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.

Your new Skin - Step 5 - Shape Modifications

I expect that your first thought was that shapes and skins should be pretty independent of each other.  Ans, in truth, that is true for most things.  But there seem to be some where the two are intimately interrelated, one is the breasts and a second is the mouth/lips.

Look closely at the breasts in the skin we've been working on.  There is a shadow under each breast a sharp line indicating where the breast and chest meet. That is entirely appropriate for a woman with larger breasts, but not so much for a woman with smaller breasts.  Fortunately Eloh has thought about that and in the 'starlight_upper' file has provided a second breast choice that is more appropriate for small breasted people.

The second area is not quite so obvious in the picture here but in truth is much more variable with shape than the breasts... that is the lips and mouth.

In this post we'll make changes to the mouth (lips), legs, shoulders, face length, and hands.  In the end, I think in the end, you will like the results.

But First.... Camera Controls!!


But first, we need to be able to look at our selves in detail.....  front and back, up and down, in and out - we need to be able to view our body (avatar) from every angle and do so quickly with little muss or fuss.

Fortunately, Second Life provides a way to do this.  It will seem to be a little weird at first, but as you use it you'll find it more and more natural and easy to use.    What we will do is use the mouse together with the alt and control keys.  Try this:

1. hold the alt key down, position the mouse over your avatar's midsection and click the left button on the mouse and HOLD IT DOWN and you move the mouse.  Move the mouse horizontally (left and right) and vertically (up and down) and watch the effects.
2. hold down the ALT AND the CTRL keys down together, position the mouse over your avatar's midsection and click the left button and HOLD IT DOWN as before.  Move the mouse horizontally and vertically again and watch the effects.

In the first case (1) you saw the view of your view of your avatar circle your body as you moved left and right, and zoomed in and out as you moved up and down.  In the second case (2) you saw the same as in the first for the left and right movment, and you rotate around vertically when you move in and out.

With this you can position your camera view to look at your avatar in any way quite easily.  Use the mouse and the control and alt keys to look at your lips, face, hands, shoulders and legs.... zoom in and out and look from every angle.

Editing your avatar:


Right click on your avatar and choose "Edit Appearance".     We'll step through each of the items we've noted in the last couple posts and 'correct' them.  Remember that this is really subjective - your opinion is as valid as mine and if you dont like the result, it is fine - change it to something you do like.

• Face is too long:  Within your Appearance editor, choose Shape->Head->Head Stretch and set the value to 20.
• Legs are too long:  Within your Appearance editor, choose Shape->Legs->Leg Length and set the value to 36.
• Hands are too big:  Within your Appearance editor, choose Shape->Torso->Hand Size and set the value to 30.
• Shoulders are too broad:  Within your Appearance editor, choose Shape->Torso->Shoulder and set to 20.
• Lips are too narrow:  Within your Appearance editor, choose Shape->Mouth->Lip Fullness and set to 50.

Now let's take a look at our results......  Hey, that's a pretty cute avatar!   (Click on the picture for a closer look.... and if your cursor shows a plus sign in it as you hover over the image, click again for an even larger view.)

Now I have to confess, that I tend to twiddle and tweak my avatar endlessly and if left to my own devices I would do the same with this one.  But really, this is now a quite nice avatar with a quite nice skin.  One that you would be happy to wear anywhere in Second Life.

What's next?  Next is up to you.  Be sure you save this shape and skin somewhere and make a copy.  Play with the shape - editing things and see what happens.  Play with the skin - make the skin lighter or darker.  Try the various options that Eloh has provided for breasts, eyes and nose.   Add lip color, eye makeup and nail color.  Change the brightness of the highlighting and the darkness of the shadows.

Create YOUR UNIQUE LOOK within Second Life!

It will be fun - I promise!

See ya!
Robin

Your new Skin - Step 4 - Skin Modifications

So far we've just been taking the shortest path to producing a skin with Eloh Eliot's Open Source Skins.  Next we will explore some of the options Eloh has provided for us, and then dip our toe into making modifications of the skins she has provided.

But first!!  ....

