Airelda's Extensive Skinning Tutorial

[Administrator]

Originally posted by Airelda.

Several Simpixellers requested that I put together a skinning tutorial to show how I make skins. For this tutorial, I will show you how to make a pink smocked dress for a toddler. One of the Hamilton quads is going to wear it at her first birthday party.
The tutorial will be in several parts because it will probably be really long with lots of pictures.

I prefer to use Paintshop Pro 7 for most of my skinning, but I occasionally use Photoshop for shading and highlighting.

If you would like to try skinning with some of my methods, picture quality is paramount. The garment needs to be absolutely front-on with clean, clear lighting, not too many wrinkles and high resolution. A plain white background like the smocked dresses image has is a bonus. For The Sims2, images need to be far bigger as well. I had to throw away some of the images I kept for Sims1 as the bitmaps for that game were about half the size.

I often go cruising on the internet to find workable photographs and favourite websites like babygap.com are always updating their clothing collections so its good to keep checking. I store all of these photographs, sorted into subfolders on my hard-drive. That means when I am in a skinning mood I have plenty of inspiration to work with.

Luckily I found these three smocked dresses somewhere on the internet. (I don't remember where now - it was a while ago.) This image is a perfect example of what I look for. Behind the image of the dresses you can see the browsing window of the Paintshop Pro program. It shows some of the folders in which I store my images. The ones shown are for toddler girls "TG". I have been collecting for a long time (even before I ever played The Sims) so my picture collection is vast.



Having planned what my sim will wear, it's time to go into Bodyshop to export the mesh I will need. Make sure you change the mannequin before you go to export the mesh. I like to use my pale custom skintone when making a new outfit. It gives me a better idea of what it will look like on a "real" sim.

This is the Maxis dress mesh I chose. There are two full-skirted toddler dress meshes, this one with the layered skirt and one without a layered skirt. I chose the layered skirt mesh even though the smocked dress doesn't have such a skirt because this mesh has built-in short sleeves and the other Maxis dress (the checked one) is sleeveless.
I always start my filenames with my initals KM, then I put in a two-letter label so I know who the outfit is for. TG stands for toddler girl.



Now we have decided what our project will be, we can get down to work. The first step is to prepare your image for "siminising".

In Paintshop, I browse to my Projects folder where the exported Maxis texture will be, and look at the bmp side-by-side with the picture of the dress I want to make.
I can tell that the smocked dress image is larger than the Maxis dress and it will need to be resized to work.



Using the rectangle selection tool, I create a rectangle around the pink dress which is the one I want to make first.



I then type on my keyboard ctrl c which means I make a copy of the selected area. ctrl v will then paste the part I copied as a separate image. Copying and pasting like this means I don't damage the original image which is especially important in this case because I will want to make the blue and yellow dresses later. I then "X" the original image so it isn't cluttering up my workspace, and is in no danger of being accidentally tampered with.

The next step is to get the pink dress on its own. Because of the plain background, the magic wand tool is handy here. It selects by colour so any colour similar to the pixel you initially clicked on gets selected. You can adjust the tolerance so that it highlights only the parts you want selected. A small number in the tolerance box means the tool selects only colours very close to the pixel you clicked on, and a high number means the tool selects pixels over a far broader colour range. You usually have to click and change the tolerance a few times to get the best selection.



I clicked in the white area around the pink dress, then adjusted the tolerance a few times to get this selection. The next step is to type ctrl shift i to invert the selection. Then type ctrl c and ctrl v to copy and paste the inverted selection so I end up with an image like this. I "X" the previous version of this image as I won't need it anymore.



The reason I copied and pasted a new version of the image is to get the image on a see-through background (can you see the grey and white squares?)

Now for getting rid of the blue dress part of my image. I use the freehand selection tool to carefully follow the outline of my pink dress where it meets the blue dress. I make sure the blue dress pixels are selected then ctrl x to cut them off my image. Finally I crop the box my image is in to make sure the image box is nice and tight around the dress. That way when I resize it, less image quality is lost.
Here is a nice clean image that I can now start turning into a sim skin:



If you would like to download this dress picture and try the tutorial for this dress along with me, you are welcome! Click here.

[Administrator]

The more I skin for The Sims the more I realise that making skins is just like any other type of creative persuit. To get to a well-finished product you must go through a process of continuous refinement. That means when you first start out, your project is going to look really rough and ready. The main thing to remember is don't panic!! The more you work with your image and the longer you spend on it the less rough and more lovely it will look. This requires patience, dedication to seeing the project through and a real enjoyment of the process itself. An artist starts out their painting by creating broad, undefined images on a canvas, and the author starts with notes and a rough draft. The first time a musician plays a piece, it sounds stilted and unmusical. Skinning for sims is the same!

Unfortunately, skinning the way I am going to show you takes a lot of time. There are simply no shortcuts to creating a really lovely sim skin. Many of the skins you see on the web are potentially good skins, but their creator has not taken the skin past the initial rough cut and paste stage. That's when you get that tacky pasted on look.

Because my skins take hours and sometimes days to complete, it is a good idea to make sure you save copies of everything. I store the images that I work with in the folder created when exporting the mesh (under Projects), and back up my entire Projects folder regularly.
I will remind you to save backup copies of images as we go along because it's a good habit to get into.

