Making your own shape

Hi again everyone!

I thought I'd try to say a few words about making your own shape in Second Life.  I mean using the Edit Appearance thingie that Linden Labs provides, not making shapes for Mesh.   Its an amazingly flexible editor for your physical form and able to do all sorts of interesting things.   Yet.... as I wander Second Life, I think that most people buy their shapes and so many many people end up looking the same as every body else.  It's really not that hard to make your own shape... or if you have a shape you mostly like, tweak that shape in small ways to make it uniquely yours.

The Art of making a shape

There is an Art to making a shape.  A sort of undefinable something that's really hard to describe.  And its true that some people have this 'something' and some simply do not.  But its not a binary thing at all, there are degrees of Arty-ness in all of us.  Some of it is a matter of skills and knowledge.  I hope  to show you how to improve both of those in this post.  But some of it is also a matter of having an 'eye' for beauty and what is 'right'.  There will be people who have the skills and knowledge and have this 'eye' too and they will be able to produce avatars of exceptional beauty.   Hopefully, some of these people have opened stores and are selling their wares... but that doesn't remove our interest in doing our own thing. You may or may not see yourself as arty... set that aside for a while and give it a try.  I think most people have more arty-ness in them than they think. 


The point of this post is not so much for you to make shapes that you can sell.... But for you to be able to make your shape feel right to you... to be right for you.  And for your shape to be unique....just for you.


I'm not sure where I fall in the spectrum of arty-ness... I think I do have some degree of the 'eye' for beauty, but I am regularly impressed by some Avatars I see and simply go, 'Wow, how did they do that?!"  And then I have the fun of trying to figure it out. 

Height

The first question that pops up in making your own avatar is the question of height.   My avatar is a realistic height though a bit on the short side at 5' 1".  And often in a group of random people in SL, I'm a shrimp.  I'd really like to know what the average height of avatars in SL are but I don't know of any such statistics.  I think most women are well over 6 feet tall, and most men are well over 7 feet tall... I couldn't prove it though.   I'm speaking of the non-furry community here.  Furries, to their credit, do not seem to suffer from the need for greater height. 

Some of the height confusion has to be laid at LL's doorstep.  Their otherwise fine AV Shape editor seems to give an incorrect estimate of height in all situations.  I'm 5-1 and yet the AV shape editor reports me as being 5.76 feet, which works out to about 5-9.  There is a simple command in LSL (Linden Script Language) that returns the height of the Avatar (with shoes, oddly enough) so its not like its a mystery or difficult.  Maybe in a future post I'll show you how to create a thingie to measure your avatar's height... its really not hard at all.

For now... let's set the question of height aside and focus on proportions.  How long should legs be, in proportion to the rest of your body?  How long should your arms be?  How large should your hands be?  And for women, how to get your breasts to look realistic?  And.... 

How do you know how you look?  Well you have to look at yourself, of course.  Second Life provides a nice way of doing this and I have found that many people who have problems with their shape are ignorant of this feature... So we'll make sure you can all see yourself by talking about that first.


Camming


Camming is a strange word... it means to manipulate your view of the world in second life to something that is not the normal 'above and behind' view that you see as you walk around.  The reason its called 'camming' is that it refers to an invisible and not so imaginary camera that your viewer uses to see what is going on in Second Life.  As you walk around, that camera is above and behind your head looking slightly down.  So.... that's why you see what you see.  When you 'cam'  you are moving that camera around.  You can move it to look more closely at distant things, or use it to look at yourself from all angles.


Here's how you do it....

• Place your right hand on your mouse and your left had over the alt and control keys on the left side of the keyboard.
• Press and HOLD DOWN the alt key and click your left mouse button down AND HOLD IT DOWN.
• Now move your mouse.  Right and left... Forward and backward.  Notice how your 'view' moves.  That is your camera moving... you are camming.
• Now continue to hold down the alt key and the left mouse button, and use another finger on your left hand to ALSO press and HOLD DOWN the control key.
• Move your mouse some more... Right and left, forward and backward.  Notice that the forward and backward motion is now different than it was before.
• (To get back to the normal above and behind view, press escape. )

That's it!  You're camming!  Now use it to look at your shape carefully and critically.  Is there something that doesn't look quite right?  Not looking the way you thought it should?  It's a common problem.


