Making a male skin - Part 2 and Plan B... or is it Plan C

Oops!

After writing the previous post I went on to the next step as I did with the Starlight skins for women... I made the base darker and fiddled around with the other layers to get it looking nice.  As I did so I noticed a visible line had cropped up between the upper and lower layers on the back.

I first thrashed around with how I was changing the layers and tried all sorts of different ways of doing it, none worked.  The line was still there.  Finally I went back to the origin, the too light skin in the original psd file and took a second look at it.  And.... Oops!!   There it was!

If you make the picture to the right bigger (click on it) you'll be able to see it too.

Sooooo..... what to do?

Well, unfortunately I think its time to abandon lf0y and try something else.  I suspect that Eloh came to the same conclusion and that's why the lf0y files aren't provided on her skins page.

If we abandon lf0y... what do we do?    Here's my idea... let's see if we can take the Starlight skin and make it into a male skin. Two approaches to doing this occur to me:

• Plan B: copy the 'male' layers from lf0y to Starlight and fiddle with them to integrate them into the overall skin
• Plan C: leave lf0y behind entirely and modify the Starlight layers directly to turn it into a male skin.

For both of the above we'll need to turn off the layers that are obviously female, the breasts and female genitalia.  For Plan B we would copy over the male chest layers and work on them to integrate them into the Starlight skin.  For Plan C we would work take some of those female layers and add them back as male layers with modifications.  The highlights and shadows around the male chest is where most of the work will be done.

I do have one overall concern about this approach and am not sure how it will work out.  The musculature of the Starlight skin is smooth... not 'buff' at all.  The abs are a good place to illustrate this, the Starlight skin certainly does not show any signs of a 'six pack'.  But the criticism extends to the rest of the body too, the arms and legs do not have well defined musculature.  There may be some things we can do about that, but I suspect that in the end this skin will not be the most buff you have ever seen.

So that's the new plan.  Sorry for the mistake in the previous post.  It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

robin