Before we go any further, we must neutralise the bump map that comes with the Maxis dress. Otherwise it will appear on top of our brand new dress and confuse your eye while you are trying to work. Go to where your bump map is stored under Projects (the grey image). DO NOT just wipe it out, however. Save a copy of the original first!! You may or may not need bits of it later, but saving a copy now makes for a lot less work later on. Type ctrl c and ctrl v to paste a new copy of the bump map. The new copy will have a generic name like "Image 5.psp" That is fine for our purposes. Save it with the rest of your images in the subfolder in your Projects file.

Now the original bump map needs to be neutralised so we can work with a clean slate. Hover your eyedropper tool over the image and choose any of the grey tones in it. Then go to the bucket tool and tip that plain colour over the image so you end up with a plain grey square. It doesn't matter which grey you choose by the way, as long as it is just a single colour. Now your bump map looks really boring like this:



Save now (make sure you've copied the original first!! ) and reload your dress in Bodyshop. You may not be able to tell right now, but the bump map is now gone.

In Part 1 we got up to the step of resizing our pink dress image. Before I resize, though I like to sharpen the image to compensate for some of the image quality loss that happens when resizing in Paintshop. (Go to Effects-Sharpen-Sharpen)

Resizing is never scientific. You need to use your own judgement about how big or small to go but I have found from experience that slightly too big is much more useful than slightly too small.

Remember everytime you resize in Paintshop you lose a great deal of image quality. If you resize and find your image is still too big or too small, never resize your resized image. You must undo the resize and start again, by trial and error until you have found the perfect size.

Go to Image-Resize to resize the image. For this image, I tried a few sizes and found I was happy with 85% of the original image. I resized to 85%, then sharpened the dress image again (to compensate for quality loss). Then I copied the resized image (ctrl c ) and pasted the dress as a new layer ctrl l on top of the original Maxis bitmap, matching the necklines. It then looked like this:



I saved the image this way, then reloaded the mannequin in Bodyshop.(Don't worry about the warning that saving your image as a bmp will save your image as a single layer. As long as you don't close your image after saving it, your layers will remain intact to work with in Paintshop.)

The result in Bodyshop:



Remember I said this is the rough stage of skinning and not to panic! It looks pretty rough at the moment but all we are doing is making sure the size is right. so we can go to the next stage. The size looks pretty good to me. The collar and smocking are in proportion, so I will work onward with this size.

Now comes the hardest part. Even though I will be telling you what I do, a lot of this comes down to the judgements you make with your own eye. You have to work away at the image until you're happy with it, making tiny adjustments as you go. Even though the dress looks almost finished in the previous picture, for me it is only at stage one. The next thing is to break down the image into its componants and work each bit until you are happy with the whole.

I'm going to start with the easy part of this dress - the smocked bodice. Using the freehand selection tool, I select the bodice only, copy and paste it as a new layer (ctrl l) Then I decided to sharpen it one more step so the pretty smocking and embroidery details look clearer in-game. It looks pretty stark on the actual bmp,



but previewing it in Bodyshop shows me that it is much easier to see the details and it looks quite good.



Now for the collar. If you look closely at the original photograph, you can see that both sides of the dress collar are not exactly the same.



The left side lies nice and flat while the right side has a sag in it that causes a shadow. Very few things in real life are absolutely symmetrical, but asymmetry in The Sims rarely works well. One of the secrets to creating a great piece of sim clothing is to use symmetry to your advantage. The smocking panel on the bodice is not symmetrical, true - but in that case leaving in the asymmetry adds to the "handmade" look of the dress - part of its charm. For something like a collar though, there is no place for asymmetry. Both sides of the dress mesh neckline are exactly the same, so our collar will look better if the two sides match exactly too.

Cut out the left side of the collar and paste it as a new layer then lay it against the neckline of the Maxis bmp.



Can you see that the collar does not exactly fit the curve of the neckline? The white of the collar stops short of the neckline, and also, there is a row of very white pixels at the collar's edge. These pixels went white when we sharpened the image. You could adjust your alpha map to fit the collar line, but the much easier option is to adjust your dress collar to fit the Maxis one.

There are several ways to adjust the collar shape, but I will show you the one I would chose, using one of my favourite tools - the "Push" tool.

The Push tool is one of the "retouch" tool options. I usually set the opacity fairly low because the colour builds up slowly as you push the colour where you want it which gives you lots of control. I have it on a one pixel brush for the fine work and two pixels to fill a larger area of space.

Select one part of the white collar - usually a medium colour and spread the colour over the pink of the Maxis bmp, building up coverage as you go. When all the pink is covered, go back and clean up your edge. You can either erase stray pixels, or use a quicker method. In your layers, select the background, and click the magic wand in the black space at the neck. Then go back to your collar layer and ctrl x which will delete stray pixels in one go.

Picture of collar with colour pushed up to neckline, edges not yet cleaned:



Preview your adjustments to the collar in Bodyshop to make sure the white collar covers up all the original pink. I won't mention it everytime I preview in Bodyshop, but believe me when I tell you I am flicking back and forth between the two programs all the time. I'll adjust a small bit of my bmp, save, refresh and preview. This way if I do something I don't like it is easy to go back to Paintshop and undo what I just did, so making a skin is a continuous trial-and-error, do and redo process. That's why it takes so long :)

Make sure your left collar is on the top of your layer pile. If you have been following me exactly it may not be. Drag it to the top before you preview.