What if you don't have a mouse?  How about those with a laptop?


Well, I'm sorry to say this, but you really should get a mouse.  Get a nice small wireless mouse and use it for this if you use it for nothing else.  They're not expensive.   I use a laptop myself and have done so for many years, and I think a mouse is really needed for a good Second Life experience.  If you have one of the Lenovo Thinkpads (was IBM) you do have a good alternative to a mouse in that little red nubby thing in the middle of the keyboard.  But for everyone else, you'll need a mouse.


What about the Mac users?  Control?  Alt?  What's that?   After a bit of Googling I found this:  In short, the Control key is the Mac's Command key.  And the Alt key is the Mac's Option key.


Proportions

I'll avoid the whole, what is beautiful and what is handsome question like the plague.  *grins*   Instead we'll talk about proportions.  What is 'normal' for the human body.  Of course, you may fairly question the idea of 'normal' but if you google human proportions you'll find a broad literature talking about it.  As you look through these links, you'll find that the 'head length' seems to be the standard measure and you'll quickly find that we are all supposed to be 8 head-length's tall.  We're not of course.  Here's a good video that will give you an introduction to the whole idea of proportions and also inject some reality into the whole 8-head-length idea.

Human Proportion 

Also look at this site...I think the images are particularly nice.  Note that the male figures also say that the normal is about 7 1/2 heads tall.

Human proportion images 

The thing is... *coughs* .... who wants to be just.... well.... normal?

No one of course.  *grins*  We want to be models, or heros, or Orcs, or Gnomes, or something else.  But certainly not normal.  This is SECOND Life after all.  But even with that, normal is a good place to start.  And making our legs a little longer, our breasts a little bigger and perhaps a little less sagging is all part of the game.  And for men, having that broad chest with massive pects and biceps, and all without steroids!  Well, its a good thing.

Personally, I think the guy in the video tape makes a good case for a 7 1/2 heads starting point with legs 4 heads long and arms 3 heads long.  Then if you want to go for a modeling/fashion look... then lengthen your legs and body slightly.

Common Proportioning Errors

As I wander through second life I do see some errors people have made in their shapes.  Usually a person will jave just one of these errors, rarely do I see someone with two and I don't think I've ever seen someone with three.  But I thought I'd list them so you can increase the power of your observations. 

And... who knows... you might see one of these in your own shape.  If you do, and want to make a change to your shape, be sure to do it on a COPY of your shape.  I've done this so often to my shape that I've taken to adding a date to the modification I make, and a height I'm trying for too.  So I have shapes named things like "Robin's 5-1 110205" where that number is a YYMMDD format.

