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.

Changing the color of your tank top

Hi again everyone!

A few posts back, I showed you how to make a nice tank top.  Then I showed you how to do some variations on the theme and ended up with a very nice tank top with a kind of randomized fabric.  It was kinda putzy to make though and if you wanted to make several versions in different colors... well it would quickly become tedious.

Soooo....

I thought I'd show you a little short-cut.  A way to change the color without having to create the entire top.   The trick is to use something called "Rotate Colors".

If you're reading this and stratching your head, saying things like 'what tank top?  what randomized fabric?'  then you may need to go back and look at some previous posts.  Here are some that are germane in reverse order (newer first, older last):

• Randomized Fabric 
• Making a Tank Top ... this is the first of a series and it starts with a small GIMP lesson.
• Tools you'll need ... this is near the very beginning of the blog and is the start of a series to make a female skin.  You will not need to go into that in detail but there might be some GIMP things in that series you need to know.

Ok... now let's get going on changing the colors.  You can look at the "Randomized Fabric" link above and see what we made last time, but I'll give you another picture here.  Its a very nice top if I do say so myself and I rather like the various shades of rose and pink that it uses.

And yes, the baby is born.  She is a bouncing baby girl and at birth was  8 lbs 6 oz.  (ouch!)  Mommy and little Fiona are doing fine.

First a few words about this pink/rose tank top.....

Recall that we used the same Hue on all of the colors we used in our randomized fabric above.   That's the H in the HSV color scheme.  So we just varied the Saturation and/or Value as we created our new colors.  Also recall that there are just three colors in the above.  The fabric itself has a darker background and a randomized lighter foreground.  The trim is the same Hue and lighter yet.  All have bump maps applied to them.  On the background fabric and the randomized fabric, these bump maps create wrinkles.  On the trim they create a kind of 3d-ish look, a nice rounded bump for each little bump that makes the trim.  And finally, we happily took Eloh Eliot's layers from her Starlight Skin to create the highlights and shadows that apply to all.

Now, exactly how do we change the color?

What we need to do is to change the Hue of four layers:  The background fabric layer, The randomized fabric layer, The straps layer and The trim layer.  So here's what we we do:

• Select the background fabric layer in GIMP's layers window,
• Then go to the Image window and choose Colors->Map->Rotate Colors.
• I wanted to shift the Hue to more of a Purple/violet with just a touch of red in it...so I rotated the two arrows clockwise about 80 degrees so they encompassed the that area on the spectrum shown in the bottom circle.  The values I ended up with were 1.580 and 1.8180 in the two fields.  You can choose some other color to shift to - but make sure to note the values... you will need to apply the SAME value to the other layers.

Now select the randomized layer of the fabric and apply the same rotation (you copied down the values... right?).  Then do the same thing to the two trim layers.

One trick that I may have mentioned before to lighten or darken the whole thing after you have created it is to add a white layer above all of your fabric and trim layers and set the mode to grain extract or grain add.  Then use the opacity to control how much is extracted or added.  Its an easy way of getting the final lightness or darkness you want without having to redo the whole thing.

When you're happy with your result be sure to save the file and give it a different name.  As usual, I appended a YYMMDD thing to the end of mine as I saved the XCF file (GIMP file).  Then I saved the same thing as a png for uploading into second life.  (See some of the previous posts on details on how to do that).

You can see my result above. Pretty nice isn't it!?!  You can see that the wrinkles came over nicely and if you look closely you'll see the 3d-effect in the trim as well.

Have fun!
robin

Making a male skin - Starlight step 3

I'm back!

In the previous post we worked very hard making adjustments to the starlight upper texture and adding the necessary layers to allow it to be used in a male skin.  So now we'll work on the adjustments ( no additions) to the other two textures, the lower and the face. This will not be nearly as long or as arduous as the upper texture was, and you have gained valuable experience which should make this a piece of cake.

starlight_lower m yymmdd.xcf - buffed up and final adjustments

After all the work we did on the upper layer, this is going to be pretty anti-climatic.  There are really just two layers to work on to buff up the legs a bit.  Both layers involved the thigh muscle on the front of each leg.  As before the problem is that the highlight is a bit too smooth and we need to make it just a bit more lumpy. 

Before you get started do a google image search for male body models to get an idea of how this should look.  Here's what I did for my layer mask::

• Turn on the grid for the cmff base layer as we have done before on the upper texture 
• Turn off the 'front highlight thigh' layer.
• Select the 'front.shift.thigh' layer, right click and choose 'add layer mask' as we have done before.  And make it white.
• Select the Airbrush tool and make the foreground color black.  Make the scale about 6.
• Now paint the area just above the knee to reduce the highlighting there.  I also reduced it a little bit toward the outside of each thigh slightly above the knee.  
• As we always do, switch the color to white and touch up what you may have overdone, changing the size of the paintbrush as you need
• and repeat the last two steps until you are satisfied.

Then, as we did before, find the 'front light thigh' layer, turn it back on and do the same thing we just did to the 'front shift thigh' layer..  Here's a picture of the layer mask I created.

That's it!  We're done with the fancy airbrushing and layer masks!  Take a break, walk around the room and SAVE YOUR FILE!

Now its time to make some adjustments to the intensity of the highlights.  This is subjective so if you decide you want more highlights than I do, or less, that's ok.  The important thing is that what you do for the upper highlights must be matched by what you do in the lower highlights.  (we won't be changing the shadows at all)  So immediately after making adjustments on the lower layer, we'll move to the upper and finally to the face, making adjustments to the layers there too.  All of these adjustments will just be to the opacity of the layers, we won't change the mode or do any more fancy airbrushing.

