#not using a full overlay but instead a combination of blushes and skin details

[monsterboysims]

The Walken Legacy - Generation 1

Happy Birthday, Poppy!

[furbyq]

Hey, you've been a big inspiration creativity wise to me, and I've been meaning to ask um a question. I'm interested in making like my own skins and whatnot and I'm not really sure where to start? I feel like its mainly texture editing/ photo manip that I'm not sure about and I'm wondering how you started? or if you could point to like some good tutorials/sites?

hi! that's a really sweet thing to say, thank you! ^^

i've been trying to figure out how to answer this for a few days (i've been having some pretty severe brainfog as of recently) so i hope this answer actually helps.

TOOLS / TUTORIALS

there's a few things i think you should familiarize yourself with before trying to blend skins.

the first is how the basics of photoshop work (i highly recommend photoshop over gimp or paint.net. i've seen *cough*free*cough* versions of cs5 floating around on tumblr, so if you don't have it, i'd recommend trying to find one that seems safe.) certain tools are going to be more useful than others for blending, but i'll definitely go over the specifics later down this explanation.

the second is how layer masks work. this tutorial by bosie and this tutorial by pooklet go over things you may need to do that utilize layer masks, so knowing how they work is paramount.

the third thing that is important is understanding how the ts2 uv maps work. this is important for understanding what part of the skin texture goes where and such. the best uv maps i've found are the ones here at mts, but they're in rars with a bunch of other uvs so i've uploaded the nude body mesh ones here by themselves with a separate face uv if you want to see where certain textures go on the actual 3d sim mesh.

BASICS OF SKINBLENDING

generally the way that skinblending is done is picking two or more skins with different pieces you like. you pick one as the base and then use layer masks to blend different features from other skins onto it. bosie's tutorial really goes over what you need to know about using layer masks for this purpose, although i personally keep all features on separate layers, even if i'm using the same texture for all of them. you don't even have to keep the layer masks at full opacity; messing with the layer opacity can give you really interesting effects!

if you’re wanting a tutorial on how to photoskin, apparently i wrote one on that a few years ago that you can read here.

you can also use handpainting to improve the coloration or texture of your skin. for example, sometimes i put some low opacity blushing over the cheeks or use a noise filter to create pore-like overlays.

always remember that if your face texture ends up a little asymmetrical during blending that you can duplicate, flip, and delete half of the texture in order to achieve perfect symmetry. although some creators definitely like some imperfection in their skins.

a lot of people end up using a body skin from one of the skins they blend facial features from without changing it because making a body blend is more challenging than making a face blend. this is due to how many more uv seams there are. you can even use a body from a skin you didn't use for your face blend, as long as you use a paintbrush on the neck of both the body and face textures to fix any seams!

this is more of an intermediate or advanced tip, but one strategy i have for mitigating this is to use the uv to draw a border on the seams with a paintbrush. for maxis matchy skins, you can use floodfill to patch the seams and on skins with more detail, you can apply a body skin to the border as a clipping mask to fix seams as long as you blur the border enough so that it blends.

BASICS OF RECOLORING

some people use actions to recolor skins, but i'm not a fan of doing that for natural tones because of how much pixelation it tends to add. instead, i usually use skintone shades on color fill layers set to multiply. this tends to make the texture look very flat, so i'll typically duplicate the base layer and drag it to the top and use a layer mask to only make certain features (like the eyes, lips, nose, and ears) visible. then i manually tone this layer using adjustment layers that are assigned as a clipping mask.

if you have difficulty with coloring beyond this, i suggest looking at a skin that already exists that is similar to the tone you're going for to see how it should look.

the tutorial by pooklet that i linked above goes over how to combat pixelation (which you will almost always end up with to some extent, even if you don’t use actions) but there’s also another tip here by them for an alternate way to smooth skins. 

i have a tutorial here that provides some layer mask psds designed for smoothing, but using them on every skin may not be feasible.

BASICS OF TEXTURE REIMPORTING

now, as far as how intensive making skins actually is; if you utilize the amount of differences maxis skins are built to accommodate, you're looking at around 16-17 images per skin.

that includes: 

teen to adult female body (normal/fat/fit states) elder female body (normal/fat/fit states) teen to elder male body (normal/fat/fit states) baby body toddler body child body baby face toddler face child-adult face elder face scalp

although a lot of popular skin makers forego some of these textures for their own sanity; some of the most popular skins have no fat/fit states, for example. with the way bodyshop and simpe work together, skins that are reimported to game will combine similar textures. so if you save your bodyshop project with the same face for every face available, in simpe you'll only have one face image to replace. you can use this fact to cull the textures down to an amount you are comfortable handling.

it should be added that you'll experience really bad image compression in bodyshop, ESPECIALLY with darker skintones and there isn't really any way to fix that in photoshop. reimporting your textures into simpe using DDS utilities will really help with that. here's a tutorial on how to install DDS utilities. there's a tutorial on how to reimport with DDS utilities here for hair. doing skins is the same basic concept, although like pooklet's tutorial mentioned, DXT3 may work better for skins than DXT5.

i know that you mainly needed help with the photomanipulation area, but i felt this was important to mention.

like i said, i hope any of this helps! if you have any specific questions beyond this, feel free to hit me up-- if i know the answer i'll definitely share it with you.