Skinning tutorial

[tone]

Cherryfunk, sounds like you're probably much more use doing history......really important job. If I hadn't got those pics of the celtic guys as reference there's no way that they'd have ended up like that!

Aja, here's a thread about skinning using GIMP.
There's loads of other stuff I can teach you.
One useful thing would be for me to upload some .xcf files (GIMP's save format) where you can see the layering that goes on.

So a quick guide....
1) Download GIMP and the .dds tool. See this thread for links: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=43015 but ignore what they say about not creating more layers....you need to!

2) Open any skin (make sure you've got a copy!)

3) Now click ctrl+L to open the layers tool - for most skins you'll see they've got about 9 or 10 layers - these are all the same but progressively get smaller. Delete all but the visible top layer.

4) Try out some of the tools to select an area or areas - rectangle, elipse, lassoo, select contiguous regions (fuzzy select), select regions by colour. For each you'll see there are 4 modes just below toolbar - these allow you to select normally, to select additively (i.e. select more than one area), subtract (from a previously selected area) and just to select an intersecting bit. Self explanatory once you start fiddling with them. There's also one which is "create and edit paths" - quite handy for selecting an irregular area, e.g a tunic - you create the shape by clicking to create dots which are autmoatically joined. If you right click once you've gone round your shape one of the items on the dialog is Select....From path which then allows you to select the area you've just made form your dots.

5)Now try doing something with this area. Try Ctrl +C then Ctrl+V. This copies and pastes this selected area. Now you need to make this a new layer. Right click on it, under Layer click New layer. OK, now you're free to manipulate it.

6) Try changing colours:
In the toolbar above the image click Layer...Colours...then try each of Color balance, Hue-Saturation, Colorize, Brightness-Contrast. Each has its uses. Note that with Hue Saturation you can select just one part of the color spectrum to manipulate. Have to be careful with Hue-Saturation because it can quite easily look unnatural! Be aware too that RTW tends to make things more garish than you see in the image editor.

7)Try some filters in that same menu - especially blur, noise, light effects->lighting effects (good for creating shiny bits although you need to play about with the light position quite a bit and I pretty much always set this to metal), one or two of the distort filters like emboss, and artistic filters like apply canvas and GIMPressionist.

8) Now save your file as an .xcf file

9) Now save your file as a .tga file (just add .tga to the file name)

10) Reopen your .tga file then resave it as .tga.dds. A little Save as DDS menu will come up - select DXT5 compression and tick generate mipmaps. You can't save directly to .dds from your mulilayer file which is why you have to create the single layer .tga file first.

The reason for editing in layers is that it keeps things separate so you can easily change things again - say you change a colour and it's too bright. if that bit of the skin is a separate layer it's easy to tweak the colour but if it's all part of the whole skin it's much more difficult.

You need to view the skin in game. I have a separate installation of RS for testing skins. Copy your newly created .tga.dds file back into the correct folder. Open a custom battle with that unit and see what you've done. Note...you can the close to desktop (Ctrl+esc) go back to your editing, tweak the skin further, resave your new changes into your RS installation, click on RTW on your windows taskbar and the new changes will be visible in game straight away. So what I tend to do is play a custom battle, save the video replay and then start the replay. I'll zoom into the unit I'm interested in and hold the camera there while I make my changes....going backwards and forwards between GIMP and RTW, remembering to copy the newly edited file across to where my RS installation is.

[dvk901]

It really isn't that hard if you have the right tools. Just be advised that Tone will replace all your stuff like he did mine!! HaHa. Just kidding. I could probably get good at it, but I have no time.

[tone]

OK, a few more things to add to the tutorial.

A) Resolution - I pretty much always edit at 512 or 1024 pixels square then shrink back down.

B) Tools

Other tools in the GIMP toolbar...

With all of these there is an opacity setting which determines how much of an effect it will have....I'm forever adjusting this to get the desired effect.

1) Rubber (pink rubber shape) - good for erasing where you've copied and pasted something and want to blend it in and get rid of sharp edges. Try the different circle and circle fuzzy sizes.

2) Airbrush (I use this probably most of all the tools - try the different brushes - circle, fuzzy circle and galaxy...galaxy is great for getting sort of hammered metal textures). I generally set this on rate around 65 and pressure 11 with opacity dependent on what I'm doing.

3) Draw (allows you to draw circles, diamonds and squares) - I don't use this much - only really for circular patterns on shields.