I'll go through a list of layers for the lower texture now and share the values for the opacity that I have used for this male skin... starting at the top and working our way down:

• front.light.abs = 66
• front light abdomen = 66
• front light thigh = 66
• front light knee = 66
• front light shin = 66
• front shift thigh = 100
• back light buttock 1 = 66
• back light buttock 2 = 66

When I change the opacity of a layer I usually make some note of it by adding something to the name of the layer.  It might be the number that I changed it to ... or it might be just some signal like "*" or "<<".  You might want to do the same.  You can feel free to adjust these values in the future to something more to your liking, but for now it's probably best to start with these.

starlight_upper m yymmdd.xcf ... final adjustments

Now here's the list of layers in the upper texture on which I have changed the opacity:

• navel upper light = 66
• navel bottom light = 66
• breastB.chest light = 66
• breast highlight male lower = 55
• breast highlight male upper = 33
• breastB.breast upper 66
• breastB breast shade 1 = 100
• collarbone = 44
• abs highlight = 66
• abs side = 66
• abs shift = 100
• arm lower light = 33
• arm bicep light male = 55
• arm upper light = 33
• arm lower light = 33

As I said on the lower texture file, feel free to adjust these values to your liking sometime in the future.  But for now, I'd suggest that you use these.

starlight_face m yymmdd.xcf final adjustments

The main thing I did with face texture was to be sure the makeup is off, including lipstick, eye shadow and eye liner.  And then adjust the lip color to something that I liked.  To do this I set these layers as shown below:

• lipsA base darker = 22, multiply
• lipsA base lighter = off
• lipsA base = off

And I then adjusted the facial highlights to match the highlights of the upper texture:

• cheek corner light = 66
• check light = 66
• chin light = 66
• eye bottom light = 66
• forehead light = 66
• ears light = 66

Also remember to experiment with the different choices of noses, lips and eyes. 

Ok!  We're done!  Yay!

Checking your work

The most awful thing that can occur in modifying one of Eloh's startlight skin is that the seams between textures and within the texture become visible.  The open source skin's Eloh provides us as starting points do NOT have visible seams, so if any show up they are simply our fault.

So.. it's time to check your work.  Load the latest versions of each of the textures you have been working on into GIMP.  For the upper and lower textures, save them as jpg files, for the face texture, save it as a png file.

Now we'll upload them into Second Life.  I recommend that you use a viewer that can upload temporary textures to do this because uploading temporary textures is free.  My current favorite to do this is Firestorm.  To upload a temporary texture you use Build->Upload->Texture, choose the texture when it shows you the folders and then tick the 'temporary' box when the viewer shows you the file you've selected, and click Upload.

Once you're logged in and have your textures uploaded its time to try them on.  You'll need to be somewhere where nudity is permitted, like an Adult Sandbox, or if you are not adult verified, find a place that is sparsely populated (use ctl-shift-1 and look at the Main Agents, that tells you the number of people in the Sim).   I'll be using Firestorm as my point of reference here so you'll have to interpret if you're using something else....

• Press the inventory button and find the second inventory button at the bottom of the inventory window to open up a second inventory window. 
• Make a copy of one of the skins in the Library and put it in a folder named 'body', then name the skin 'my skin yymmdd' and double click it to wear it.
• Now right click your avatar and choose Appearance->edit outfit->body parts->(your skin name here)  (there's a little screw driver and wrench icon to click)
• You will now see three small window-ish things at top labeled 'head tatto', 'upper tatto' and 'lower tatto'  (yes, I know its spelled 'tattoo').  That's where you will put the textures you have uploaded.
• Open the textures folder in the left inventory window and drag each of the textures you have uploaded to the appropriate window on the right.
• Press "Save" and then "X" to exit.

Now use your 'cam-ing skills' to closely inspect the seams of the skin you have just made.  Check each of these in turn

• Upper/lower seam at the waist, front and back
• Upper/face seam at the neck, front and back
• Shoulder seam in the upper texture, front and back
• Arm seam in the upper texture, down the bicep and in the back, along the tricep
• leg seams in the lower texture - the outside of the leg and the inner leg
• There are seams in the face texture too - but these usually don't seem to cause a problem, or are often covered by hair.

If you can actually SEE any of these seams, if you see a line of sorts in these places.... you have a problem that needs to be corrected.  There's no absolute prescription on how to do the correction, sometimes its a simple matter of finding the error and fixing it.  Sometimes you just have to begin again.

I tried to show you a way of doing the male skin here that would have a minimum of seam problems, so lets go on and look at what we've done.    Look at the male pects, lighting and shadow.  You may decide you need a little more or less of one or the other.  That's fine.  Once you have verified that you have no seams in your skin, you can go ahead and make changes to personalize it to the way you want to look.  Likewise inspect the abs... too much?  too little?  All of this is totally subjective and up to you.  Just be sure, as you make changes, to keep inspecting for the dreaded seams.... and provide yourself a way to backup to a previous level if you find you've introduced one.

And Finally.......

Once you're happy with the results of your hairless male skin, we can move on to the final step - making hair!  That's in the next post.

robin

Making a male skin - Starlight step 2

Hi again!

Today we'll work on "starlight_upper m yymmdd".  First we'll work on creating the male pectoral shading and highlights (aka pects) and then we'll work on the abdominal muscle definition (abs) and the bicep definition.  Let's get started. 

Nipples

My first thought was to simply turn on the nipple layers in the starlight skin given to us by Eloh. But after doing that and looking at the result... it didn't look quite right.  The nipples were not quite in the right spot for a man's skin and they were a bit on the large size.  So I decided to turn the starlight nipples off again and go get the nipples from the lf0y_upper file and work with those.   Here's my earlier post on how to find copies of lf0y on the web:

http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/2011/07/making-male-skin.html

So go forth and download!

Once you've downloaded and unpacked the files, start GIMP and load lf0y_upper.psd into it.  Then....

• Resize the file to 1024x1024 with Image->Scale Image and tell it 1024x1024
• Find the 'nipples' layer and select it.  Then resize it using Layer -> Layer to Image Size.
• Press Ctl-C to make a copy of the layer
• Find and open your starlight upper file, 'starlight_upper m yymmdd.xcf"
• Find the general area of the nipples layers and create a new transparent layer in a convenient place above or below them.  Then press Ctl-V to paste the lf0y nipples layer from your clipboard and click the anchor button to put it in the new transparent layer.
• Change the name of this layer to 'nipples male'
• Change the mode to multiply

The nipples look a little pale now but that will be easily remedied later.  First let's move them a bit to where we want them.