The collar is looking pretty good. To make it look more 3D, I will grab my push tool and pull the deepest pink that is under the collar all the way across to make the bodice underneath look shadowed. My push brush is set to one pixel, opacity 12. Now I pull the deepest grey from inside the piping edge to make it stand out more too. Finally I choose a medium pink pixel from inside the piping and drag it all across the piping curve to make the colour cleaner. Now it looks a bit neater like this:



Can you see another problem with the collar? The mesh edge of the Maxis dress cuts the collar piping off abruptly on the lefthand side. I could leave it like this if I wanted to, but being picky, I decide to try to get the piping extend all around the outer edge.

First of all, I need to find the edge of the mesh. First of all I add a new layer to my bmp so I can easily delete it when I don't need it anymore. Taking a bright, unrelated colour I draw a straight line close to where I think the mesh edge might be on my bmp:



Saving and previewing in Bodyshop shows me I was lucky and chose a point almost exactly at the edge. Moving this layer over a few pixel points gets me exactly to the edge.

Now I reselect my collar layer. I use the rectangular selection tool and copy and paste a small section of my outer collar edge. Then I manouver the new layer over until the edge fits exactly under the red line.



I know the new layer collar edge does not exactly match but I'm not going to worry about that yet. Previewing in Bodyshop shows me that the pink piping now carries on around the side, and to me it is looking much better already.



So go back to your bmp, delete the red line layer, and manipulate the new collar layer to match the edge of the old one. You will want to join the old and new collar layers up together at some point.



To acheive this result, I used a combination of the eraser tool and the selection tool to cut away portions of the old collar I didn't want anymore. Then I used the push brush to carry the edge colours and piping colours up to the end of the bmp and then the cloning brush on the smocked bodice part (selecting the bodice layer first of course!! )so that the smocks come right up underneath the new, smaller collar.



Now I am fairly happy with how my collar is looking. It is an easy matter to copy and paste another one as a new layer. Mirror the new collar image ctrl m and then carefully align it symmetrically on the right neck edge.

I then decided to take just the very top of the smocking and make it symmetrical (not the bit with the embroidered flowers). This is so that both sides fit well under the collar. The right side at the moment is looking lopsided. Choose the exact center point of this part of your bodice and select it with the rectangular selection tool.



Make a copy, paste it as a new layer then mirror image it. Align it on your bmp, making sure this layer lies underneath your collar layer. Then join the two sides of the bodice into one layer, then the two sides of your collar into one layer too (so bodice and collar are still two separate layers).

Your bmp should now look like this:



At this point, you should ctrl c and ctrl v both your bodice and collar layers. That means they appear as separate images on your workspace. Save each one individually in your project folder, both as a backup and to use in your bump map later on.

The other thing you should do is backup your skin the way it is at the moment so that if the unthinkable happens (like a blackout) you will have a backup copy of your skin that has all layers preserved. Once you lose your layers, it is a big pain working on a skin!!! Save a copy in your projects folder and make sure it is the .psp file format so that your layers are preserved.

If your skin is looking something like this, you are doing very well!!

[Administrator]

In part two of this tutorial, we got our pink smocked dress to the stage where it had a good-looking collar and bodice. In this tutorial, I will show you how I make a skirt for the dress.

First of all, to take a shortcut, I usually make the basic skirt out of a pattern cut from the dress. I will show you what I mean.

Zoom up close to the original resized photograph of your dress and find a place where the colour is nice and even and you can see the pattern clearly (in the case of this dress, the pattern is made up of raised pink and white dots on the cotton background of the dress.)

I try to find a place on the garment that has even colour (not shading light to dark at the sides), and the pattern is as near horizonal in alignment as possible. Then I draw a rectangular box around the smallest possible part of the pattern that will ensure that it repeats correctly.

Tip: even if the garment does not have a pattern per se, it is still a good idea to do this step if you are going to be filling a large area on your skin, rather than just choosing a plain colour with no texture in it. This makes the garment texture look more real and have more "life" to it. Even if I were using a plain fabric background like tshirting or denim, I would still find a square of texture from the original photograph to use as a fill rather than a plain colour.

This is the place on the dress I chose:



Can you see how I kept my selection close to the dots on the top and left hand sides, and far away from the dots on the bottom and right hand sides? That ensures my pattern will repeat correctly.

Paintshop Pro has a really useful "pattern" option that works for all the painting type tools like the fill tool, paintbrush and airbrush. It is located near your colour palette. To change the brush style from plain colour to pattern, click in either the top or bottom square right under the colour palette, and hold down your mouse button for a moment until a little menu pops up with three options - solid, gradient or pattern, and select the pattern option. If you select the pattern option for the top square, the pattern will be on your left mouse click, and the bottom square will be on your right mouse click. To get the pink and white dot pattern you have selected on the dress, briefly click on the pattern box (don't hold the mouse button down this time), and your pattern textures box will show up. There are a lot of ugly default ones, but at the top of the options box you will find your pink and white dot repeating pattern. Select it and now your pattern will show in the pattern box like this:



Well it's hard to see, but the bottom square (beneath the red one) has my dot pattern.
You can use the pattern right away of course, but at this point, I always like to make a backup copy of the pattern I'm going to use. If you click away the selection box you made on the dress, your pattern will no longer exist. Because this is easy to do, I make a new small image that is about 100x100 and fill it with my pattern. Then I cut the image back down to the smallest possible size which creates a repeating pattern. Here is my swatch, magnified 10x for you to see:



If you would like to download this swatch to use for the tutorial, click this link: *Note - this swatch is already darkened to match the dress bodice, so if you use it in your tutorial, skip the darkening step further along *

Save your new swatch pattern as a separate image in your projects folder for backup, but keep the window open.

