Quake Skins Tutorial

Carl Kidwell
HighColor Mode
Page 3

So far we have used examples that you often wont run into when trying to create a skin. The rest of this section is dedicated to showing you the process of creating a flesh base chest in high color mode.

First we start off with a blank template.

You see here (above) the outline of a chest. The upper portion that points up in a triangle shape is the neck.

In the image above I have introduced a new tool to help you conform to the Quake palette. In the lower right hand corner is the 'on image palette'. Basically its like having a palette to choose from on your image itself instead of within the paint program. This is most usefull when you are using a program (like PaintShop Pro) that when you change to highcolor mode the color palette changes so that you can choose from millions of colors. Well thats fine and all, but since you know that your image eventually will need to conform to the Quake palette you are better off choosing colors that already actually exist in Quake. So by using the "eyedropper" tool to choose your colors from the "on image palette" that I show above you can make sure to give maximum chance that your image will not change much after you load the Quake palette.

NEW - this same technique is equally usefull for Quake2 or any other game that has a palette you need to conform to.

First off you'll notice (below) that I picked a color that is in the middle of the flesh tones for the image background. Reason being that I will need to make both dark and lighter highlights, and by choosing a color in the middle I allow myself room for proper contrast.

And to show the begining of the work I have created some round highlights over his chest to depict his pectoral muscles with the airbrush tool below.