• Make two copies of the 'nipple male' layer and change the names to 'nipple male left' and 'nipple male right'.
• Turn on the grid by turning on the "cmff  base" layer.  Recall that in the last post we moved it to the top of the layers list and set the opacity to about 10%, so it should now be faintly visible.
• Now select 'nipple male right', choose the Move tool from the Tools window and below on the Tools window select 'move the active layer'
• If you look at the image to the right you can see where I moved the nipple to.  I tried to make it so that the upper right edge was just touching the old center point.  Use your mouse to move the nipple to a similar position. 
• There will be a little of the nipple that spills beyond the ring around the center point... we need to trim that off or it will smear and look very odd.  So select the Eraser tool on the tools menu and adjust the scale to somewhere around 6 with a hard edged circle as the 'paint brush' and use the edge to nibble away at the part of the nipple outside the circle.
• There were two nipples in each layer, so now we need to go erase the other.  Since we're working on the right nipple, we need to erase the left from this layer.  So use your Eraser tool to do so.

Now repeat the above process for the other nipple.  When you're done make copies of both and you should have a nice level of darkness for both nipples.

This is probably a good time to save your file.  Remember to give it a new date when you to so, or give it a number of a letter in addition if you already have a saved copy with todays date (like this starlight_upper m yymmdd-2.xcf)

Pectoral Muscles - Shadow

Next we'll work with the pects' shadow.  There is a bit of creative license in this step but it's not too bad.  It's probably about 60% mechanical and 40% creative.

In truth, it's strongly connected with the pects' higlights we'll be doing next so you may find yourself coming back here after you've done the highlghts.  Or you may find yourself iterating between the two for a while until you get them to a place you like.  That's ok.  In fact, its probably good that it happens.

I find that I could use the breast shadow as a base for our pect highlights... here's what I did:

• make a copy of the layer 'breastB.breast shade 1' and turn it on.

What we need to do is to trim back the shadow from the nipple area, pushing it back down toward the edge.  A man's pect is much flatter than a woman's breast (duh!) so the shadow will not extend as far up to the nipple, but will be confined just to the lower edge.

• Rt click on the layer and choose 'Add a layer mask' and choose a white mask.  A white mask will allow the whole of the layer to show through, and we can add black to it to trim the breast shadow back to where it should be for a male pectoral muscle.
• Choose the Airbrush tool from the Tools window, and make the foreground color black. Then choose the largest fuzzy circle as the paint brush.  I've set the scale to about 6 or 8, and the rate to values you find comfortable to work with (experiment - remember ctl-z is your friend.
• Use the large fuzzy black painbrush to nibble the shadow back, pushing it away from the nipple. 
• Then with a smaller fuzzy paintbrush adjust the shadows that wrap around the breast both near the sternum and near the under-arms.  Be very careful as you do this to NOT get too close to the template edge!
• You will then want to switch the colors and paint with black to clean up what you have done, making corrections and adjustments.
• Repeat the above two or three steps until you're happy with the result.  You can see my result in the image to the right.

I'll also make the layer mask visible (right click the layer and select 'show layer mask' so you can see how mine ended up.  Yours need not look like this at all, but it will probably be similar in the important areas.

Pectoral Muscles - Highlights

Now the scary part!  The pects!  This is going to be the most creative of all of the things we need to do to make this a male skin. I would rate is at aout 30% mechanical and 70% creative. This will require some 'freehand' drawing using the airbrush similar to what we just did with the shadow, but more so.  We will be creating the highlight outright, not just modifying one that already exists.

You may want to take inventory of your 'pointing tools'.  On my laptop I have three, a 'track point', a 'track pad' and a wireless mouse.  (I'm using a Lenovo Thinkpad, which has a lineage going back to IBM, hence the Track Point, a red nubby thing in the middle of the keyboard).  Which you prefer is largely a personal choice - for general computer usage I seem to like: 1) the mouse, followed closely by 2) the Track Point and followed more distantly by 3) the Track Pad.   But for GIMP airbrush work I tend to reverse the last two, the Pad is better than the red-nubby thing for painting with the airbursh, but the mouse is still number one for me.  If you're using a laptop and dont have a mouse, by all means try this with your Pad.  But you may also want to invest a few dollars in a mouse and try that out if you have any trouble at all.

And, remember as we proceed into this that ctl-z is your friend.  You can always use that to back out your latest changes to the image.  Also remember that this is not a one-shot thing.  You can delete the layers and start over any time and you will not have lost any of your previous work.

I chose to do this in two stages, adding one layer for each stage.  The first is just to even out the lighting.  if you look again at the image above (not the one showing the layer mask) you will see a slightly darker band just above the pects.  The thing to do first is to lighten that band:

• Select the "breastB.breast upper" layer and using the Color Picker tool, sample the color in that layer, making it the foreground color (you don't have to make the layer visible to do this, selecting it is enough)
• Now create a new layer just above "breastB.breast upper" and let it take on the foreground color.
• Right click and choose "add layer mask", choosing a black layer mask.  (we will paint white onto it in a few minutes)
• Name your new layer 'breast highlights male upper' and set the mode to 'burn' and the opacity to 33%
• Now choose the airbrush tool and make white the foreground color.  Choose the large fuzzy paint brush and set the scale to something largish, around 6 or so.  I have the rate and pressure at 80 and 10 but feel free to adjust them up and down.
• Now use the airbrush and paint on the darker areas above the pects, making them lighter and lighter until they roughly match the lightness of the neighboring area.
• Switch the foreground color to black and use that airbrush to make adjustment, switching back and forth between white and black until you are satisfied with your result.
• You can see my result of this lightening to the right.

One thing to be aware of as you work create your highlights.  Keep your paint brushes away from the edge of the template.  If you do stray, use ctl-z to back it out and try again, perhaps adjusting the scale to make your brush a notch smaller.  This is important, if you don't stay away from the edges of the template, the edge will become visible on your skin and you'll see a sharp line where your arms join the chest.

Now repeat the above, putting the new layer (named breast highlights male) above the layer we just created.  On this layer we will use the same technique as above, but with a bigger paintbrush, setting the scale to 8 or so.  With this brush we will paint a broad squarish pectoral highlight over the lightening the whole area of the pectoral muscle.  Then switch to black and trim it and back to white as needed.  You may find, as I did, that changing the size of the paintbrush to something smaller using scale, and using the black color, can work well in defining the area between the right and left pectoral muscles.  Here's my final result to the right.

