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Skinning (Help)

 
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Joined: 05 Dec 2008
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PostPosted: Thu Feb 19, 2009 1:52 pm    Post subject: Skinning (Help) Reply with quote

Not exactly mapping, but here's a tutorial on how to make a skin for Unreal Tournament. (I wrote this a while back)

Now note, making a skin is actually really easy. The hardest thing about making a skin is creating the textures and how you want the skin to look. This can take some practice especially if you're not familiar with any photo editing software such as Photoshop.

Some utilities you will use:
    Unreal Tournament Skin Maker (UTSM) - http://ut-files.com/Utilities/UT_Skin_Maker_2.4.1.zip (Note: UTSM will not work on all computers. I believe it has to do with newer video cards. What I did when it didn't work on mine was i took out my video card and used the on board video card. UTSM IS NOT necessary at all, it just makes life SOOO much easier.)

    UnrealEd - You will need this in order to extract pre-existing textures. Most of the time, people grab the original skin and work off of that (located: C:\UnrealTournament\System)

    Photo Editor or Painting Program - You will use a photo editing program in order to make the textures of the skin. You can use any editor as long as it supports creating images with 256 colors. Also, make sure it supports the .pcx file format. If you have photoshop, it will work great. (Note: once it comes time for compiling your skin, UnrealEd will not accept images that don't meet its requirements. Make sure your image is 256x256 and 256 colors. I will cover how to do this in Photoshop)


Now that's done. Lets move on and get started
The first thing to do is extract the textures from the skin you want to modify. Open up UnrealEd and hit the texture button at the top. A pop up should appear with different texture packages. Hit file, then open. Now, you should already have an idea of what skin model you want to use. The texture packages are named according to what they are. For example, if you want to create a Male Soldier, open up the package that's named "Soldierskins." If you want to create a Female Commando skin, open up the package that's called "FCommandoSkins," etc etc. Now once you have your package open, you will have a bunch of different images.

All of these images combined make up the skin, including the different team colors and faces. So now we have to extract the textures. Now for this tutorial, I will be using the SGirlSkins and the Metal Guard MOZ skin i made a while ago. I'm only going to be working with one face and skin. I can go into detail later how to add multiple faces and skins. So pick a skin you'd like to use, and extract the files that go along with it. You will need the face & hands, chest & back, arms, and then the legs. For example, these will be the textures I'm extracting for my skin.



You don't have to extract the team colors. You can create the different team colors using Photoshop. Now save these into a folder where you can access all of the files. It will save them into .pcx format.

Next thing to do is understand what each texture is and does. Some of the images have multiple features such as the one with the face where it includes the hands, face, microphone, and the back of the head/hair. For example, this
creates this

Now what I usually do is start with the face. Open up your program you're going to use and open up the texture with the face in it. If you're in photoshop, you wont be able to edit it until you have changed the mode. Go to Image, then mode, and then hit RGB Color. Play around with the original image until you like what you have. Here's an example of before and after.
turned into
What i did with the face was i took off all the parts i didn't want. I wanted to model this after Mr. Rogers' male soldier skin, so i already had an idea of what to put on it. Here were the steps i took to get the final product of the face.


I really only used some simple painting, gradients and masks. Now once you have adjusted it to your likings, save it. If you're using photoshop, first save it as a .psd. It's important to preserve all the layers you've used so you can back and edit it. Now in order for it to be compatible with UnrealED, go to Image, then mode, then hit Indexed Color.



A dialogue box will appear, and just hit ok. Another one will pop up, make sure the color is set to 256 and hit ok. Then, go to file, save, and now save it as a .pcx.

Naming your texture is important especially when you're not using UTSM. You MUST have named your image with atleast 4 characters. It doesnt' matter what it is, as long as its 4 characters. With that, it must be followed by some certain characters. Since we're working with the face, the name must be followed by a 4. Ex. [Name]4.pcx. This tells UT what file this is.

The rest of the files also have a certain naming format. Use the exact same name that you used for the head, but instead of a 4, each file is followed by a different number. Here is a list:
    [Name]1.pcx (The Chest and the Back)
    [Name]2.pcx (The Legs and the Boots )
    [name]3.pcx (The Arms and Shoulders)
    [name]4.pcx (The Face, Back of Head/Hair, Microphone & Gloves/Hands)


Now back to the texture making. Open up each file, and now that you have created the face and all of that, you should coordinate the other textures to match the face. Again, just play around until you like it. Follow the same process of saving as you did for the face.

Now it's time to create the different team colors. Instead of re-creating what you just created, Photoshop makes it really simple to change the color of something. Make a new layer (Ctrl+Shift+N) and get the paint brush tool and start painting the area that you want to be a different color. Don't worry, it will look blotchy at first. We will have to change the blending of the layer.



After you're done coloring, make sure you havent gone over the parts that you didn't want to color. Now on that same layer, go to where it says "Normal" and change it to "soft light"


The painting now should blend in and look real.



If you'd like, you can change the opacity of the layer to make it how you like. Do the same thing for all the colors.

With team colors, they also need to be named a certain name. In the example i showed you, I was using the texture with the legs in it. Save it the exact same way we did earlier to the other files. The name needs to use the same name you named the other files, except the name will be followed by 2t_0. Ex. [Name]2t_0.pcx. The 2 indicates that it's the legs, and the 0 indicates that its the color red. If you're making team colors, you should also color the chest texture. Do the exact same thing except for the chest, you would name it [Name]1t_0.pcx. Now note that the 0 is for RED only. Here is a list of what the colors are and how to name your files.

    [Name]1t_0.pcx (Red team chest)
    [Name]1t_1.pcx (Blue team chest)
    [Name]1t_2.pcx (Green team chest)
    [Name]1t_3.pcx (Yellow team chest)

    [Name]2t_0.pcx (Red team legs and boots)
    [Name]2t_1.pcx (Bue team legs and boots)
    [Name]2t_2.pcx (Green team legs and boots)
    [Name]2t_3.pcx (Yellow team legs and boots)


Now it's time to import the textures. If you're using UTSM, read ahead. If you didn't get it to work, skip to the next part. Open up UTSM and start a new project. It will prompt you to select a model. Select the model that you are using. Now on the left hand side, in the area that is labeled "Skin Editor" Right click where it says the model you're using. In this example i will right click SGirl



It will prompt you to type in a description of the skin, I described mine as {MØZ}Metal Guard. For the skin 4 letter code, use the name that you used earlier for your files. You will now get a list that says "Chest" "Legs" "Arms" etc. Now right click where it says Chest, and open the texture that has the chest in it (Make sure this isnt the colored chest). Where it says "Insert texture as" leave it as default. Now again right click chest, now open up one of the colored chests. Now instead of leaving the "Insert texture as" as default, specify what color chest you're importing. Keep importing the colors and do the exact same thing for all of the different textures. You don't really need anything for the talk texture.

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