Okay I fired up my psp7 opened my seam victoria head and body guide template, and ready to create my first texture, now I can paint over the template and make a new texture for victoria but that dose not satisfy my creative urges, I want to creat a good detailed texture for my victoria character like so many of the talented people do on here. Dose anyone have or know where to get a good tutorial on this topic, or have any advice for me such as tools to use and tips. Things im also looking for is how to make the skin a scale type texture, how to do detailed eyes, add body hair, and do transpary eyebrows for realistic look. if anyone can give some help here it would be greatly appricated. tools I have are psp7, photoshop7, many plugins for them. I tried to do search on this forum but keep getting the error page of death so if this topic is covered somewhere on here already sorry for the redundacy thanks Dark_Raven

I will offer this one basic tip: open a new document the size that you wish - Paste the tempate in as a layer. Do your texturing on layers above this. Use a lot of layers. When you save the texture, hide the template. As for skin: you can patch in sections from photographs - this is a popular method - the problem? a photo is 2D and it has shading to define the effect of light on the substructure of the skin. A 3D figure has its own substructure as a part of the mesh. If you use a texture with shadows and highlights on it you are duplicating the effect you will get from a render - and the photo shadows are usually wrong. You can use a mixture of colors - layers are good for this. You can make nozzles/hoses of a piece of closeup photos of skin. Feathering, resolution, blending - tricky - a black art. You can make a tile of a section of skin closeup - same problems as a nozzle.

Another tip, along the same theme... assuming you make both the head and the body textures the same size (2000x2000 is a good medium-res)... something to keep in mind is that the Head is 7 or 8 times smaller than the body, so if you use the same 'skin-tile' to flood-fill the skin on both the head and body, you'll end up with mis-matching skin-pore-patterns. Try scaling your fill pattern up 7 or 8 times for the head skin (it'll be rendered 7-8 times smaller). This is often overlooked (I'm guilty of this as well) and is not always noticable, but if you account for subtle details like that, it will help the end product.

Here's where I jump in to plug my product.... I have a texture set for sale in the marketplace. but instead of the usual, this set consists of semi-transparent layers in .png format. This item is truly designed to be modified by the customer. Also, these layers are usable for commercial products. (if you use the layers in a character you can sell it, as long as you don't sell the layers themselves) Look for Vicky's texture tidbits. end commercial... Cakeone has a tutorial site at http://www.cakeone.com/ Make the template semi-transparent and placing it above the layer you are working on. Put together a collection of "people pieces" snapshots of body parts that will attract the eye (those that need more that a basic skin texture) eye, lips, nipples, belly button & pubic regions. Also collect skin samples, high detail close ups of skin (snakeskin would probably work for scales) The tricky part will be to get these separate elements to match up without visible seams. I have seen no good tutorial for this part, you can only learn by doing I suppose.

To further what Spanki and shadowcat said: Also watch the hand/feet : body And the ears and back of the head : the face. This difference in pixels per facet area is difficult to adjust for. And yup, no short cuts, it takes lots of practice. Even then mitigation and minimizing is about the best you can hope for.

I'd suggest Photoshop, rather than Paintshop, but that might just be becasue I use Photoshop more :) Use many layers, save often. Try different variations, and by all means save out good looking accidents. You can always get back to them later! :) Skin painting is not as easy as it looks. Always be careful of your seams, and be aware of strecth zones on the figure. To check for stretch zones render it from all angles with a checkerboard pattern. That should show any problem areas fairly clearly. Also, if you haven't bought UVmapper pro, you ought to. It has an option to view the texture on a live rotateable model. Very, very helpful when texturing. There are many tutorials in the links on top there, and you can always come and ask in the tetxuring forum :) Lyrra

Heres a tip which may be of use. As everyone has said you should add the template as a layer for guidance. This is sometimes useful as the top-most layer. If you are using a sharp black&white only template you can in photoshop use the magic wand to select the white areas and delete them. Switch the contiguous mode off before selecting one white area and all will be selected. This will leave the black seams only, the rest is 100% transparent. This can be put as the top layer, and will be visible at all times. You can reduce the transparency of the layer to make the black lines less "in-your-face". Having started creating my own textures recently I can re-iterate what others have said, that you have to learn the model. There are some places where the skin is stretched and squashed. With Victoria one example is under the eyes(stretched), another is the lips. Be aware that what looks like the inner part of the lip is actually the inside of the mouth. It is this stretching that causes some peoples lips texture to look fake as the white highlights on the texture disappear into the mouth. Save your multi-layered working texture in PSD, then you can use it in both Photoshop and PSP. Paintshop Pro has some nice tricks, you can create your own skin Patterns and textures to use with the airbrush, fill etc and bodyhair can be created in tubes. Lyrras mention of UVmapper is worth re-stating, even the classic free version is useful for generating your own custom sized templates, which are much "cleaner" than any JPEG versions. Good luck Mark

Thank you all so much your information will be very useful, I do have a few questions to help clear up a few things so if you can elaborate on them it will help understand better someone refered to nozzles/hoses and doing a close up by using real images of skin texture how can I get a skin texture into my paint program, and what size should I make it? The template I am using is one I found on here it color coded where its to match to the other side, this has be good for beginers like me. I did find a texture in PSP to use to give the texture i want on my skin, but I really dont understand the consept of streatching and how it can effect the skin if the skin is all the same color? is this a consern if I start out making the skin on the body a base color first? Also How should apply the color say as the base color right now im slowly working with a size 1 brush around the edges and then using a size 5 to paint the big parts? Dose it matter if you color outside the lines a bit(feels like im learning to color in kindengaden again)? Is there an easier way such as flood fill the base color? or is this not adviced either? thnaks again for all your help I go check out some tutorials now please keep the tips comming Dark_Raven

Poser lies about the mapping, especially so in preview. I advise coloring about half a facet outside the lines. Anything extra there is ignored anyway. Staale and others color the whole thing the basic skin color. The texture does not look ship shape and Bristol fashion, but you don't get white lines either. Turning a shin closeup into a nozzle is an art - some of mine work and some do not. The trick is to find a section with no highlights or shadows - and I am talking about a section of the back of the thigh or glute, not something large. That is the area I have found to have the largest smooth surface. What is difficult is getting it relatively seamless. The other thing - remember what percent it was of the body it came from and try to keep it that percent of the area you are painting. As for the source - JPEG. The how you gotta dig out of the manual. I use Painter 6.

routledge, actually its easier to just set the template layer to 'darken' rather than deleting anything. That makes only the black line show on layers below. And if your texture is dark, ivert the templates color and set it to lighten. I always set a base seleciton that is at least 4 to 8 pixels out from the mesh, as sometimes poser grabs a little white space if you get too close. Some people like to floodfill the entire background, but I find that sloppy :)

"Some people like to floodfill the entire background, but I find that sloppy" Interesting... I'm one of those who flood the whole background - but I do it precisely because I find it looks neater! ;). Seriously, it's pretty easy to just crop out the parts that aren't used (as you say, maybe 8 pixels bigger), but to me, I find that looks sloppy ;). To each his/her own, I guess ;)