We need to talk about an important, though quite technical, issue.  Its that of file size.  To paraphrase the famous quote from Albert Einstein, we need to make everything as small as possible, but no smaller.  This translates into doing two things BEFORE we upload our files into Second Life:

1. Scale the files from 1024x1024 to 512x512.  (smaller would be too small)
2. Make the file type JPEG (jpg) on the files that have no transparency (upper and lower) and PNG (png) on the file that does have transparency (face).   In this application I've seen the jpg files be 1/10th of the size of the same thing saved as a PNG file.  So reserve the PNG file for cases where you need it, for example the face file.

I hadn't mentioned this technical issue before to keep things simple.  But as we near the point where we will be moving from temporary files to permanent files, its important to keep the size of the files we're creating in mind.  Scaling the files is very easy in GIMP, here's what you do:

1. First save the file in its 1024x1024 size.  you dont want to loose it.  Do this with File->Save.
2. Use  Image->Scale Image.  Simply type 512 on the Width and press enter, the Height will change for you.  Then click OK and watch GIMP make the file smaller.  
3. Use File->Save As.  I change the file name to add '...512.jpg'  or '...512.png' to the end as a reminder that i have made the file smaller.  So an example name might be "starlight_face yymmdd 512.png" and "starlight_upper yymmdd 512.jpg".

Modifications:


Now on to the fun stuff - modifications.  This is where you start to personalize the files to something that YOU like.

As you were looking through the layers you might have noticed that there were layers that were not visible and they had names like breastB or lipsA.    We will make use of just one of these, changing from lipsB to lipsA and look at the difference it makes to the shape.  And we will be just a little more daring - and modify the basic skin color so something a shade or two darker.

Modifying the lips:


Ok, here's what to do:  Open up the "starlight_face 110228.xcf" file we created before and look through the layers and find those that start with lipsA.   Most will have a little eye next to them indicating that they're active.  Go through and click the eyes turning them all off.   Now if you look at the layers below, you will find a bunch named lipA.    You'll need to turn MOST of these layers on, but NOT ALL.  For now, turn on all EXCEPT:

• lipsA.base
• lipsA.base.lighter
• lipsA.color.*  (leave all of the lipsA.color layers off for now)

That should make 18 lipsB layers turned off and 18 lipsA layers turned on.

Now look at the image shown by GIMP.... to my eyes the shading at the corners of the mouth and below the lower lip look a bit dark.  So we will adjust them.  For the corners, find lipsA.corners.shade and drop the opacity from 100 to about 20.  For the shade under the lower lip, find lipsA.lower.shade 2 and turn it off (click the eye to turn it off).

Modify the skin color:


Now its time to be brave and modify the skin color.  :)

In the layers window, scroll all the way to the bottom.  You'll see a layer named 'base.color'.   Select it by clicking it (the line will have a blue back-light) and find the 'duplicate layer' button (circled in the image on the right) and click it. You will get a new layer above the selected 'base.color' named 'base.color copy'.  (Click on the picture for a closer look.... and if your cursor shows a plus sign in it as you hover over the image, click again for an even larger view)

Now select that layer and choose the "color picker tool" from the GIMP Toolbox Window.  (For reasons that are not clear to me, it looks something like an eyedropper.)  Now go to the image window and click on it with that 'color picker' and you should see the "foreground color" in the Toolbox window change to be that of the 'base.color copy' in the image window.

Next we will click on that "foreground color" in the Toolbox window and you will see a window open to help you change the color.  It should look rather like the image below this paragraph.

We will pause here for a minute and look at the Change Color window.  Note the series of six rows to the right labeled, H, S, V, R, G, B.    These are the color change controls and they are two groups, HSV and RGB.  HSV stands for Hue, Saturation and Value and RGB stands for Red, Green and Blue.  Both are complete - you can use just one set or the other.  For some purposes HSV is easier to use and for other purposes RGB is easier to use.  I'll let you google the two for more detailed information, for our purposes here we'll be using HSV.  In fact, for the present, we'll just make some small changes to the Saturation and Value leaving the Hue alone.

If you look at the large color window on the left of the image above, you'll see what looks like a cross-hair inside it.  Now draw a diagonal through that cross-hair sloping down from left to right.  We will want to work along that line for the skins.  Its probably not a straight line though. I would expect it to be curved away from the extremes at both corners so something more like the red line drawn in the picture to the right would be the right range of reasonable colors for skins.