• Too long legs!  We all want longish legs, that's what high-heels are all about.  But there can be such a thing as too long.  When you start looking like you might be on stilts, that's the time to wonder. If you're a woman remember to look at yourself in heels.  That adds another 4 to 6 inches and may just put you over the top.
• Too short arms!  If you use the Second Life avatar shape editor and just increase your height, there's a good chance that you'll end up with arms that are too short.  They should be about 3 heads long.
• Push-up bra breasts.... with no bra!  This is a common problem with home made avatars, and quite a few store-bought avatar shapes as well.  If your breasts look like someone pasted half of cantaloupes to your chest, then this is your problem.  Breasts do not have the same shape at the top as they do at the bottom... There's this thing called gravity!    If you want the push-up bra look when you're dressed, that's certainly an ok thing -- but then be sure to make another version of your shape for when you're undressed or in a bathing suit.  You'll be much happier with the result.
• Too small a head!  I see this quite often on guys.  They have increased their height, chest size and muscles but have done nothing for their head.  So... guys... you don't want to look like a pin-head do you?  Make it a bit bigger... and your neck a bit thicker too.  Try for at least a size that would make your height 9 heads total.  Eight would be better.  That doesn't mean I'm suggesting you reduce your height... just increase the size of your head.
• Scrunched bottom!  I see a lot of people, both men and women who's bottoms that are scrunched vertically.  Its quite strange looking in naturalist or nudist Sim.  I suppose its no big deal if you never get naked though.  The fix is in the torso->hip length control  make your hips Longer.
• Too long a trunk!  I think what some women have done is to take their basic shape and make it a bit shorter.  But the SL shape editor does not reduce height proportionately across the entire body.... I think it focuses mostly on the legs.  So this might also be titled 'too short legs' but if shorter is what you're trying for, then your legs may be ok - its your trunk shoulders to crotch that is too long.To fix this use the controls to control the Hip and Torso length.  Also watch the Neck length too.

Then there are facial features.....

• Pasted on smile! I know, I know, this person is trying to communicate that he or she is a friendly and happy person.  But using the up-turned corners on the mouth control in the SL avatar editor to make this happen just looks scary.  Instead get one of those things that make you smile every now and then.  Come to think of it... that's something I can easily show you how to make in a future post.
• Surprised eyes!  Its easy to make your eyes too open, too round.  I've done it myself.  When you do so it makes you look like you're surprised all of the time.  
• Jaw-line too high, too sharp!  I think this is simply a flaw in the editor, it lets you make your jawline much too upward sloping.  It might be a good thing if you're trying to make an avatar of the Wicked Witch of the West (along with the required green skin).  But for most of us its way too much.

And finally, Avatar physics.  We can now have bouncy boobies, bottoms and bellies.  *grins*  If you're making a 'full figured' female avatar, the avatar physics can be a lot of fun.

First for the guys... if you're going for a buff look, I think I'd skip avatar physics completely.  Being buff, and having things jiggling is just not right, and could be downright disturbing.  If, however, you're making an overweight avatar, by all means, go for it.  You can get a jiggling belly, butt and man-boobs very easily.

Now for us ladies...  My advice would be to copy your walk animation from your AO and then run it in-world so you can see the effect of the changes you make.  Use the Camming we talked about above to look at yourself from the front as you use the animation to walk in place.  Walking is the most common thing, but turning, jumping and running are important too - so if you can do those as well, by all means do so.

Assuming you're going for a trim figure, you will want to minimize the belly bounce, perhaps you will want just a little butt bounce and your boobie bounce and sway will depend on how your breasts are shaped.  Larger and more pendulous, more bounce and sway... smaller, less bounce and sway.

If you're making a pregnant shape, play attention to the advanced parameters too.  Adding some Mass and Gravity to your belly will move it down a little into a more natural position.  And some mass and gravity on our breasts can make them sag and sway more realistically.

Avatar physics errors....

• Everything is moving!  The most comon problem I see is for everything to be moving all over the place. If you're a heavy woman, then that's appropriate when you're walking around naked... but not so much when you're clothed.  You may want to make two avatar physics layers one for each condition.
• Prim thingies don't move with my avatar physics!  If you have a dress with a prim lace trim along the top passing over your breasts.  And you have turned your avatar physics on, you will find that your prim lace will be stationary as your breasts bounce and sway though the lace.  Its even worse if you have bought prim nipples.  I'll leave it to your imagination.  The solution?  Don't wear the prim... or don't wear the avatar physics layer.  Its as simple as that.

What to do?!  

I've probably scared you off now.  So many ways to go wrong!

It's not really that bad though.  You're probably fairly happy with the shape you have but just want to make a little change.  Perhaps your lips need to be a little more full... or you need more lower lip .... or your nose is too narrow... or you breasts are too small.  All of those things are easy and simple to adjust.  Just remember to make your adjustments to a copy of your current shape so you have a way to back up without having to remember each and every tweak you made.