Now go back to pattern selection box and choose your new version of the pattern (not the one we did originally on the dress). That way you can click your original selection off safely.

Now comes the fun bit. Make sure you create a new layer first!! Go to Layers-New Raster Layer to create one.
After you've got a new layer, grab your rectangle selection tool again and draw a rectangle right across where the skirt of the dress happens on the Maxis dress. Then fill it with your pattern

Mine looks like this:



Don't worry about the smocked bodice being covered up. It is easily fixed. Just grab the smocked layer and pull it up to the second to top layer (under the collar layer).

Now it looks like this:



Here's a tip I only learned recently, but has since saved me a lot of time and trouble!! If you want to make more than one selection of an area at a time you can! Make your first selection, then hold down shift while making a second selection. You will see a tiny plus sign next to your selection tool, and now both areas will be selected. Similarly, you can hold down ctrl while using the selection tool to make a selection smaller. This works for all selection tool types!

Now we come to another tricky part - putting the wrinkles in the dress. I have tried using the actual wrinkles on the photograph of the original dress but when previewing it in Bodyshop, I think it looks tacky and unrealistic. (There is a picture of the dress pasted directly onto the skin in Part One which shows how the wrinkles look done this way.)

This means we are going to have to draw the wrinkles in by hand. However, we can use some of the photographed wrinkles to get us started. Look closely at this next picture. See the narrow selection I made on the original dress? I grabbed the start of the wrinkles from right underneath the smocked bodice with the selection tool, copied and pasted it as a new layer, then added them to my bodice. Can you see that narrow row of wrinkles under the bodice? That will help us get started. Merge the narrow wrinkle bit to your smocked bodice.



The other thing to note here, is to see how Maxis made their wrinkles, which look quite nice and natural. They are hand-drawn, but previewed in Bodyshop, they come off very nicely so we can use them to help us too.



Before I try adding wrinkles, I am going to darken the pattern of the skirt a bit so it matches the bodice colour more closely. I went to Colours-Adjust-Hue/Saturation/Lightness and took the lightness down about -18 which gives me a better match between bodice and skirt:



Tip: Remember how we saved a copy of this dot pattern in your projects folder? Go and get it right now and also adjust its lightness down -18. That way if we ever have to use it again it will be the correct colour!!

While doing this tutorial for you I tried a few different methods of placing the wrinkles, but this is the one I felt worked best for this dress.

I grabbed my push tool (set to size 1, opacity 13 ) and pushed down some of the darker bits of the narrow wrinkle band we applied under the bodice. Don't forget you can rub back and forth with this tool to darken the lines as you go.




Next I selected a dark but related pink colour from one of the wrinkles (Hue 246/Sat 128 ) and got out my paintbrush set to size 2, opacity 24. I hid my dotty skirt layer so I could see the Maxis original as I did the next step (make sure you are still working on your bodice layer though, not the Maxis layer!!!)With the paintbrush I connected some of my pushed lines with some of the Maxis wrinkles, painting right over the top.



I then made my dotty layer visible again, and doing a lot of saving and previewing I painted over some of the other wrinkles to give them more depth and added a few as well:



This is how it looks so far. I am not worrying about the bottom layer of the skirt mesh at the moment, and I am also not letting the fact that it looks rough at the moment bother me. That can be refined in a moment. We need to get the wrinkle placement right first.



The wrinkles would look better if they were softer. Here's a quick way to do it: Select the wrinkles only with the rectangle selection tool and go to Effects-Blur-Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 0.75. Now the wrinkles look softer:



However, on previewing I think they look too dark. I get out my eraser tool set to size 5, opacity 30 and run it all over the wrinkles to take some of the colour depth away. Make sure you hold the mouse button down as you do this otherwise you will be erasing more than you want to.

Looking a bit better:



It still needs some adjusting. Use your eye and a lot of previewing to get it looking good. I added some darker wrinkles under the bodice with my paintbrush and softened them with my soften tool. I also brought out the darkness of some of the longer wrinkles, and highlighted the green stiching line of smocking on the bodice because it was getting lost. This is okay for now, and I will work on it a bit further later:



Okay - let's move on to the lower layer on the skirt. If you look at the Maxis version, you can see that their lower layer is in shadow which makes it look more 3D. You could paint in the deeper colour if you wish, but here is a quicker way.

Create a new layer first!!
Get out your rectangular selection tool and choose the entire image from left to right from the top down, then stop where the shading starts on the Maxis version of the lower skirt. Then go to Effects-3D Effects-Drop Shadow. I used these settings:

Vertical 16;Horizontal 0;Opacity 43; Blur 31.8 and Colour Hue 244 Sat 144. (I came to these settings by trial and error).