That's it!  The scary part is over!  You may not believe it at this point, but the highlights we've created here will look good on a male avatar.  Just remember that your not satisfied, you  can go back play with this making adjustments, adding, subtracting or even redoing as you feel the need. 

Chest highlight

Now we'll move on to some easier things.  First we'll look at the 'breastB.chest light' layer.  I'll rate this at 70% mechanical and 30% creative.  Turn the layer on and play with the opacity, adjusting the slider up and down until you get it to a level appropriate level considering how the highlights you just created look.

When I did that I found that some of the chest highlight overlapped with the highlights I had created so I added a white layer mask and used a black fuzzy airbrush to select the areas around the edges I wanted to de-emphasize.  Use the instructions in 'breastB.breast shade 1' to do this, applying them to 'breastB.chest light'.

Let's pause here for a moment...

First... you should congratulate yourself!  You've done the most difficult part of making the starlight male skin.  If you're like me you'll go back and fiddle with it, touching it up here and there, but really, the difficult part is done/over/finis! 

The next steps are to increase the muscle definition.  That's entirely appropriate for a for an adult male skin.  But not so much for a child's skin.  So if your goal here to make a skin appropriate for a child avatar (male or female), this is probably as far as you need to go.  Come to think of it, you're probably pretty much done with the other layers too, the face layer really won't need any changes and arguably the lower layer will not need any changes either.

If your goal is a child's skin, you will probably want to revisit the shadow and highlights above and lighten both, use the opacity slider to do so.  And you can feel free to skip the rest of this post and most of the next.  Look for the section in the next post where I talk about checking your work.

But... I suspect that most of you want to create a mature man's skin so we need to buff him up.  We'll work first on the abdominal muscles and then on the biceps.  And in a future step there will be more to do on the lower layer as well.

Abdominal Muscles - Six Pack

Next we want to work on the abs. I think this one is not so creative as the last, so would rate it at about 67% mechanical and 33% creative.  The goal here is to make the abs less smooth looking... to provide a hint of a six-pack, but not get carried away and go into body-builder mode.  If you look carefully at the abs in this file you will see that the highlights provided by Eloh in the Starlight files are smooth.  So the way to approach this is to subtract some of the highlighting to create the six-pack.

Before we start its a good idea to get firmly in mind what we're trying to do.  Since I don't personally have a lot of experience with male six-packs, I did a google image search of "male body models" and made an extensive study of the pictures.  *fans herself* 

Look particularly at the shadows between each of the abs, that's what we're going to be creating here.

There are two layers here that we'll need to be concerned with:  "abs shift"and "abs highlight".  Turn off "abs highlight" for now (click the eye), we'll work on "abs shift" first:

• Go to the "cmff base" layer (at the top of the layers list) and turn it on, giving us a grid to work within.
• Select the 'abs shift' layer, right click and choose 'add layer mask' .... make the new layer mask white. 
• Now go to the Tools window and choose the Airbrush, the large fuzzy paintbrush, set the foreground color to black and the scale to about 2 or 3.  Adjust the rate and pressure to your liking.
• Being very careful to NOT get near the edge of the template grid, paint a black line down the middle and then two crossing lines, one just above the belly button and another above that.
• Change the color of your brush to white (and perhaps change its scale as well) and trim what you have done
• Repeat with the black and white until you can see the hint of abs

Now turn on "abs highlight" and repeat the process above.  Marking the same areas of the layer mask you create with black and trimming with white - being careful to stay away from the edges of the template. 

Here's an image showing my "abs shift" layer mask.  Right click on the layer and click 'show layer mask' and you can compare it to your own.

Biceps and Shoulder

Now we're ready for the last step for this file. The biceps and shoulder muscles. 

This will be a mix of the techniques we've used above.  We're going to adjust some highlights like we did for the abs, and we're going to create a highlight like we did with the pectorals.  So this is a pretty creative process and but not so creative as the pects were.  I'd rate is at about 50% mechanical and 50% creative.

You'll find the arms layers about 2/3's of the way down the layers list, named 'arm upper light' and 'arm lower light'.  For these two, we're going to create a white layer mask as we did for the abs, then use a black airbrush to do some trimming of the highlight provided.  I'll not repeat the steps here, you can look above at the abs and get those if you need them. 

What I have done with the 'arm upper light' layer is leave the highlight in place on the shoulder, but eliminate it just below, to give definition to the shoulder muscle.  Then I've taken out the highlight running the length of the upper arm down to the elbow.  We'll add another highlight shortly to be the bicep, but this one is in the wrong place.  I'll add a picture of the layer mask to the right so you can see what i've done.

One thing to note as you look at it... I came dangerously close to the edge of the arm template and used the paint brush and the blur tool to make some small adjustments.  You may need to do the same.

The lower arm is similar and I came to the edge and beyond here too.  So you'll see where I did some remedial trimming and blurring.  It happens that its not too critical in either of these layers since the highlight we're editing is confined to the middle of the area that we're editing.

Now for the creative part.  Go back up and review how we made the layer for the pectoral muscle.  We first created a greyish layer (you can copy the pect layer now if you want) and then added a black layer mask (delete the pect layer mask and re-add a new pristine black layer mask.  Then get ready to paint.  Call the new layer 'arm bicep highlight male'.

The difference between this and the pects is that we'll need to use a much much narrower fuzzy paint brush for our airbrush.  And we have to be very very careful to NOT get too close to the edge of the arm part of the template.  Here's an image of the layer mask I created for the bicep highlight.  I circled the part that you should pay attention to - that's the bicep highlight.  Notice that it is NOT up against the edge of the arm template.  Making a highlight layer that will cross one template edge to another smoothly and invisibly is not within the scope of what we're trying to do.

Yay!

We've finished adjusting the starlight upper texture to make it a male skin.  Well, except for the body hair, which we will deal with later.  Really, the hardest part is over, I'd estimate we're about 2/3s of the way to being done.  So congratulations! ( remember to save your work!)

