Vampiria opened this issue on Mar 07, 2004 ยท 11 posts
hauksdottir posted Sun, 07 March 2004 at 11:03 PM
Vampiria, First, I'm going to say this... if you are making products for sale, they ought to be an extension of what you already know and are experienced with. Example: if you are a make-up artist, you know where to put the highlights and what real eyelashes look like so you can make a nice transmap. Or, if you are an antique car buff, you know where to put the chrome and how to shape the tail to indicate the difference between a 45 Ford and a 57 Chevy. Maybe you collect copper cookware. Pick something you know and love! Otherwise, you'll spend a lot of frustrating hours floundering around and the resulting product might not have those special aspects which will help it sell. Second, some fields are overcrowded and others are untouched. In a saturated market, you might have more success if you can find a niche and claim it. Koshini is popular, and there are doubtless dozens of texture packs for her... why should somebody buy yours? You cannot compete with free unless what you do is special or very, very good. People with a lot of money will buy everything in order to have a complete collection, but in this economy, few people have that much money. Reading between the lines, I would guess that you've made a morph and need a texture in order to produce a character pack. Ballerinas, goths, and magic users are all done, and done well. You will have to do better or do something different. If you make a Byzantine empress or a Minoan dancer or a Japanese geisha, you will need to know not just how to make a texture, but how makeup was applied for that culture. Yes, these are hurdles, but it is better that you know about them before you start the race! If you are determined to paint textures, there are some aids. First, most commercial products have templates. If possible, look for SnowSultan's seam guides for that product. He has color-coded the edges so that matching is easier. This is absolutely essential for tattoos, ivy, or anything else which crosses body parts. Seams must match... and they must not show when rendered from any angle. Enough people do nude pictures that you can not hope that hair or clothing will cover any mistakes. A couple other people have done seam guides, but his is the first name I would search. Second, Anton provided a couple of make-up guides showing coordinating colors for skin, blush, shadow, highlights for both madeup and natural faces. These are jpgs and are in the Poser Forum in one of the threads. Look for posts by PheonixRising. If your base color resembles a real skin tone, the rest will be less of a battle to get right. ;) I use PhotoShop, but PSP also has layers. You will need a paint program with layers. Gimp is free, but I'm not sure of its capabilities. Have the seam guide on one layer and your new layer for painting on is separate from this. I often put the seam guide on top and reduce the opacity so the lines barely show, then paint on my skin layer. You can do it any way you like, just keep an eye on which layer is active. This is really important! I put lips and eyes and lashes and such on their own layers. This makes it MUCH easier to adjust size and color and shape. Don't fret about having 20 layers, you can group them. If you make a mistake and the lip color isn't working, it is easier to trash or hide that layer than to trash your entire face file! You can't just borrow lips or eyes from another texture, even if it was free. For a commercial product you must either buy a kit which is royalty-free, or digitally photograph a face and use those elements, or paint from scratch. There are some mini-tutes on how to do eyeballs, for instance. Remember that in PhotoShop you have various blending modes such as dodge, burn, overlay, multiply.... you will need to get comfortable with various blending modes in order to get sparkly eye makeup or a soft blush on the cheeks. (All I can say here is practice and experiment.) I will also recommend that you be aware of the seam lines for the dimples and laugh lines and eye crinkles. Several times during a paint job, I'll save the file with all its layers (under new names) and then save a flattened file as a jpg for testing. I will test with expressions. When the eyes crinkle or blink, does the makeup still look good? When the mouth opens in a wide laugh, does the lipstick cover the lips completely and flow with the lip shape? Not everybody does vacant-faced nudes in temples, so you should try out some expressions, if not a full Mimic file, to see if the face holds up. I test under white light, not just the default lights. If you are doing whole bodies, you might also wish to be aware of ethnicity: some skin tones are more sallow, others more pink, and black skin often has a bit of iridescence. Remember details: lighter palms and soles if needed, eyeball colors, pinker earlobes or anywhere else that blood is close to the surface... skin is a membrane, and not totally opaque. HTH, Carolly