When you okay these settings, you get a shadow across your bmp like this:



It looks like this in Bodyshop:



Because you created the shadow in a separate layer, you can move it and also erase parts of it from your skin. The shadow extends right across the skin, but you can erase the middle and side sections if you like. It doesn't really matter either way in this case because that middle section is never seen in the game. I chose to delete the extra shadows because I like my bmp's looking nice and neat!

Now using similar shading techniques as we used on the upper skirt, add wrinkles to the lower skirt. Remember to use the Maxis wrinkles to help guide you.

Mine looks like this:



And in Bodyshop:



There is one more part of the skirt we haven't done yet - the underside. I decided to cheat to make this. Because the pinks of the Maxis and our dress are so similar and because the underside of the skirt is rarely ever seen in gameplay, I decided just to cut away the bottom portion of my dot fabric so the Maxis skirt underneath shows on my bmp. I think that will work fine don't you?



Tip - even if we were making the blue dress rather than the pink one, so that the colours were really dissimilar, you could still use portions of the Maxis skin. Copy and paste the part you want as a new layer, and then recolour it, fiddling with the lightness and saturation until you've got a good colour match!

Now our dress has a skirt and is looking pretty good (as long as the model doesn't turn around!) I think we need to put a back on this skin. But you can wipe your brow because the main creating from scratch part of this skin is now done!

[Administrator]

Ooops - I just realised in the last picture of my dress, the collar is hiding under the bodice. Just pull it up to the top layer if it ever gets buried!

Now we are going to make a back for this dress. Most of the time, the pictures you use to make sim skins do not show the back of the garment, so putting a decent back on requires some imgaination and guesswork. Fortunately simply cutting a pasting some of what you have already done often works well

We have already put our pink dotty fabric roughly over the back of our garment. Lower its opacity until you can clearly see the shape of the Maxis dress underneath, then following their shaping, use a combination of the selection tools and the eraser tool to cut your pink dotty fabric to the same shape:



The simplest way to do the next step is to copy the gathered part of your front skirt and paste it as a new layer. Then place it carefully over the back portion of your dress. Cut away the inside skirt part at the bottom so the Maxis inside skirt is showing:



Okay let's see how it's looking in Bodyshop.



It's looking okay. The gathers at the waist look a bit funny because they don't appear to be gathered to anything. I wanted to get a good idea of how to make the back look more finished, so I got out some of the smocking magazines that we have here at home and checked out the backs on the dresses. I found that 95% of the smocked dresses in a similar style to ours is finished off with a big bow in the back, and buttons up to the back neckline.

Here is an illustration of the back of a smocked dress I found in a smocking magazine:



A bow on our pink dress would look pretty so I have decided to construct one for our dress.

Using things you have to hand is always much quicker than drawing things freehand yourself, though if you wish to hand-draw the bow, you are very welcome. I could hand-draw it myself but since I have found such a handy and lovely illustration of a bow I have decided to use it instead. I also wanted to show those of you who believe you lack drawing ability how it is possible to produce polished-looking skins anyway

I cut the bow out from the picture I showed you above and pasted it as a new layer. I manipulated it a bit so the proportions look good on my dress.



I then tested how it looks in Bodyshop.



It's fitting the skin well, so now we can use it as our template. Note how the side seams of the dress on the mesh are not the same as where they look on our bmp. I had to move the edges of the sash around until they looked like they were sewn directly into the side seams of the dress when I looked at it in Bodyshop.

Download the bow template here.



Make sure you add a new layer to your skin before drawing in your bow!!

After adding a new layer, hover your eyedropper tool over your pink fabric. Then click on the box that holds the colour you selected so the colour wheel shows up. Drag your colour upwards so that the pink in your selection box gradually darkens.



You can see in this picture the new colour on top, and the old colour below. The reason I selected my colour this way is to get a pink that is darker than the original, but related to the original to outline our bow with.

Using the paintbrush set to size 1, opacity 87, I carefully trace the illustration of the bow with my dark pink, making sure I am working in the new layer, not the layer which holds the bow picture. I also extended the sash section to so the bow meets the sides of the dress:



In Bodyshop:



It doesn't look very realistic yet, does it? That's alright - it's only step one. You can nowdelete the white sash layer as we won't be needing it anymore.

Get the magic wand out and select in the blank space around the sash, then ctrl shift i to invert the selection. This means our selection is perfectly bow-shaped. Create another new layer, then fill that new layer with our pink dotted fabric pattern. (Remember how we saved a copy of it in case we needed it again! )
Make sure the newest layer lies under the pink outline layer so that the bow appears to be filled with the pink dotted fabric. Now merge your two sash layers so they look like this:



Now we can work on making our bow and sash look more 3D and realistic. One of the simplest things you can do is drop a shadow under your sash and bow. I used these settings:



And the result:



That's looking better already! Next, use the lighten and darken retouch tools to add more shading to the bow itself. I actually prefer to make a copy of the sash layer and do this step in Photoshop with the dodge and burn tools because those tools are far more subtle and controllable than the Paintshop ones.