In the next post we'll work on the lower level, buffing it up a little as we did with the upper (while continuing to gaze at those 'male body model' images, purely as guidance of course!).  Then we'll revisit the face layer and see if there are any small adjustments to make there. 

We'll create body hair for this male skin in a post following the lower/face post and deal with body hair on all of the layers.

See ya!
robin

Making a male skin - Starlight step 1

Hi everyone, I'm back!

I mentioned in the last post that there is an artistic or creative part to turning Eloh Eliot's Starlight skin into a male skin.  There's not any single part that is purely creative though and that will help.  I'll try to give you my feeling of the mechanical vs creativity score.  Most will be a mixture of both but some will be more mechanical than creative, and others more creative than mechanical.

First let's do a little preparation, this is 100% mechanical, so it should be a piece of cake, here are the steps I took in doing my preparation:

• Download the starlight XCF files from here: http://sites.google.com/site/another/resources.
• Once you have them, move them from the download folder into a folder that you will use for this work.  Mine is in my documents folder and has the name graphics/skins/starlight/male.  (or something close to that)
• Now open up each of the files in GIMP, and one by one we will go through and de-feminize the files.

First starlight_upper.xcf... when you open it up it will be female but bizarrely sans nipples.  That is ok for our purposes though, it saves us turning them off.   The job now is to turn off the breast layers.

• There is a large group about 3/4 of the way to the top of the layers... you can see them in the layers window.  These will start with breastA.... turn them all off (click the 'eye' making it disappear).
• There is one more located near the halfway point in the layer list named 'breast shift'.  Turn this one off too.
• Now go all of the way to the bottom of the layer list and you will see one named 'cmff base'.  Select it (click on it) and then press the shift key down AND HOLDING IT DOWN click the green up-arrow with the left mouse button.  This will send that layer all the way to the top.
• Turn on the cmff layer (now at the top) by clicking the eye and drag the opacity slider to about 10%.
• Now turn the cmff layer back off, we will have use of it later.
• Now save the file and give it a new name.  I suggest including a date in the name.  I've named mine starlight_upper m 110807.xcf.   (110807 is the date I am writing this, yymmdd )

Now let's work on starlight_lower.xcf.  This one is fine as it is... like the nipples, Eloh has left the female genitalia  layers turned off, so just save it giving it a new name as you did above.

• Find the "cmff base" layer as you did above and move it up to the top, setting the opacity to about 10%.
• Save the file, the name I used is starlight_lower m 110807.xcf.

Now for the face: starlight_face.xcf.  The needs a few adjustment, in truth they are more choices than adjustments.

• Near the top of the list of layers, turn off the freckles layers.  (You may want to leave them on if you're creating a child or teen skin.)
• A little further down you will find some eyebrow layers, I have turned on 'eyebrows hair' and the eyebrowsb layers.  Leaving eyebrowsA off.  (Likewise here the thinner eyebrows are more more appropriate for skins intended for younger shapes.)
• There is a choice to make for the nose and lips.  I have used noseB and lipsA for my male skin.  You may wish to choose differently.  If you choose the same as I did, turn the lipsB layer and turn on the lipsA layers.  (noseB is already on)
• There is also a choice of eyesA and eyesB and you can choose either of course.  I have kept eyesA in this male skin.
• Find the "cmff base" layer as you did above and move it up to the top, setting the opacity to about 10%.
  
• Save the file, the name I used is starlight_face m 110807.xcf.

Now it's time to do something with just a little creativity. (About 90% mechanical and 10% creative) The skin color startlight has as 'base' is a good shade, but we will need to do something to give it some texture, I think it's too smooth for a male skin.

What we will do is create a layer of tiny random speckles, then spread the speckles out a little by blurring them.  We will use this as a layer mask to poke small blurry holes in the skin layer called base, and make a darker layer below base that will show through these holes.

Now create our layer below and the layer mask...

• Select 'base' and press the copy button to make a copy of the base layer.
• Move the copy below the base layer and choose the color picker tool (it looks like a pippette), sample the color of the 'base copy' to get that color as the foreground color.
• Click on that color and move the cross-hair that define the color a good bit up and to the left to make a new darker color.
• Now with the 'base copy' layer selected (and below the base layer) select the bucket fill tool and paint the 'base copy' layer with your new darker color.
• Select the 'base' layer, right click and choose Add Layer Mask (choose White).
• Still with 'base' selected, right click and check 'show layer mask' so we can see what we're doing.
• Create our speckles with Filter->Noise->HSV Noise.  I set Holdness to 1 (whatever that is) and then HSV to 0, 160, 160 (other values are fine too - this is the creative part)
• Use Colors -> Threshold to reduce the number of speckles and make everything a nice black and white again.  keeping the value of 50 is ok but others are ok too (another creative part)
• Blur things a bit with Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur, I set the number of pixels to 3, you may choose differently if you wish.
• With our newly made blurry layer
• Now right click the 'base' layer again and un-check 'show layer mask'

Now you should be able to use the mouse wheel to zoom in on the image window and see a slight variation in the skin tone.  It should be smooth with a little variation in color, going slightly darker where we made our little speckles.   How much variation is totally up to you.  This another aspect of the creative process.  If you want more variation, use the slider on Threshold to give you more speckles.  If you want the variation more defined you can blur them a little less, perhaps use a 2 pixel blur rather than 3.

This is a good start.  Next we will launch into some of the more creative things things to make the Starlight male skin.

robin

Making a male skin - Part 2, Plan C

Hi everyone!

I know I left you hanging on the last post and I'm sorry it's been so long.  I promise that it is not sloth that has bright this on.... your correspondent has been working on the male starlight skin and has started over several times, gaining experience that she hopes will benefit you.

I won't take you through all the fits and starts.  Instead I think I'll show you end end product... or at least, the where the skin is the present time.  I seem to ding with these things over time so no project is never 'done' in the strictest sense of the word.  But this one has reached a point where it's ready to be shared publicly and I expect only small changes in the future.

Oh, before I show you I should post a sign.... *nails up a sign.... thwack!.... thwack! .... thwack! .... and steps back to view her work*   "PENIS WARNING!".

I know, I know... but its possible that some will be offended by male frontal nudity.... so If you're among them please consider before you proceed.