We want to make the color of the skin a little darker.  That means we will want to move that cross-hair up and to the left a little.  If you play with the S and V values with the controls (circled on the right in the image) you'll find that changing the S value will move the horizontal part of the cross-hair up and down, and changing the V value will move the vertical part of the cross-hair left and right.    So.... moving the cross-hair intersection up and to the right will mean INCREASING the S value and DECREASING the V value.   For now... I would suggest increasing S by 3 and decreasing V by 4 so the final values will be 54 and 60.

Now we want to apply this new color to our copy of the base color layer we created earlier.  So - make sure that the "base.color copy" layer is selected in the layers window, and choose the "Bucket Fill Tool" in the Tools window (it looks like a tipping paint can) then make use of that tool on that layer by clicking on the image window.  You should see GIMP make the change and notice that it the color is slightly darker than it was before.

Saving the File:


It's time to save our work. First we'll save the file as is, but change the name so we can backtrack if necessary.  Then we'll scale the file to something smaller and save as a png file (we have some transparency in this file so we need to use png).

• File->Save As  ... naming the file "starlight_face 110315.xcf"  (the general format of the date is yymmdd in my scheme of things)
• Image->Scale .... choosing 512x512 and clicking ok.
• File->Save As ... naming the file "starlight_face 110315 512.png"  (adding 512 to the name is a reminder that the image was scaled down, if you don't need it's ok to leave it off - but I DO need it).

Changing the skin color on upper and lower:


Making the same changes to the upper and lower textures for our new skin is pretty straighforward now that we have the color defined.  I'll just list the steps for the upper, I'm sure you can work it out from that:

• Load "starlight_upper 110224.xcf" into GIMP.
• Go to the bottom of the layers window, select base.color and click the 'duplicate' button.
• Select the new layer named 'base.color copy' in the layer window
• Select the bucket fill tool in the Toolbox window
• Click in the image window and watch the new color be applied.  (we're using the same color as we did earlier for the face texture)
• Save the file, changing the name as described above
• Scale the image as described above
• Save the file as a jpg image as described above.

Then repeat the above for the starlight lower file.  (all of this takes longer to read than it does to do )

Upload and try it out:


Now go back to the previous blog post and repeat the process to upload the textures and apply them to a new skin.  Remember to copy your current skin and name is with today's date so you can discard it and back up to the previous without running into problems.

After uploading the new textures and creating the new skin we should pause and look the results.   As I mentioned in the previous post, we are now wading cautiously into the subjective so it's totally ok if your opinion of the changes made are different than mine.

Looking at the lips now, I like them better.  They're still 'not quite right' but in my opinion, they're much more right than they were before.  In the previous post I noted five things that were in the 'not quite right' category and I'll repeat them here:

• hand size
• leg length
• face length
• shoulder width
• lips

We'll make changes to each.  But that will be the next post.  *grins*

See ya!
Robin

Your new Skin - Step 3 - Second Life

Hi, I'm back!   And we're ready for the last step - turning the textures we created in the last step into a skin.

Before we do that though we need to sign onto Second Life and do some housekeeping in our Inventory.  I'm going to assume you know how to sign on and get access to your inventory.  You may also have some nice skins and shapes that you are pleased with, so we want to be careful to not muck with them.  To do this, and provide a path for people new to Second Life - we'll copy a skin and shape (and hair and a few other things) from the library and modify those items.

Inventory - New Folder for Girl Next Door

I would suggest 'girl next door' so open your inventory window and look in Library->Clothing->Girl Next Door by Renegade Clothing & Adam n Eve.  Now click on the first line, then scroll down and click on the last while holding down the shift key and copy all those selected by pressing ctrl-c.   Next go back up into Inventory->Clothing and right click on Clothing, choosing New Folder. Select it and paste the items you have copied into your new folder.

Then open that New Folder and make a copy of the shape named 'Girl Next Door' and the skin named 'Girl Next Door Medium Skin", naming the first 'Girl Next Door - edited' and 'eloh eliot's starlight' respectively.

OK, the housekeeping is done.  What we have now is a placeholder for our new skin, 'eloh eliot's starlight' and a placeholder for any shape modifications we want to make after making the new skin 'Girl Next Door - edited'.  Excellent!