4) Paint using patterns or image regions - this is quite useful as a cloning tool - if you want to extend a patten just a little bit you can use this - first of all ctrl+click on the area you want to copy then start painting in the area you want to fill

5) Blur (I don't use this much)

6) Smudge - good for blurring edges that are too hard or for filling in small areas. Just click and drag and you'll smudge the colour across

7) Dodge and burn - this is THE tool for doing clothing folds and shadows, but takes a lot of experience to get to look natural....I'm just starting to get a handle on this...so probably not the place to start - that can come later. I always have this set on a circle fuzzy brush setting, exposure around 10, opacity somewhere between 30 and 80. Basically when you click on an area or paint a line with this, you brighten, if you Ctrl+click you darken. So fairly quickly you can create the impression of folds. I've just added some more clothing textures to the celtic chieftains - you can see the difference it makes:

After:


Compare with before:


C) Colours
You can use the Pick colours tool (looks like a dropper) to make a particular colour in your image become the "foreground" colour, i.e what your painting tools will use to paint with. The default settings you'll see as an overlapping black and white square below the tools. Click on the black if you want to change this manually to something new - you can then play with the sliders and the colour square to select whatever colour you want.

D) Reference files
I've uploaded some .xcf files for you to look at to see how I've built up layers and import images from the web either for reference or to use as part of the skin. These are for 2 of the celtic chieftains, a Roman shield, Greek hoplites and a couple of Carthaginian units. Some of these have just a few layers and would be worth looking at first, then move onto the others and try and see why I've done what I've done. You'll see why using layers is helpful.

They're here: http://files.filefront.com/skinning_.../fileinfo.html

On the libyphoenician spearman, I've not done a huge amount, just changed a couple of things. With the "Greek archer", this was originally a Spirit of Rob imitation legionary....you can see the way I've used the "Create and edit paths" tool to copy the just the bit of the cloth tunic that's showing and then change it's colour and then add some shading around where the chainmail tunic goes over the top to create the effect of clothing layers, how I've imported a sheet of Carthaginian shield patterns to use one of them for some decoration on the quiver and around the hem of the tunic.

On the celtic chieftain and hoplite shields, look at the metal bits and see the way you create the impression of metal using shading with the airbrush tool set on galaxy and the lighting filter. Also have a look at the cloak and other clothes to see what I've done with dodge and burn.

Other things to consider are shadows between different layers of clothing.
Also, sometimes you'll want to merge certain layers - you do this in the layers window - right click on a layer and then merge down. I used this for example with the hoplite shields to allow me to add the same lighting effect to the whole bull's head and the background together, so they look all part of the same object.


REMEMBER: in general, keep the saturation and brightness quite well down! Things may look dark in GIMP but they very quickly brighten up when put in game.

[tone]

Just thought I'd bump this for Roman_man and Marcus.

[Marcus Illuminatus]

interesting stuff!!

download from skinning tutorial.zip doesnt work for me... he re-direct me to the http://www.filefront.com/ main page!

[tone]

OK, for some reason it isn't there but I've uploaded some of the latest skins I've done - they obviously don't fit with the explanations I've made but you can see the way I build up layers (sometimes 100 or more) to get the effect or change things slightly from other units:

http://files.filefront.com/skinning+.../fileinfo.html

[Marcus Illuminatus]

thx... it works fine and 'the gimp' is also in german language available.. cewl ... but perhaps i should select better the english language, coz it's better to communicate with you if i got questions?

amazing skins tony... i think they will look fantastic in game, like all your skins before!

the gimp reminds me back to the good old c64 times, where i have to set pixel by pixel to get an image

in gimp the layers work like the photoshop layers, ... that should be no problem for me to use them! as far as i have seen yet, a lot of good functions has gimp too! also a fractal generator is included... wow!! can't believe that this program is freeware?! i'll play a little bit around to check out the many different functions and i'll test it with some other skins from rs first! overall i think, no problem for me to work with it!

[tone]

Worth checking with Spartan Shame about user interfaces too. Either doing user interface work or basic skinning would be good.

[Marcus Illuminatus]

yeah... it would be nice for me to create a new user interface! it's located here... "Rome - Total War\Data\pak\UI_1_pak\DATA\UI" ... right? if this is no problem for spartan shame i can start with that immediately! i only have to known, what do you exactly want to have changed? i think about the new factions, right?

i personally also dont like the the background from the roman interface! it shows a picture from alexander the great... that fits better for any of the greek factions (i.e. macedonia). for the romans the wolf with romulus and remus would be much better!

[tone]

Marcus,
Check out this thread - discussions about the user interface - Spartan Shame had started doing a bit of work on it and we'd had some discussions about the look - for Romans we'd pretty much agreed the idea of going with stone ?black marble like the loading screens:

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=94086

[spirit_of_rob]

Ill just chime in with something here.

take your time over a skin dont rush them and most importantly dont expect to be brilliant immediatly ive seen professional cpu graphic designers skin and they arent amazing at it immediatly.

im afraid i use photoshop soi dont know specifics about gimp