Here is how my sash looks after I've applied the dodge and burn tools in Photoshop. I follow the general rule when shading that outsides of things are generally darker, and middles lighter. You need to darken the sides of creases and lighten the peak of a crease. You also need to lighten things that are closer to the front and darken things that are further away.



In Bodyshop we can see that it is looking a lot more realistic, but still a bit too "defined" to look truly real.



I am going to fiddle with it a bit to create a more subtle effect. First I added a Gaussian Blur with radius of .50 to soften the image overall. Then I used the push tool set to size1 opacity 10 and pushed all over the hard dark pink outline, not trying to be too careful so that the colours were bleeding into one another a lot more, and the outline was greatly softened. Next up was the soften tool set to size 4 opacity 21 which I rubbed over the entire bow. Then I lightened the colour depth in the brightness/contrast menu up 15 points. Finally I lowered the overall opacity of the sash and bow layer downwards to 80%. My bow now looks like this:



and in Bodyshop:



To me, the sash and bow now have a much softer appearence which matches the overall look of our pink dress a lot better.

Reminder: make sure you are saving a .psp format copy of your skin all the time! The more layers you work with the more important it is to keep a backup copy that has layers preserved!!! At this point, it is a good idea to make a copy of your sash and bow layer, paste it as a new image and save that image separately in your projects folder. We will need it as a separate layer later on when we create our bump map. You will also be able to recolour it and use it in future projects to save yourself a lot of time and hassle!!

Now let's tackle the back of the collar To save time, I am going to use part of the front collar that we have already created to make the back collar. Copy your front collar layer and paste it as a new layer. Then using your rectangular selection tool, cut off the left hand side completely so only the right hand side remains. Go to Image-Rotate and rotate the collar to the right 90 degrees.

You should have something that looks like this:



See the curvy part at the top? You won't need that now, so select it and cut it off. I dragged the collar over to the top of the bmp so the side of it matched the side of our pink dress:



Then I previewed the result in Bodyshop:



I'm looking for a good match of the white collar and the pink piping. It's looking pretty good!

Tip: to get this top-down view in Bodyshop, you press the F3 key, then you can manipulate your model by a combination of clicking and dragging either mouse button and both mouse buttons together. However, the back of your garment will be in shadow unless you rotate your model to face backwards BEFORE you press F3. Whichever way the model is facing when you press F3 will be the bright side to look at in F3 mode. Goodness knows why the lighting has to be so strange and dark in Bodyshop. Another Maxis mystery!

While looking at my Bodyshop model, I noticed that the back collar is disproportionately short compared to the front collar. So to fix this, I grabbed a selection of my collar piece with the rectangular selection tool and dragged it down and outward, saving and previewing in Bodyshop as I went until I was happy with how long the collar looks on the model.





Of course this has left a gap between the two collar pieces. But as I now have a good idea of how the mesh wraps the bmp here at the shoulder, it is pretty easy to push the collar lines outward to meet one another, doing a lot of previewing until I am happy with the rounded shape of the side of my collar, and the way it wraps to meet the front collar.

Here is my version. (I'm not too worried about all the extra white that is hanging over the inner neckline. It is easily deleted with selecting that area with the magic wand on the Maxis layer of this skin, then going back to the back collar layer and cutting it off.)



It's now looking like a good match for the front of the collar when you look at it in Bodyshop:



Tip: I find that you get a much better result using the push to fill a large area like this rather than colouring it in with a single colour on a paintbrush. The push tool allows for subtle and natural colour variation as you push the colour where you want it, so the end result is less stark and more natural.

I've tidied up the white bit the way I mentioned before, copied the left side of the back collar, pasted the copy as a new layer, mirrored the image and then joined the two collar halves together. I tidied up the join a bit with the push brush, then merged the collar layer into one.



At this point, make a copy of your back collar layer, paste it as a separate image and save it into your projects folder for future use, especially when we come to our bump map. Do this BEFORE you drop the shadow in the next step so your collar has a nice clean outline.

Now I am going to drop a shadow under our collar (front and back) to make it more 3D, using the exact same settings I used on the sash:



Great! Let's leave the collar for now. There is only one more major thing left for our garment back - a button closure. Have a look at the drawing of the dress back I posted earlier. You can see that when a garment is buttoned (for a girl), the placket laps to the right side. If this garment was for a boy, your placket would lap the opposite way! The lap does not happen in the centre - that is where you place your buttons. Okay let's create some buttons! I'll show you an easy way to do it in Paintshop Pro that does not require hand-drawing. Go to the Preset shapes tool. Select the white button preset shape illustrated here:


Create an entirely new image (mine was 100x100) and draw a round button with your preset shape tool. To get rid of the surrounding graph, draw a second circle, then crop around your original circle tightly.

Mine looks like this (actual size)



The only problem at the moment with this image is that it's a vector and we need it as a raster. Go to merge layers and merge all layers which turns the image into a raster image. You get a blank white surround around your image - that is fine. Copy this image and paste it into your pink dress bmp, then erase all the white surrounding. If your button is too big, resize it before adding it as a separate layer. It needs to be really small to look right. Find the right size by trial and error. My button ended up being 5x5 pixels, with all four corners deleted.

By previewing in Bodyshop, find the centre back, then line layers of buttons up the center back, spacing them until you are happy with how they look.



Now merge all of your buttons into a single layer!