I'll use myself as an example for you.  At times, I like to play using the Mama Allpa hud.  It gives me a realistic menstrual cycle and a few other things too... like the possibility of pregnancy. 

So... if that happens, I need to adjust my shape as I proceed through my pregnancy...  What I do is make up three more shapes based on my normal shape.  First here's my normal shape to the right.  (as always click on the picture to see a larger version - and you may be able to click again to see an even larger version).

Now to the left... here's a picture with my tummy made a bit larger, I call it 'showing'.  To make my baby bump on this shape I increased the belly control in the torso section going from about 1 on the SL Avatar Editor to about 25 or so.

And now to the right is my 'trimester 2' shape.  Well, kinda mid to late trimester 2.  *smiles*.  In this one my breasts are a little bigger too, and I increased the gravity so they would droop realistically.  All of these controls are also found in the torso section.

And finally, to the left is my trimester 3 shape.  My tummy is certainly larger and my breasts are too.  I also used the cleavage control to pull my breasts closer together a bit.  If you don't it starts to feel like they're flopping under your arms!  And I increased the gravity yet again. 

I might also increase my butt size and add weight in general by using the control to make my shape more 'muscular'.  It's not muscles in this case of course, but it's the effect we want.

All of these shapes have the Avatar Physics layer applied and have gravity and mass set for my breasts and tummy.  It does make a difference but you can't see it in the Avatar editor, you have to make the change and look at the result when you leave the editor.

This is just an example of course and a simple one at that.  But you can do it.  Study the proportions and give it a try.  Its fun!

robin

PS: A shape begs the question of a skin.  If you're new to this blog there are a couple of points to enter to learn how to make a nice skin for yourself.  One, for general skills and leading to making a female skin is here.   If you want to make a male skin, you should look at the starting point for the female skin and then go here.    (I had several false starts on the male skin.)  And if you want to make a dark skin, also look here.

Making a dark skin

Hi again!

I've promised several times to talk about making a dark skin, and I think I've started writing something on it at least 4 times... Each time I ran into complications that I couldn't easily translate into instructions so I set it aside and later tried again.   I've not been able to reduce this to a set of relatively simple instructions.   Its rather like the Starlight Male Skin I took you through earlier but even more so.  It tends to be a very artistic endeavor, lots of lots of personal and subjective stuff - so what I might prefer and what you might prefer could easily be very different.

So, what I thought I'd do, on this 5th try to say something about dark skins, is to just talk about some of those choices.   This won't be a how-to... instead it will be a guidance. It will give you some things to think about as you embark on making a dark skin and give you my perspective on them.

For me, the main questions in making a dark skin are these:

• How dark a skin can I make?
• What happens with shadows and highlights on my dark skin.
• Are there things about dark skins that are different from the lighter skins we've made so far?

How Dark?

Let's face it, our skin color (speaking as one human being to another) varies all over the place.  Some of our skins are very very dark, some are very very light, and of course there is everything in between.  When I say "dark skin", I mean the skins of people with a sub-Saharan African ancestry.  You may mean something different of course, and that is fine. It's just that I just have more experience with people of that ancestry so I can look closely at skins of that type and study them the detail.

I've found, through the school of hard knocks, that if we make a very dark skin with a true to life very dark color, or a very light skin with a true to life very light color, that Second Life renders them very poorly.  It's sad but true.  The problem with a very dark skin is that SL's nighttime will tend to make you invisible.  That's ok if you're having a running gun battle in some combat Sim at night, but generally not so ok.  It's good to be seen.  Also your dark skin needs to be able to have both shadows and highlights... if you start with a very dark skin color, you really have no where to go with the shadows.

The problem with a very light skin is that SL's nearby lights, and sometimes even just daylight, can make the skin seem garish and washed out.  If your intended style is garish, I suppose that's ok.  But its really not going to do for most of us.  And here too, your skin needs to be able to have both shadows and highlights.... if you start with a very light skin color, you really have no where to go with the highlights.