So.... here it is.  My work on a Starlight Male skin so far.  Let me point out a few changes...

First notice the body shape.  The 'boy next door' shape from SL was just too boyish for me, so I buffed him up a bit.  You can see that his shoulders are broader and his pects are more pronounced.  I also shortened his legs a little - many of the SL shapes in the library have freakishly long legs, I have no idea why but I have images of the Lindens all wandering from cubical to cubical wearing those clown suits that conceal stilts.  He is also more muscular than the 'boy next door', that's in the pects, arms and legs.  The hair is a freebie I found somewhere as is his penis.

Now let's pay attention to the skin.  It's not easy to tell here, but it's darker.  Not a lot, but it is a significant change.  Another thing that you can't see well in this picture is the detail of the skin texture, it's not so baby-bottom smooth, there's a little texture to it.

From the skin point of view, the male pects are an obvious change and the highlighting on the skin supports the underlying shape.  Less obvious, but equally important is the shadow under the pects.  If you compare this side by side with the normal female Starlight skin, you'll see several other less obvious changes too.  The abs are the first thing that you will probably notice, the female version does not have the mild six-pack that our male version has.  This was done by changing the highlighting.  And the same approach was taken with other highlights in the lower thigh and the biceps.

Finally, I have the added body hair.  To get an idea of what to do here I did a google image search on "male body hair".  Some of the pictures are truly scary but many are useful.  I'll explain the tecnique I used to create the hair later, it was easier than I thought it would be.

I will explain how to make this skin in the following posts, but I must warn you of one thing before we proceed.  ......

This is will not be a purely 'mechanical' exercise, there will be some creativity, some 'art' involved.  As I mentioned at the start, it's taken me many iterations to create this so you should also expect toss away what you've done several times and start over.  I think I've done so at least four times myself and that's not counting all the little back-tracking I've done when something didn't quite work out as I wished.

Also it's certain that your result will look different from mine - creativity is like that.  Different doesn't mean better or worse, just different.  If you persevere and learn, you will eventually end up with something that you like.

robin

Tank top.... New Trim and Adjustments

Ok, ok!  I promised to tell you how to do the fancy trim and make the fabric's connection to the straps a little more realistic.... and I will!!

Let's to the adjustment of the fabrics to the straps first.  It's really easy.

• Open up your GIMP xcf file containing your tank top.  Then on the Layers window choose the Paths tab.  
• Make sure your front and back panels are showing, along with the trim and straps.  If they're not turn on the appropriate layers to fix that.
• Locate the path that defined the outline of the front and back of the fabric and MAKE A COPY of it, give it a new name... something including the word 'pointy'  *winks*
• Now click the 'eye on that to make it show up on the image.
• Back on GIMP's Tool Window click the "Path's Tool"
• Now switch to the Image Window, and look at the point where the straps and the front fabric intersect... you should see the line showing the path overlaying the trim.  If not zoom in using the Ctl-MouseWheel to make it bigger ..... and click the line with the mouse.
• We had 7 points on the upper part of our line... two of the points were just above each breast.  
• Using your mouse, move those points to so they are at the points where the trim and straps intersect.
• Now.... move those points up the strap a bit.... how much you move them is up to you.  Move them both about the same amount.  Precision is not important here.
• Once they're in position.... use the adjustment handles and make them both look like and upside down "V".  
• Check the other end of each line segment to see if you need to make an adjustment there, do so if you need to.

That's it for the front.  As usual, it takes much more effort to describe as it does to do it.  *shrugs*  C'est la vie!

Now we need to do the same thing on the back.  Every thing is the same until we get to the point where we click on the path and look for the 7 points.... and discover that we only have 5!!  ( Well, I only used 5 in my example, you might have had more. )   You just need one trick to fix this....  Using the Path Tool, press the Control key and hold it down, then click on the point of intersection of the strap and the back fabric.  As you press the control key, notice that the cursor get's a tiny tiny "+".  That tells you that you're going to ADD a point to the line.

Once you've added your points, move them up a little as we did above and make the adjustment handles go in an upside down "V".  Make any adjustments to the other ends of the line segments that you may need.  In the end, your Path will look something like this picture to the right.

If you'd like to take a look at the original posts where we created the path for the front and back of the fabric, look here:
http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/2011/05/making-clothes-tank-top-part-2.html
If you want to look at the place where we practiced on making paths and adjusting them to make smooth curves, look here:
http://robin-makingstuff.blogspot.com/2011/04/making-clothes-tank-top-part-1.html

Now the fancy trim and straps.  Its really not that hard. 

When we made the straps the last time... recall that we used the "Paint along the path" tool at the bottom of the Layers window when we had the Path tab open.   The last time we accepted the default and adjusted the width of the painting that the tool used.  This time we'll use the Paint Tool, so check the "Stroke along the path with a Paint Tool" option after clicking "Paint along the Path".

BUT FIRST!  We need to set up the Paint Tool.

On the Tools window, click the Paint Tool and on the window that opens below, choose a size that you'd like the Paint Tool to use.  You'll see the choices on the lower part of the Layer Window.  You'll probably want to hover your mouse over the fabric to judge the size and pick one you want.  I used the one named "Circle (11) 13x13"  (the name of the one you've chosen is just above the collection).

Now notice that slider just below the collection of brushes in the Layers Window.  It's titled "Spacing".  The value you choose will determine the spacing between each 'instance' of the paint brush you've chosen.  Choose a small number with a largish brush and the line will appear to be continuous.  Choose a larger number with a smaller brush and you will get spaces between each 'brush stroke'.  We want each of the circles of the brush stroke to be just barely touching.  A value of 100 does this.  Go ahead and experiment with it, and with the brush size - see what you like.

If you've been following along with the making of a tank top from the start, you've probably guessed that I used Filter->Bump Map to give the 3D appearance to the trim and the straps.  And... you would be right!!   The difficult part is to create the mask for the bump map.  Here's what I did.