Of course, they are not the right colour at the moment. That is easily fixed. Pick a colour from the pink of the dress that you like (I chose Hue 248) , and go to Colours-
Colourize. Now you have pink buttons! I lowered the brightness -33 and this is the result in Bodyshop:



Now is the time to save a separate image of your button layer in your projects folder for future use before we add our shadow!

Drop a shadow under the buttons, keeping the vertical and horizontal settings to 1 and -1

Let's draw in the placket. Choose a deep pink from the collar edge and set your paintbrush to size 1, opacity 60. To draw a straight line, click once at the top of the placket edge, hold down shift and click once at the botton of your edge. If you judged it right, you should have a straight line. I also drew a two-pixel straight line on either side of the buttons to represent buttonholes. Now my dress back looks like this:



Note: Make sure your collar and sash layers are ON TOP of the button layer, otherwise their shadows will not shade the button part the way they should.

Let's see how our dress back is looking in its entirety now. I think it's looking pretty nice - don't you?

[Administrator]

Our dress looks fine the way it is and if you preferred you could do some finishing touches on it and use it as is. We haven't put any sleeves on it or changed the shoes and stockings, but it looks nice anyway. The dress as is looks like it is a smocked pinafore, with no sleeves.

But I kind of like the way the original dress looks with the pink sleeve caps and white cuffs don't you? So I am going to add sleeves to my version of the dress.

The first thing to do is add a new layer of course!

Next, highlight the part of the bmp that Maxis left white for their sleeves. Make sure you cover all of the white with your selection, then fill it with our pink dot fabric. Drag the new sleeve layer down until it sits underneath the collar and bodice layers. Get the rectangular selection tool and by trial and error, chop away at the bottom of the sleeve bit until the amount of white shows on the model sleeves that you are happy with. The white part of the Maxis bmp we have left showing will become our white sleeve cuff.





Awww - our model is starting to look really sweet in our creation don't you think?

The easiest way to make your sleeve look naturally wrinkled and shaded is to follow the way the Maxis shading goes. Here is a new way to add shading to a skin. Create yet another new layer and hide the pink dotty sleeve layer. Choose a dark pink that is related to the dress colour and draw in dark pink highlights over any places on the Maxis skin that are darkened. It can be really rough - that won't affect our final result:



Now go to Effects-Blur-Gaussian Blur and set the radius to 2.98 The edges of the painted lines will be greatly softened. Show the pink dotted layer again and delete any pink shading from your layer that is hanging into the white of the cuff. You can see I've selected it ready to delete in this picture:



Now create yet ANOTHER layer

The new layer is for your pale highlights. Again, hide your pink dotty sleeve layer so you can see the white Maxis original. Choose a pink from the dress and LIGHTEN it up almost to white. Now trace over any parts of the Maxis original that are lighter, then blur. Before blurring:



After blurring:



Tip: If you find your blurred highlights are too stark when looking at them in Bodyshop, the easiest way to soften the effect is to lower the opacity of these layers until they look good to you. I lowered my light highlights to 50% and my dark highlights to 75% for this skin.

Merge the three sleeve layers - the fabric, light and dark highlights - into a single layer. Now copy that layer and paste as a separate image in your Projects folder to save for later use. Also save a backup .psp copy of your skin.

Your sleeves may now look something like this:



The highlights give the sleeves a lot more life! Let's just add a bit more of a defined edge to them so the cuff looks more 3d.

Get out the dark pink that you used to make your placket edge and trace straight lines of it against the edge of your sleeve cuff on the bmp. I chose Hue 246, Sat 74 and set my paintbrush to size 1, opacity 62.

Add another new layer for our drop shadow

Draw a selection line that encompasses the entire bottom of your bmp up to the edge of the cuff, then drop a shadow so it sits ABOVE the cuff. I used these settings:



Because we used a new layer for our shadow, we can cut away those parts of the cuff shadow that go across our dress bodice. Now our cuff stands out a bit more. Let's look at it in Bodyshop:



That's it for now! Sleeves are a lot easier than some of the other things we've done, aren't they!

[Administrator]

Now is a good time to sit back a bit and enjoy your beautiful creation. I have learned that things look a lot different in the game than they do in Bodyshop, so before we go onto the finishing details, let's load the dress up in the game and have a look at it. The lighting in The Sims is far brighter and more colourful than in Bodyshop. I have been thinking all along that our pink and white dress looks a little muddy in colour but before I do anything to change any colour settings let's look at it in The Sims2 game.



Well I tried my pink dress on this little cutie - and guess what - the pink and white look perfect! You can see from this picture how much more bright and colourful the colours are. That means we don't have to fiddle with the colour settings. Good news!

Our bmp does not exactly match the Maxis mesh at the waistline, but I'm sure this won't be too obvious once you're actually playing the game.

If you were feeling ambitious, you could change the shoes and stockings that go with this outfit. But I think the Maxis ones in this case fit the outfit nicely, so for this skin I won't bother.

The final thing I will do is shade and highlight my skin one last time. I prefer to go into Photoshop and use their dodge and burn tools like I did for the sash before.

I've finished with my highlighting tools. Now let's admire the results of all that hard work!

Front:



Back:



But don't rest too much! We still have to make a bump map for this skin to make it really look great!