The next step is to make our skin.... but .... well.... you know, there will be nudity involved.  So you will need to find a safe place where you can go and people will not be upset seeing a naked avatar.  If you know of such a place, great!  Skip the rest of this paragraph and go there.  If not, I can't give you such a place... but I may be able to guide you a bit in finding one.  First - don't go to a PG place.  I shouldn't need to get into why - just don't.  An Adult place is probably best - but Mature may be OK too.  An Adult sandbox might be good - or some place that is not used very much.  As you look for a place - read the rules and respect them.  If they say no nudity, move on to another.  Sooner or later you will find a place where nudity is acceptable.

Next we need to upload the textures you created using GIMP in the last step.  At the top of the screen, choose File->Upload->Image, then navigate to the folder on your computer where you stored the textures we created in the last step.... select one and press "Open".  Then on the window that you get in the Phoenix viewer, check "Temporary (Free)" and click "Upload".  Do this once for each of the three files, and get them all uploading into your inventory.   You can watch them appear by opening your Inventory->Textures.  You will see each appear in turn, and you will note that the name is in italics - and that it is a temporary file.

Girl Next Door - standard shape - standard medium skin.

Ok ... now you should be in a place where nudity is allowed, so remove all your clothes and wear the "Girl Next Door - edited" and "eloh eliot's starlight".  These are the place holders and now we'll make them the real thing.  The image to the right of this paragraph is what you should see.

She is a nice looking girl.  Sadly though she has a rather nasty problem.  No nipples.  *grimaces* I don't really understand the whole no nipple thing, but we won't dwell on it.  The next step is to create our new skin.

Here's how to make your new skin.

Edit Appearances - Skin

Right click on your avatar and choose "Edit Appearances".   You will find yourself with a window that gives you lots of ways to change things about your avatar, including the skin you are wearing.  If you look in the upper left you will see "Skin" listed.  Once you click 'skin' you will see a panel with three windows open up: note the three red arrows pointing at the small windows in the picture to the right of this paragraph.

The topmost window is the one that will receive the "Face" texture.  The middle window is the one that will receive the "Upper" texture.  And the bottom window is the one that will receive the "Lower" texture.

Now open your inventory window and find the Inventory->Textures folder.  Click on the "starlight_face" texture and drag it to the topmost window within the Edit Appearances window.  Then click on the "starlight_upper" texture and drag it to the middle window within the Edit Appearances window.  Finally click on the "starlight_lower" texture and drag it to the lower window within the Edit Appearances window..... and click Save, then click Close.

Girl Next Door - Standard Shape - Eloh Eliot's Starlight Skin

It make take a couple minutes for your new skin to appear and become clear - but once it does it should look like the image at the right.

Yay!  Nipples!  She looks pretty good doesn't she?  *does a happy dance!*

Now... let us pause for a few moments and bask in your achievement.  You have made a skin!  Of course, since we used temporary textures uploaded for free, it won't last.  In a few days you'll find that one or all of the textures on this skin have been 'grey'd out' - meaning you've lost the temporary texture.  To make it permanent you'll repeat the steps we took above and NOT check Temporary (Free) when you upload.   (And you need to have some money in your account.)  Then when you drag this permanent texture to the skin, it will not be lost after a few days.

Now look your skin over.  Use your camera controls and move your view around.  Zoom in and zoom out.  It looks pretty good, right?  

If you're like me though, you're seeing some things that you would like to change.  This usually registers as a 'hmmm that's not quite right' feeling.  Of course, it is purely subjective.  What is 'not quite right' to me may be just fine to you - and that is a GOOD THING.  It would be a horribly boring world if we all looked alike and all thought alike.   That said, I'll give you my list of things that are 'not quite right':

• Hands... perhaps a bit large
• Shoulders .... perhaps a bit broad
• Face ... perhaps a bit long
• Lips .... upper lip is not quite right
• Legs ... perhaps a bit long

Most of the things above have to do with the shape, but the Lips certainly have something to do with the Skin.   We'll edit the shape later, but first let's continue our work on the skin.  As it happens, Eloh has given us several options in the files she has provided.  And one of those options is for a different 'style' of lips.  We'll play with that in the next post and see what happens.

See ya later!
robin

Your new Skin - Step 2 - Starlight

Ok - we're finished with the preliminaries.  Let's make the skin!  Here are the steps:

1. Find and open the GIMP file for the Upper portion of the skin.  Then edit it to turn on the various 'bits' that Eloh left off when she saved it.  Then save the skin as a jpg file (aka texture).
2. Likewise, find and open the GIMP file for the Lower portion of the skin.  There are 'bits' missing here too so we'll have to turn them on.  Then save teh skin as a jpg file (aka texture).
3. Finally, find and open the GIMP file for the Face portion of the skin (actually the head).  No bits are missing here but we will want to turn off a couple things.