So the thing to do is to pick a color that's dark, but not quite as dark as our skins can get in real life. Exactly what this color is is up to you.  For me, I find that something like HSV = 22,71,42 works pretty well.  I would describe it as a dark mocha.  It is by no means the deepest darkest brown that I've seen in real life but its a nice color.

For those into quasi-human avatars, other colors are fun and interesting too.  Especially dark reds and dark greys.  I've tried a few other colors, violets, greens and such.. and they will look good in some SL lighting but seem to look bad in other SL lighting.  A dark red value that I like is HSV = 3,62,55.  A dark grey value I like is HSV = 0,0,39.  We'll talk a bit more about these later.

Shadows

Of course, the place to start is with the values given us by Eloh Eliot in her Starlight skin.  But, if you're making the sub-Saharan-African skin.. you'll find that it looks pretty bland.  The shadows are not deep enough and the highlights are not bright enough.

So the obvious answer is to somehow make the shadows deeper and the light parts lighter.  But....as the old map-makers said when they warned the captains of ships that they were sailing into dangerous or uncharted waters , 'Here be Dragons!" The danger is that IF you modify the upper and lower textures slightly differently, you will create a line at your waist between the two layers.  This is the death knell of any skin.

So.... some advice....  Break the Highlights and shadows down into smaller jobs. What I do is first is the shadows.

For the dark skin color  (HSV) I described above, I created a new layer and applied that new dark skin color to it.  Then I went through each of the files that Eloh gives us, and made a copy of each shadow layer.  This was mostly those that used the multiply mode, but there were exceptions that I had to handle differently.  Things like nipples and lips, and perhaps makeup around the eyes.

Once you've duplicated the shadow layers in each file you'll probably go back and want to modify of the opacity of some of the duplicates.  GIMP gives you the ability to adjust it in fine detail using the slider, but I've found that this is a bad idea.  If you use the slider and you're just 'eyeballing' it, the danger is that you think you're doing the same level of opacity on a layer on the upper, and one on the lower, but you're not.  They'll be just a little off and before you know it you have the dreaded line between the upper and lower skin textures.

So, what I do is pick just a few values for my opacity and stick to them.  The values I use are these: 0, 11, 22, 33, 44, 55, 66, 77, 88, 100.  When I make a change, I usually also make a change to the name of the layer so its something like this 'abs.shadow 88'  where 88 is the opacity value I've set. This does two things... it makes it less likely that I will screw up and make the abs.shadow on the upper layer 87 and the abs.shadow layer on the lower texture 89.  And... WHEN (not if)  I screw things up I know where to look to fix things.

Highlights

Highlights on dark skins are really interesting.   It's good to keep an eye out on real life and really study what you see.  When I do this I see two very different kinds of highlights.

One type of highlight I see is the bright shiny whitish reflection.  I usually see this when outside in full sunlight... and its probably a warm day too.  So people have a light film of moisture on their skins and it reflects the sunlight in a very direct way.  The edges of these reflections also tend to be sharper.  Not a crisp line mind you, skin is not a metallic surface like a car.  Think how your skin reflects light when you've put a layer of suntan oil on and you'll have the idea... then tone it down a little, 'cause a little sweat is not suntan oil.  :-P

The second type of highlight is much more subtle.  It happens when the light penetrates the outer surface of the skin, diffuses and reflects back through the skin from the inside.  The light picks up a warm tint while doing this and lightens the surface of the skin without appearing to be white.   This is the kind of reflection tends to have a much softer edge to it.  In fact, the edge is so soft its hard to say it has an edge at all.  And its very much NOT a white reflection, its more a warming of the natural skin color.  On a pale skinned person it will tend toward pink and on a brown skinned person it will tend to a warmer, brown... maybe adding a little orange to the underlying brown, but it's still brown.