• Create a new transparent layer
• Change the color to white, and leave the paint tool selected with the same paint brush and spacing as before.
• On the Path Tab of the Layers Window, use the Paint Along The Path tool as you did before, but this time in the new transparent window you just made.
• On the Tools Window, switch to the Fuzzy Select Tool (it looks like a tiny magic wand)
• In the Image Window click the Fuzzy Select Tool on the white trim you have just made.  It will select all of them in as a group.
• Use Select->Shrink and reduce the size of the selections by several pixels.  I don't recall how many I used exactly... but you want a small blob in the middle of each circle.  The blob need not be a circle.
• Use Select->Invert. To invert the selection and press the delete key.  You will have deleted the outside of each of the circles leaving a little bit on the inside.
• Get rid of the selection by pressing Ctl-A
• Use Filter-Blur->Gaussian and spread out that small blob.... and you'll have your Bump Mask.

One more thing.  Remember we learned that the back of the fabric is actually smaller than the front of the fabric.  So when you make the straps and trim for the back, you'll need to make the circles slightly smaller.  The way to do this is pretty easy.  Once you have the Paint Tool selected on the Tools Window, look at the lower half of that window.... See the 'Scale' slider?  Make the scale 0.90, and you will have the right size circles for the trim and straps on the back of your top.

Let me know if you have any questions!

robin

PS: Here's a picture of the final result.  I've added the cmff layer behind it so you can get an idea of the size of the circles for the trim and the amount I moved things to make the top of the top more realistic.

Making a seamless tile - part two

Hi again!

We're going to make another pink flower tile this time, but much fancier. First, I'm sure you've noticed that flower petals are not really just one color, but instead they are delicate shades, merging from one color to another.  And flowers have that thing in the center, what is it called?  (Pistil and Stamen I think). Whatever it is, its often yellow and we'll make a yellow one for this flower.

We're going to go through the same steps as before with some additions.  I'm not going to repeat the detail from the previous post though.  Instead I'll try to focus on the new GIMP tricks in this post - hopefully you'll be able to put it together yourself.

Sooo.... First let's open GIMP, create a 64x64 canvas to work on like we did in the last post.  Here's what mine looks like... just 2 layers:

That's simple enough.

Now let's make the petals of the flower more interesting.   We're going to shrink the selection by 3 pixels and add a layer for the new size and fill it with a lighter shade of the pink we have above.  Then!  We'll do it again!  Shrink the selection by another 3 pixels, create a new transparent layer and put paint the lighter shade in that layer.  To shrink the selection use Select->Shrink and tell it you want it 3 pixels smaller.

Now if you look at that closely it looks a little ragged around the edges.  So we need to smooth it out.  We'll use something called Gaussian Blur on each layer to do that.  You'll find it in Filters->Blur->Gaussian.  I chose to blur by 2 pixels on the lower (biggest petals) layer and 3 pixels on the other two.  Choose what looks good to you though, your flower is likely different.  Here's my result:

That's much nicer!

Now we need the yellow center, the pistil/stamen.  This is pretty easy - just do what you did before to create the flower petals, but create a round area in the middle that you will paint yellow.  It doesn't have to be centered perfectly.  Heck it doesn't even have to be perfectly round.  Look at mine!

I went ahead did the blurring thing we did above.  Nice!  Isn't it?!

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention.  I also tinted the background layer pink and made it a little less bright.  You may want to do the same.

What we've been done so far is to create a fancier version of the rather cartoon-ish flower we had before.  Now I want to add some 'pop' to this.  Some 3-D effects.  We'll use something called Bump Map in a few minutes, but first we need to do a little preparation.   I'll detail the steps here so its easier to follow.

1. Click the eye icon on the background layer so that it is no longer visible.
2. Now make a copy of the large petal layer and click the eye icon to make it invisible.
3. And make a coy of the large pistil/stamen layer and click the eye icon to make it in visible
4. At this point you have the original layers visible, minus the background.....Now go to Image->Merge Visible Layers and all of the petal and pistil/stamen layers will be merged into one layer.  (If this makes you nervous, save the file before you do it).

Ok, now it should look something like this:

Note especially the Layers window.... four layers, one visible, our merged layer.  Now we're going to use the large petals layer and large pistil/stamen layer to create masks for the Bump Map.

First the petals layer.  Click on where the eye should be, making it visible.  Then select that layer, making it active and....

1. Make the layer black and white with: Colors->Desaturate
2. Then blur the layer rather severely.  Use Filters->Blur->Gaussian ..... I chose 8 pixels and that's probably a good number for you too.
3. Finally you will want to brighten this - its very grey at the moment.  So choose Colors->Brightness-Contrast and adjust the two controls you see to the right.  I think for mine I moved both up to somewhere between 50 and 60.
4. Click on the eye and make the layer invisible again.

Next make the pistil/stamen layer visible and active and repeat the above.

Now select the layer that is our merged flower.  Just check - it should be the only visible layer.  If it is not correct this now.  The Bump Map we're going to do next will actually make changes to the layer, so let's make a copy of this layer and work on the copy.   The new layer will now be selected and visible - that's good.

Now for the Bump Map.  We're going to do it twice, once for the petals and once for the pistil/stamen.

1. Choose Filters->Map->Bump Map.  You will get a dialog window with many choices... The only one we need to look at is the first one that chooses the Bump Map to use.
2. Click the pull down and select the large flower petal layer we had been working on above.
3. Notice in the preview window that some subtle shading has appeared - this is exactly what we want.  Press OK.

Take a moment and notice what the Bump Map filter did.  It created a rather nice 3D look on your petals.  So now repeat the process again, except in step 2 choose the pistil/stamen layer we had been working on before.

In the end, you should see something like this:

Pretty nifty!  Isn't it?

Now, you could at this point do the same thing we did before....  Duplicate this layer, divide the duplicate in half vertically and horizontally....  Combine the two with the background layer and create your test tiling.  And there is really nothing wrong with that but we'll do something just a little fancier.  This creates a result where the upper of the split image and the lower part of the split image, both overlay the original.  Since we've added a kind of 3D-ness here though, I'd like to carry that into the end result and make it so there is a kind of interleaving.

To do this we'll create the duplicate, divided layer as before, but then we'l add a layer mask.  (New GIMP trick!) and use it to hide one half of the duplicate divided layer.  Then we'll duplicate that and reverse the layer mask and with some simple positioning of the layers we'll achieve our result.