A skin has 3 textures, an Upper, Lower and Face.  The Upper covers the portion from the neck to the waist.  The Lower covers the portion from the neck down.  And the Face covers the portion from the neck up, the entire head.  The places these three connect are crucial areas, the goal is to see no line or boundary connecting the upper to the face or the upper to the lower.  The upper to face is usually not a problem, but the upper to lower can be if we are not careful.  Being careful here will mean changing the smallest number of layers we can get away with.

The Upper Texture:

Now double click on "starlight_upper.xcf" and look closely at the GIMP image window.  (the squarish one)  You will see the front and back of what appears to be a girl with NO NIPPLES.  :-(

Fortunately the nipples are layers in the file, we just have to turn them on.  So scroll through the layers (the layers window) and find the layer named "nipple.creases".  That marks the top of a list of layers that have to do with the nipples. The lower limit is marked by the layer named "nipple.dark.color".  We will go through them layer by layer, topmost to the bottom and turn them on - or leave them off.  In particular, we'll have the opportunity to choose light, medium or dark nipples - and will choose medium.  You can choose light or dark if you wish - or choose light and dark and medium in any combination.  But I would recommend just medium to start.

The way to turn a layer 'on' is to click the area to the left of the layer near the edge.  An 'on' layer will have an eye looking at you - meaning it is visible.  An 'off' layer will have no eye - it will be blank.

• nipple.creases .... on 
• nipple.texture.center.highlight .... on
• nipple.texture.center....on
• nipple.middle .... on
• nipple.outer  .... on
• nipple.light.colorcenter .... on
• nipple.light.color .... off
• nipple.med.color .... on
• nipple.dark.color .... off

Now you should see a nice pair of nipples on the breasts.

The next step is to save your work.  I would suggest a naming convention and change the name of the file.  Today at this writing, is February 28, 2011, so I would change the name to "starlight_upper 110228.xcf".  If you save the file again, you might choose to name it "starlight_upper 110228-2.xcf" or you might not, its up to you to decide how major your change was and how annoyed you would be if you had to back up to the previous level.  So.... do a File->Save As and change the name to "starlight_upper yymmdd.xcf" and press enter.  ( yy stands for the last two digits of the current year, mm is the number of the current month 01->12, and dd is today's date ).

Now you've saved your work but you do not yet have an uploadable texture file.  To make one choose File->Save As again and name the file "starlight_upper yymmdd.jpg" and press enter.  GIMP will create a JPEG file, a compressed image file that you can upload into Second Life.

The Lower Texture:


Double click "starlight_lower.xcf" and you will see an image of the lower portion of a body, front and back with detail for the feet oddly located to the right.  As you study the image you will notice that there are "bits" missing in this file too and its totally your choice whether you want to add them or not.  In this case it's the vulva, the female external genitalia.  The vulva layers that are not turned on are near the top of the GIMP layers window so scroll up in that window and you will find them.  Starting at the top the first one is labeled "hood.highlight" and as you scroll down you will find the last is labeled "hood.shade".  As you did for the layers in Upper, click each of these layers and all in between, "on" - make the eye for each layer visible.

Now you should see a pretty vulva on the image named "starlight_lower.xcf" and its time to save the file.  Choose File->Save As and change the name as we did above to "starlight_lower yymmdd.xcf" and press enter.  Once GIMP is finished saving, Choose File->Save As again and now change the name to "starlight_lower yymmdd.jpg" to create the uploadable texture for Second Life.

The Face Texture:


Double click "starlight_face.xcf" and you will see the GIMP file containing the layers that create the face texture open up.  It really looks pretty good as-is with no obvious 'bits' missing.  But if you look closely at the lips and the eyes, you may think as I do, that there are a couple things that could use correction.

I will pause here and give you a little 'tip' about GIMP that will make things easier.  A small lesson in Zooming in and out with GIMP.  If you have a mouse with a wheel, zooming in and out is simplicity itself.  Position your mouse pointer over the point in the image file that you want to be the middle of your zoomed image, press the control key (labeled Ctrl) and roll the wheel of your mouse away from you to Zoom In.  Likewise, position your mouse, press Ctrl and roll the wheel of your mouse toward you to Zoom out.  Try it on the lips, zoom in and out and try it.