It occurs to me that some people may not be familar with the idea of warm colors and cool colors.  It's a pretty common way of describing things and if you look on the compact flourescent light bulbs you can by in the grocery store, you'll notice that they list something called color temperature.  The lower numbers are warmer, they have more red, orange and yellow.  The higher numbers are cooler, they have more blue.  Here's a link with more than you'll want to know about color temperature.  :-P

Color Temperature

The types of highlights that Eloh Eliot has given us with the Starlight skin is the second type.  So what we will be looking for as we make the highlights brighter is a shift in the color to something lighter and warmer... not a layer of white on top of the darker skin.

As I suggested with the shadows above... I would just go through each of the layers and duplicate them as a first step.  This raises a question though... there are really two kinds of these highlights in Eloh's files.  One is called "Shift' and the other is called "Highlight" or "Light".  My personal experience has been duplicate the Shifts and leave the Highlights and Lights alone.  As they say... YMMV  (Your Milage May Vary) .... you may find that you like to use the highlights rather than the shifts to do this.   Give it a try... but if you do, be sure you leave an easy way back to a good starting point so you can recover if you don't like the result.

We have the same danger here as we did with the shadows... so look at the waist where the upper and lower textures come together very carefully.  If there's a line... you've messed up somewhere.  And you'll need to either figure it out or start from your last save-point and give it another try.

Let's return for a few minutes to the quasi-human avatars, dark-red and a dark-grey and talk about highlights.  For the dark-red, I've found that I can use the same approach that I've described above and it works very well.  But.... dark-grey shows an interesting problem.  If you repeat the above for the highlights of a dark-grey skin, you'll find that the highlights take on a warmish cast.  This is not a good thing in a grey skin.  Fortunately the solution is pretty straightforward ... go through each highlight layer and desaturate it (Color->desaturate).  You'll need to do this for both the shift layers and the highlight layers.... and you may find you need to do some work on the nipples and lips too.

And if you get brave and venture further into other colors like blue and green, be sure to desaturate as you would for the grey, it would not do to have warmer highlights on a cooler skin color.


What's different?

Finally there's the question of how dark skins are different than lighter skins.  I'm thinking of the dark skins of sub-Saharan African's here... and the lighter skins of Northern Europeans and I do see several differences.

But first, let's talk about where things are the same.

Many light skins and even some darker skins include tan-lines.  For those of you who live in a cave or perhaps a sub-basement and never come out, tan-lines are the imprint made by a bathing suit, usually a bikini, as it blocks the sun's tanning rays.  This can happen for most people with light skins and for some people with the lighter shades of dark skins.  Some consider such things unsightly, and they can be a problem if you have bathing suits of different styles.  I'm ignoring tan-lines here but you may not want to do so.  If you want to add them, you'll need to read the sections of this blog where I talk about how to make a tank top.  Your cut for your bikini tan-lines will be different, of course.  But the principles will be the same.  And... be sure to make yourself a bikini that matches!

There is another skin color variation that I'm ignoring as well.  It's also due to tanning.  The shoulders and back of most light skinned people who spend a good bit of time in the sun will be darker than their fonts.  And under-arms are often even lighter than the fronts.  Of course if you visit the tanning salons you're getting an all over even tan... and you can do so in the natural sun as well.. you just have to be more intentional about it.  And as above, people with lighter shades of darker skins will show these tendencies of tanning as well.

I'm simply ignoring all of this sun related tanning and assuming you're running around in the bright sun naked all of the time... then spending time laying on your back with arms over your head to get a nice tan on your tummy too.  :-P

Now for the differences we WILL pay attention to....

The first difference is in fine detail of the the color of the skin itself. I find that dark skins are smoother in their color... or I could say that light skins have more small-grained variation in their color.  Freckles on a light skin are one obvious example.  Age spots are another.  But even ignoring these things you can see the blue of veins and small variations in the skin color itself on a light skin.  Adding veins is beyond the scope of what we're about here, but I do add something to give me this micro-variation in the overall skin color when making a light skin, and then use the freckle layers provided by Eloh.  On dark skins I would turn off the freckles and not do anything to give the skin the fine-grained variations.