[Administrator]

I won't go into technical details here, but you need to know before you do this part of the tutorial that if you have a less-than-great graphics card, bump maps may not appear at all in your game. If this is the case for you, it is far better to leave the bump map solid grey and skip this step - at least until you upgrade your graphics card!

Let me tell you something about bump maps that I learned the hard way - you have to plan them into your skin creation as you go along, or otherwise they take twice as long to create. As we made our smocked dress, I kept reminding you to save each layer as a separate image and keep it in your projects folder. Hopefully you have followed my advice in which case our bump map won't take very long at all to create

This is how bump maps work: they are in greyscale and the game reads lighter greys as closer and darker greys as further away. They have two excellent uses - they make the various components of your skin look more 3D as they help emphasise the depth of your skin, and they can also add interesting and realistic texture to your skin so it looks less "painty" and more "fabricy" if you get my drift.

Sometimes with the new version of Bodyshop I have trouble getting the bump map to show up properly. I have no idea why this might be - it might just be a glitch in my computer somewhere rather than a general bug. If this does happen, I find the best thing to do is re-import a new version of the skin. I had to do that for this skin. Don't delete your old project folder as it has all your saved work in it!

Let's build our bump map up in a logical fashion one step at a time, just like we did for our dress. The first step is to merge all your bmp layers temporarily and greyscale the image. Post this as a new layer over your bump map and save to see what this looks like as a bump map in Bodyshop:

Here is our greyscaled bmp:



And in Bodyshop:



The result is not too nice at all - the edges are too hard. It looks like she's wearing something made out of plastic! So let's work our bump map up a bit more carefully, step by step. It is important to have a copy of our complete skin like this as a bottom layer even though we won't really use it as you need to make sure your bump map layers are placed exactly over the top of where they fit on your coloured bmp.

Remember how we saved a copy of the original Maxis bump map? Get a copy of it and paste it as a new layer. We might as well use the lower portion of it to start us off as we did not alter anything on the original Maxis bmp from the inner skirt down:



Next, I want to bring out the texture of our dotted fabric. So I poured the dotted fabric over the portions of the skin where it should show up. The colour of the fabric will be in greyscale, and as long as you use the same fabric swatch we have been using all along to create our pattern, you will find that the dots on the bump map match exactly where your dots fall on your actual skin.



And in Bodyshop:



Hmmm - some of the dots look raised and some look like holes. The reason is if we look at our greyscaled version of our pink dotty fabric, the pink dots are darker than the background of the fabric so the bump map reads them as if they were holes. In real life, all the dots whether they are pink or white are raised areas on the cotton background of our fabric. So it stands to reason if we make all the dots the same light colour on our bump map, then all of the dots will look raised to the same height.

Get your original pink fabric swatch, make a copy of it and paste it as a new image. Then greyscale it. Take out your paint brush set to size 1, opacity 100 and paint over the two dark dots on the swatch with the same greys selected from the two light dots. Mine looks like this (magnified 10x)



Now choose it as a new pattern, and fill it in over the dotty section of your bump map. Now it looks like this in Bodyshop:



That's looking a bit better, but I still think it looks too stark. So I'm going to take the contrast down a bit to make the effect more subtle. I went to Colours-Adjust-Brightness/Contrast and took the contrast of the dotty layer down -33 This gives the raised dots a softer effect:



Well it's hard to tell from those two pictures, but there is a definite softening of the effect to my eye in Bodyshop.

Let's move on and bring out some texture on our smocked bodice. Make a copy of the separate bodice layer you have saved in your Projects folder and greyscale it. Now paste it into your bump map, and lower the opacity so you can make sure it fits PERFECTLY over the original smocking. You will have to switch off your dotty layer for a moment while you get the placement perfect, then switch it back on again when you have placed it.



Preview the result in Bodyshop:



Yuk! Way too contrasty, and again, parts that should look raised (like the embroidery) look deepened because they are darker colours. Let's work on this a bit. First of all, choose a light grey colour and draw over all of the rose embroideries on your smocked bodice that ought to look raised on a bump map. I did this step in a new layer so I can erase if I make a mistake



Merge the two layers into one bodice layer. The bodice layer probably ought to be lighter than the dotty fabric, so lightened the bodice layer up 27 then lowered the contrast to -27 so now it looks like this.



And the result:



Much better! We can still see the raised texture of the smocking and embroidery but it looks softer and more natural. We are doing well!

The collar is next. Follow the steps we did for the bodice - make a copy of your collar layer, greyscale it and paste it onto your bump map being very careful to match it to where the collar sits on your coloured bmp. You can do the front and back collar at the same time as realistically they would sit at the same height in real life. The collar should be one of the lightest elements of your bump maps because it is one of the elements on the skin that "sticks out" the most. So I lightened it up 50 and lowered the contrast to -27

Now it looks like this:



I'm sure you get the idea by now. You need to paste on each skin element separately and adjust the contrast and brightness until you are happy with the 3D effect.

To finish my bump map I posted two more layers - the sash and buttons and lightened both layers to: +58 Brightness, -27 Contrast

Here is the final result:

Back:



Front:



Now your pretty pink smocked dress is complete!

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial and found it useful. I would love to hear your questions and or comments, so please post a thread in this forum if you have any.

Have fun skinning!