If your mouse does not have a wheel, or you have no mouse and are on a laptop, do not despair, there is something we can do to make zooming nearly as easy.  What we will do is define a pair of shortcut keys to zoom in and out, I use the "-" (minus) key for zooming out and the "=" key for zooming in.  On the image window open Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts and choose View.  If you scroll down in the list you will fine "Zoom In" is already assigned to "=".... good, let it be as it is.  Then look a little further down and find "Zoom Out" and note that it is disabled.  Click on that line with your mouse to select it, then press the '-' key to tell GIMP you want to use that key to Zoom Out.  Click the close button in the lower right and you can now use the = and - keys in an image to zoom in and out.  Try it on the lips, zoom in for a close look.

We will now walk bravely into the land of opinion.  There is no right or wrong - there is only opinion here.  I may like one thing and you may like another.  That's ok...... As I look closely at the zoomed-in lips, the area under the lower lip looks dark to me.  There is a layer that control that darkness: lipsB.lower.edge.shade.  You can click on the eye and turn it off - but to my eyes that looks too light.   So turn it back on and then click your mouse on the layer to select it and notice above the list of layers something called "Opacity".

Make sure you have the layer you want selected (it will be highlighted) and then move the slider from 100% to about 50%.  Or move it to where you like the balance between light and dark.  For me, 50% seems about right.

A little below the "lipsB.lower.edge.shade" layer you'll find lipsB.color.ganguro.  I had to look it up to see what 'ganguro' meant and you may too, its a color of lipstick used in Japan a while ago.  If you like it - keep it.  I turned it off by clicking the 'eye'.

You may want to look at two other layers too - a little further down:  "lipsB.base" and "lipsB.base.darker".  They are both currently on and I like them that way.  But you may want just one on or neither.  Click them on and off and see which appeals to you.

Ok, we've made our choices and we're now ready to save the file.  Choose File->Save As and rename the file "starlight_face yymmdd.xcf".  Once its saved, choose File->Save As again and now rename the file to "starlight_face yymmdd.png" and press enter.  Notice that's "png" not "jpg" as we used on the Upper and Lower.  That's because this file has a couple of transparent areas that we need to reproduce in the texture we'll be uploading.  The JPEG files (jpg) are good for uploading textures that have no transparent areas (technically called an alpha layer) and PNG file (png) are good for uploading textures that have transparent, or semi-transparent area.

That's enough for now I think.  Go make a cup of tea and relax or take a nap.  In the next post we'll upload the textures we've created and turn them into a Second Life Skin.  Woo hoo!

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

Tools, Credits and Caveats

First the Caveat.... I'm not an expert at building, making clothing, making skins, or trees, or flowers, or eyes, or hair, etc etc. So don't expect me to have the final word on things. In any case, there is usually more than one way of doing things and each will have it's own advantages and disadvantages. I do enjoy Making Stuff though, and I'll share what I have learned so far. As I learn more, I'll share that too.

Now the tools:

• Computer: I use a laptop (Lenovo SL500) running Windows 7 Home Premium, with 2 gigs and a NVidia GeForce G 105m graphics controller. Not really all that hot - but it gets the job done.
• 2d Graphics Software: GIMP.... which stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. ( Get it at gimp.org )
• Eloh Eliot's Open Source Skins ( get them at sites.google.com/site/another/resources )
• Second Life Viewer: I use Phoenix. ( get it at phoenixviewer.com )
• A Second Life ID/Account. (secondlife.com)

Everything in the list above is free, except the computer of course. So no excuses, go get them!

I should also say that these are the tools I use to make a skin. There are other tools that I use for other purposes and they will probably turn up later as my attention turns to other things.

Now for the Credits:

GIMP is an amazing and powerful program. It competes with the likes of Adobe's Photoshop and Illustrator. And did I mention that it was free? It's rather quirky but once you get used to it you'll find it pretty easy to use.

Phoenix is another labor of love and is also free. It's derived from the source code of the Second Life viewer known as Snowglobe and adds some very useful features to it. The feature that we will be particularly interested in is the ability to upload 'temporary' files without a charge from Second Life. (Phoenix will be replaced at some point by Firestorm, which will be based on a newer set of source code from the newer Second Life viewer known as version 2. )

Second Life comes from Linden Labs and together with the viewer creates a 3d world that you can move though in a fairly natural way. Its an amazing achievement and has to be seen to be understood.