The second difference is to notice places where the dark skins are lighter.  For those of a sub-Saharan-African ancestry, the palms of the hand are usually a bit lighter shade of brown and the soles and heels of the feet are as well.  This is really really tricky to create but its a very visible feature so I think it's important to add it to your dark skin.

The problem is that the palm is on one portion of the template and the back of the hand is on another portion of the template.  So if you do the obvious thing and make the back of the hand dark and the palm lighter, you'll end up with a very visible line running through the side of each finger, and a line at the underside of the wrist.  Bad, bad!  It will not do!

The solution is extend the lighter color into the template for the back of the hand.  But you have to do with with a fuzzy paintbrush.  And that fuzzy paintbrush cannot intersect with the edge of the template at all.  If it does, you will create the very line you're trying to avoid.  ( You can see my result in the picture to the right. )

The way to do this is create a layer mask over your skin layer and then paint with a fuzzy paintbrush over the areas where you want the light color to show through.  (You will have to create a layer with the lighter color below your skin layer.)  To do this you'll need to zoom in on the portions of the fingers and do each one very carefully.

Or you can create paths that are like the bones of the fingers and use the fuzzy paint-brush along those paths trick that we used in creating the straps and trim of the tank top in earlier posts.  It CAN be done!  But it is NOT easy.

There is one more place on a dark, sub-Saharan-African skin that shows some color variation.  The lower lip of some people with such ancestry is a little lighter than the upper lip.   I have no idea why, genetics I guess.  But if you google the question you'll find lots of discussion on both sides.  So it's optional, but its something you may want to consider doing.

The way I did this is to make layers that separate the upper lip from the lower lip.  To do this make two copies of the lipsA.base.darker layer and name one lipsA.base.darker.upper and the other lipsA.base.darker.lower.  Then add a black layer mask to both and on the upper make the area of the upper lip white, and on the other, make the area of the lower lip white. Now you can control the lightness and darkness of the upper and lower lips separately.

Dark skin wrap-up

As I mentioned at the start, making a dark skin from Eloh's Starlight skin is not an easy thing to do.  But it IS possible and the results do look good.   Here's a picture of my end result with the color I gave you earlier (picture to the right - double click on it for a larger view).  This is not the skin I normally wear, but I would be happy to do so.  It is a very nice skin.










And here's a picture of the same skin at night (on the left).  Both of these pictures are un-retouched and taken using a viewer 2 style viewer at with the High graphics setting.

You may be thinking that this is all well and good but my dark-mocha is not what you think of as a dark skin, and you want to go darker.  By all means... do so!  That's part of the art of this - you get to choose what you do... don't feel that you need to follow what I've done.

I haven't tried to go darker than this. If I did I would guess that the areas I described above would be the issue areas.  Perhaps you will need to make more copies of the shadow areas... or less.  Or more copies of the shift areas... or make copies of the highlight areas too.  As you do this... be sure you do it in small steps so you can check your work with temporary textures uploaded to SL.  That will let you find the flaws that get introduced as we mess with Eloh's layers and fix them.

One last suggestion as you launch off into creating your own dark skin....  Once you've created all three templates for your new dark skin and tried them out.  And you've fixed the line that showed up between the upper and lower layers, perhaps you even fixed it several times..... Wear the temporary skin for a couple days - you may even have to reload the temporary templates and reapply them to the skin.  I find that when I do this I notice little details that will bug me and I'll need to do something to change them.  Once you can wear the skin for a day or two and are still happy with it.... THEN upload the textures as permanent textures and apply them to your skin.

kisses!
robin

PS:  You may have noticed some problems with the pictures on this blog.  I think I figured out the problem... it was probably my own doing.  And I think the pictures should be visible to everyone now.  Please let me know if you find that's not so.