makeup Layering and Wearability

Tutorials: Converting Clothes to Different Age Groups

Tutorials: Converting Clothes to Different Genders

Tutorials: Correct Footstep Noises on Skins

Tutorials: Creating Default Skin Replacements - Simplified Method

Tutorials: Default Skin Replacement Tutorial

Tutorials: Give Your Elders an Easy Hair Dye

Tutorials: How to Add Bump Maps to Skins

Tutorials: How do you change the lens colour of glasses?

Tutorials: How to Bin Hair Recolours with SimPE

Tutorials: How to Remove Unwanted Hair Ages

Tutorials: Making Eyes Townie-Friendly