Second Life allows for free IDs so you can login and experiment with it at no cost. Be aware though, at some point you will probably want to put some money in your account that you can draw on for in-world things like uploading files from your computer into Second Life. While Phoenix allows you to upload files temporarily, they will in time disappear. To make a file permanent you will need to upload a permanent file and that will cost you some spare change. If you put 10 or 20 dollars in your account, that will more than cover your needs for creating a skin.

Finally, I must credit Eloh Eliot for her creation of the skins and her generosity in making those skins open source and freely available on the web. I wish I knew how she made them, but I don't. Eloh provides the skins in several formats, depending on the skin in question. All are provided in Postscript format and the newer ones in GIMP and Adobe Illustrator formats as well. GIMP will read Adobe Postscript format so with it you can work with all of the skins Eloh provides. (Note that Eloh Eliot is an Avatar name in Second Life - not the person in questions' real name. And no, I don't know her real name, that is often the way of things in Second Life.)

In the following posts - I will .....

1. Download and install the files that define one of Eloh's skins onto my laptop.
2. Modify that skin to my liking using GIMP.
3. Create the 'texture' files that will define the skin to Second Life using GIMP.
4. Sign on to Second Life using the Phoenix Viewer.
5. Upload those files (henceforth known as 'textures') from my laptop to Second Life temporarily using the Phoenix Viewer.
6. Use the Edit Appearance of Second Life to 'wear' those textures as skins.
7. Look over the results - decide what you like and don't like, loop back to step 2 and iterate until you are happy with what you see.
8. Upload the files paying 10 linden dollars (some pocket change) for each, repeat step 6 wtih the permanent textures.

And BAM! You've made a skin!

I suppose I should say something about the computers and what is needed to run Second Life. Second Life is a 3d virtual world, and can stress a computer much more than the typical word processing or web browsing applications so some attention to the computer's 'power' is necessary.

Many people will cringe when they see I'm using a laptop. And yes, I'm also connected to SL (Second Life) over a wireless connection. As of the today, Feb 23 2011, their cringing is justified for most of the laptops in common use. The first problem with laptops is the Integrated Graphics that Intel or AMD usually provide. A second likely problem is with the amount of memory the computer has available to it.

Without giving you way too much information on the subject... Laptops that come with Windows Vista or Windows 7, 2 gigs or more or memory, and a separate (not Integrated) Graphics Controller by NVidia or ATI (AMD) will probably do the job. If you're reading this and wondering if the Vista or Windows 7 laptop you're using will do the job, the most likely problem is that you will lack a NVidia or ATI graphics controller. Even without the better graphics controller, your computer will probably work with Second Life - it just won't perform well in all situations.

If you have a computer running Window's XP, I'm afraid your odds of things going well are much lower. If you have 2 gigs of memory and a graphics controller (not integrated) you have a good chance. If not, you may try to upgrade or just go ahead and give it a try. It will probably work but you will probably have performance problems.

Both Intel and AMD have been improving the performance of their integrated graphics controllers over the past 3 or 4 years and this year, 2011, has a good chance of being the year that both of their integrated graphics controllers will be good enough for Second Life without having to resort to something fancier and more expensive. So its my guess that by 2012, all laptops purchased with integrated graphics controllers will be ok for Second Life.

Now for network connections: There are two important quantities for the network, speed and reliability. Reliability is the most important attribute. If your connection is flaky you'll have serious problems. My connection is 802.11n to a router that connects to a high speed cable modem and I've not had any trouble with it. Others do have difficulties though and the likely cause is the loss of the wireless signal strength as it passes though walls, floors and bounces off things like refrigerators and file cabinets.

At a minimum SL will need a link with at least a 1 megabit/sec from your computer to the Second Life servers. It will not use that bandwidth all of the time, but it will need it in bursts. If you try to connect over cellphone networks you are likely to run into bandwidth problems, and use all of your monthly data quota in short order .... possible, but not recommended. If you try a satellite internet connection, the round trip ping delay will make it unworkable.

Ok - you have your homework. Go and download those programs and get them installed. Try them out - see what you can learn.

robin