A Few Quick Skinning Tips
Just a few tips to keep in mind when making that dy-no-mite skin:
My basic approach to making a skin is to first block off the basic areas in different colors (I might paint an orange bicep, and make the triceps different shades of green). After I've blocked in the different areas to be detailed, I go back and do very basic flat shading, to give a better sense of depth. After that, I mask certain areas I want to work in, then I Add more detailed shading, and then I add the little details. If I've enlarged the skin (I usually don't) I make sure I shrink it back to its original size and save it as a .bmp file. Then I can use MedDLe or qME to import it onto the mdl.
I prefer to work in the Quake pallete when I make a skin. Some people prefer to work in 24 bit color and then convert it to the Quake pallete. Whenever I try that it never seems to come out just right. When you work directly with the pallete, you have more control over how the skin finally turns out.
You need to make sure you use good shading. A skin that is shaded well will look many times better than a skin that uses flat colors. Also make sure you shade each part of the skin with the same light source. It would look very odd if you're guy's face was underlit, but the rest of him was shaded as though the light source was from above. The pic below should give you an idea of how to get a good even shading on your skin.
What I did to get the skin to look like that: First I masked the area I wanted to work in. Then I did a flood fill using the darkest shade I planned on using. Then, using the lightest shade I planned on using, I made the highlight. Then I selected the next darkest color, and colored around the highlight. I repeated this until I had worked through all the shades between the darkest and lightest colors.
You may want to add more detail to the surface once you've gotten the basic shading down. Maybe you want to put a dent into a metal surface or make a surface look a little bumpy. Below are some examples of how you can accomplish neat little effects like that. These are pretty basic examples. You'd still have to add some more detail to them to make 'em look good, but this should get you started.
These examples are taken from a 320x200 skin enlarged by 1600%. The area shown is about 16 pixels high and 24 pixels wide. When viewed at 100%, these big blocks will looks like little dents on a gray surface.
