Foreword
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First and foremost: Be patient, look at other people's work, and above
all look at fashion/couture magazines and advertising for ideas on textures. The
texture or base skin is the colourful part that we most ready notice about a
skin. The easiest skins have only the texture and the alpha. If you have a clear
idea of what you want to make, it will be easier by far than dabbling until you
end up with a good product.
Second: Don't expect to turn out a satisfactory product until you have a
basic understanding of how the alpha works. An alpha is like a polarising lens,
the dark area is blotted out, the light area shows through, the grey areas are
shown a little. E.G. true black is blocked out completely, true white is shown
completely, grey varies on how light or dark it may be.
Third: the first time you see or find a bumpmap don't freak out. Bumpmaps
are a sort of 3D level to a skin, it can raise or not raise portions of the
texture. These will cause shadowing to appear in such a fashion so that (for
example) a belt is higher than the level of the pants and the belt loops are
higher than the level of the belt. However, it should be understood that in some
very complex meshes these items may be rendered as completely seperate pieces.
If you alter a texture too far outside it's bumpmap without changing the bumpmap
also, you run the risk of having an odd looking skin; in some cases this is
pleasing, most times not.
Fourth: Having a good graphics programme, like Adobe Photoshop, makes
things easier, some people say Gimp is as good as Adobe Photoshop, but those are
generally people not all that familiar with all the features of Photoshop. The
chief benefit of Gimp is it is free. I don't have much regard for PaintShopPro,
but many people use it with very good results. If you have the patience of
Mother Teresa, you can even use Paint that comes with Windows.
Lastly: Remember the first thing, be patient and read the many good
turorials on skin creation here, MTS2, and in other game sites, even some that
don't deal with the Sims2 but other games altogether. The ideas will work for
the Sims2 as well as they work for Unreal Tournament.
Making Pixel-Perfect Skins
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See this
TUTORIAL: Making Pixel-Perfect Skintones. The same method can be used for making pixel-perfect clothing items.
Adding Young Adult or Other Age Categories
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See this
TUTORIAL: Using SimPE to Change/Add Age Categories of ClothingThis same method can also be used to add or change Clothing-type Categories.