Ok let's list the steps:

1. Duplicate the layer and split is as we did in the previous post.
2. Now right click that new layer and choose Add Layer Mask.  Make it a white layer when you are asked to choose.
3. Now right click again and check 'Show Layer Mask"  (note that Edit Layer Mask is already checked). The image will become white, showing the layer mask you just created.
4. In the tools menu choose the Rectangle Select Tool.   Drag your mouse across the lower half of the layer mask.  Your first will not be perfectly accurate, but you will want this to be positioned at 32 on the vertical axis.  (recall that the image is 64x64).  You can use the 'position' on the lower part of the Tools window to see where your selection is.  Move it up or down as needed to make the second position value 32.
5. Make the foreground color in the Tools window black.  
6. Select the pain Bucket Fill Tool (the paint can) and click within the selection on the Image window.
7. Right click the Layer and uncheck 'Show Layer".

Now you will see that the portion of the layer with the white layer mask is visible.  And the part with the black layer mask is not.  Here's a snapshot of the result:

Now one more thing to do:

1. Duplicate the layer we've been working on.
2. The duplicated layer will be selected.... Choose Color->Invert.

You should see the layer mask reverse on the selected layer.  Black becomes white, white becomes black.    Now move the layer with the white/black layer mask above our original merged layer and look closely at the result.

Look at the upper corners first and how they interact with the middle.  The corner flowers are overlaying the middle flowers.  Now look at the middle flower and how it interacts with the lower corners.  The middle flower is overlaying the lower corner flowers.   Cool!!

Before we do anything else, let's save the file.  There's a lot of work here and it would be awful to loose it though a simple mistake.

Now, we need to make one layer for our tiling test.  So Image->Merge Visible Layers.  (notice that all three flower layers and the background layer are visible).  Then Filters->Map->Tile  and choose 640x640.   Here's the result:

Click on the image to get a close look at the tile testing window.  It looks pretty good to me!

robin

Your new Skin - Step 1 - GIMP

Hi again!  Let's get started in making a new skin.

We'll just do just a few things as we get started:

• download the skin from Eloh Eliot's site on the internet and set up the folders we'll use for making our skin.
• download and install GIMP.
• Start Gimp with Eloh's provided skin and get familiar with GIMP.

Downloading and installing.....

You'll find Eloh's skins here: http://sites.google.com/site/another/resources
So go there and you'll see the skin called "Starlight".  You'll find three files listed under GIMP for that skin, one for the face, one for upper body and one for lower body.  Click on each in turn and wait for your browser to complete the download of all three files.

While they are downloading, create a folder in your Documents folder (My Documents for those with XP) and call it Graphics.  Then open that folder and create one inside it called Skins.  Open Skins and create one called Starlight.  Open Starlight and create two folders, one called Reference and one called Minimum.

Once the download of all three files is complete, copy them to ...\Graphics\Skins\Starlight\Reference and ...\Graphics\Skins\Starlight\Minimum.

Now go to http://gimp.org and click the 'download' button. As I look there today (Feb 25, 2011) I see a link that is named "Download GIMP 2.6.11".  Click that and wait for the download to complete.  Once its complete, double click on the downloaded file and follow the instructions to install it on your system.

An aside..... The good people working on GIMP have plans to create a new version of GIMP sometime soon.  It will be called GIMP 3.something.  This description will be based on GIMP 2.something.  We'll deal with the new GIMP when it arrives.

Now, go to the folder ...\Graphics\Skins\Starlight\Minimum and find the file named "starlight_upper.xcf" and double click it.  GIMP will start and load the file.

Getting familiar with GIMP.....

If this is your first time with GIMP you're probably a bit puzzled.  For your double-clicking of "starlight_upper.xcf" you got 3 windows!   One window will be squarish and the other two sort of long and thin.  Let me reassure you first - there is just ONE program running, one GIMP.  When GIMP is running with one file displayed, you just get 3 windows, that's its nature.  So let's look in detail at the windows....  Look at the title bars and you'll see:

1. Toolbox
2. Layers, Undo, Paths, Channels - Brushes, Patterns, Gradients
3. starlight_upper.xcf  (I'd suggest you grab the title bar of this window and drag it to the right so its not covering the other two)

Sooooo... if you have 3 windows and one program, how do you exit the program?  Easy... click the red X in the upper right corner of that 3rd windows, the one titled 'starlight_upper.xcf".  What you will see is that the file that it contains disappears and the window becomes blank.  Then click the red X on that window again and the program exits.  If you tried this out, start up GIMP again by double clicking "starlight_upper.xcf" again and drag the window containing the image to the right again to expose the other windows if you need to.

Let's pause here for a moment........  I am thinking back on when I first download and started GIMP and I have to admit that I found it confusing.  Very confusing, until I had one of those "AHA!" moments. That moment was when I understood the underlying organizing principle of GIMP - Layers.

Look at the GIMP window labeled "Layers, Undo, Paths....".  You will notice that there is a section in that window with several lines of small boxes in a column that look like they might contain something.  On each line, to the left of each box is an 'eye'.  Here's the key to GIMP:  Each of these lines is a layer.  The eye indicates that that layer is being displayed.  The place it is being displayed is in the window named "starlight_upper.xcf".

Now click your mouse on just one of those layers.  In the upper part of that "Layers... etc" window you will see "Mode".  This is HOW each of those layers is being displayed.  To the right of Mode you will see a downward pointing triangle, a 'pull down'.  Click it and you will see all of the possible Modes, the possible ways a given layer can be combined with the other layers. There are complex equations that describe exactly what is happening with each mode, pixel by pixel, but we can pass over that.  It is enough to understand that all of the layers (about 125 in starlight_upper.xcf plus or minus a few) are combined together to create what you see in the image window labeled "starlight_upper.xcf".

That's the key.  Simple isn't it?  Scroll the layers up and down.  Click the eye on and off on a layer here and there and watch the effect in the "starlight_upper.xcf" window.   Select a layer by clicking on it and change the mode in which is it combined with the other layers and see the effect.  Don't save the file though!  We will want the file to have its original values when we create our own skin in the following posts.

robin