[UT200x-Skinning]: Making skins of good quality with low effort

[Maxx]

This tutorial shows some easy tricks to let your skin become looking more professional. It is ment for beginners and so there are only some basic clues to be found here, but if you practise and try out more you`re skins can become pretty nice with less effort. Personally I used Paintshop Pro 10 for skinning, so the usage might differ in other programmes.

First of all I want to tell you how many people rate skin quality:

Bad: Simply added some colors in upaint, no shading effects, no teamcolors
Good: There are different UT-textures used, the skin has teamcolors, good portrait and it looks quite professional.
Great: New ideas, new textures, just awesome looking (can also be done with UT textures if you are creative)

If you have problems in working with layers, just focus on good recolors for the moment and take also a look at the other turorials.

Download Link for this skin created in this tutorial:
Team Spark Fist

 

[Maxx]

Ok, enough talking, let`s start. Today I will skin a robot without any masked out stuff (you should leave this out at the beginning), I have never skinned it before, so it is quite about time for this

We open the original texture and maybe want to greyscale or recolor it. This is no must, but people playing my skins know me for darker skins with bright colors

 

[Maxx]

After the recoloring switch back to 16 mio colors and save the file as bmp. If you are working with masks, you should save it as png though! By masking things I mean to let parts of the model "disappear" or overlayed (for instance Saphire`s Hairstyle).



After that we take a first look in upaint:

 

[Maxx]

Let`s bring color in the skin`s life! Change the Blending mode of your paintbrush to something you like and you can easily recolor the skin and keep the original design!



Don`t be shy to load the skin more often into upaint, you can test which bodyparts are affected by your work and how it looks

 

[Maxx]

The gold looks nice? Yes, that`s true, but at the moment we are only recoloring...Time for a small change. Let`s add a shiny effect to that gold!
First of all, add a layer to your bitmap:



Now we need a good reference image, I will use the one I created when skinning some egyptians (Team Star Blade). UT has many good grafics you can use for this purpose, or just google for it, but you should never ever use stuff of other persons without their permission! You can find a good gold effect on Diva`s/Memphis` original bitmap.



Ok, let`s mark the wished area and copy the effect into it. After doing this, just open the properties of the layer and play with the blend ranges until you have a good result.



When you are happy just merge all layers and save the bitmap

 

[Maxx]

The skin is looking much better now, right?



Ok, let`s skin the head. I always want to make something new and I haven`t seen this model with a face wearing the upper head as supersized helmet...I think I`ll go for this. Let`s take the Metal Guard`s head and recolor it for better fitting the body.

 

[Maxx]

After using additional stuff of Widowmaker and ClanLord the head looks like this now:


Woohoo, that is the moment I want to release this skin. Inititally it was planned for this tut only, but I like what I see here.

Ok, after some time we are ready for the comparison:



Nice what we got here, remember we only took stuff from Diva, Widowmaker Barktooth and Clanlord!

 

[Maxx]

A good skin also needs it`s teamcolors, for this turorial we make it easy.We just switch the gold stuff



to another color, for instance blue:

 

[Maxx]

Ok, the skin is ready for testplay now. We should keep in mind, that the original upaint generated portrait is well....not good, let`s say it that way and so we go for something different. Either follow klasnic`s great tutorial, make an ingame shot after winning a deathmath or simply move all other upl-files out of the system folder (do not delete them, you should recopy them later). With our new skin the only one in the game we can easily let have him posing in the highscore screen in single player mode.



I combine this with another good background image, I made the seen one from scratch in Paintshop and è voilà our portraits look quite professional:

 

[Maxx]

The skinning part is over now, you should finish the skin by making a proper upl (tutorial) and maybe also a nice bio (tutorial).

Keep in mind, that all you need is practise, practise and practise. If you manage to do all tricks of this tutorial and keep experimenting new stuff, Your works will get better.

Happy skinning!