Basic Skinning Tutorial

[Jay]

TUTORIAL MADE BY: JAY

Skinning


In this tutorial I will be teaching you the basics of skinning. Before we start you must have Photoshop installed aswell as having the .dds plugin placed in Photoshops plugin folder. You can find these two things at the links below.

Adobe Photoshop CS2 Demo

DDS Plugin

Skinning also requires HMT v3.5 so if you don't have it then refer to the the modding basics tutorial.


Lets get started!

1. For this tutorial i'm skinning the warthog, so open up a map in HMT v3.5 and double click on the [bitm]Bitmap tag in the Resource Browser.

2. Scroll down to vehicles\warthog\bitmaps\warthog and click on it.

3. With the warthog bitmap open click the Save Texture button in the Tag Editor box and save it, preferably to the desktop.

4. Now open Photoshop up and open the bitmap you just saved, a box will come up asking about MIP maps, say no.

5. For this tutorial i'm going to change the exterior and the seats of the warthog to a different colour. This meens we need to use the magic wand tool to select those things. Press the W key to switch to the magic wand tool and make sure it's Tolerance is set to 10. While holding the SHIFT key start click on the all the green parts of the warthog until you get something like in the picture below:



6. Now press CTRL+B to bring up the colour balance menu, mess around with these settings until you get something you like, i'll be making my warthog red. Once you've got something you like click Ok to close out of the colour balance menu and then press CTRL+D to de-select everything. You should now have something like in the picture below.



7. Now repeat steps 5-6 again for the seats but make them a little darker than the exterior of the warthog. Once you done you should end up with something like in the picture below.



8. You can clean up all the little parts that were missed but for this tutorial i'm going to inject the new bitmap as is. Alright, click File and then Save As... Make sure it over rights the previous one and then click Save. A new menu will come up, for the warthog bitmap you must change the Save Format to DXT1 (No Alpha) it will be different for other bitmaps and you can check to see which one it is by looking at the bitmap in HMT. Anyways with the proper Save Format selected click Save, here's a picture of what you should be looking at with the DXT thing:



9. Go back over to HMT v3.5, you should still have the map open as well as the bitmap your editing opened. Click the Inject Texture button and navigate to where your edited bitmap is and open it. A message will come up saying the texture was imported successfully. All you have to do now is hit save and close the map file, Here's an end result of what we just did, as you can see there's a lot of little spaces which should be touched up, you can do that yourself just use the zoom tool to get closer up on everything.

[killa9/11]

wow jay your just posting tut after tut man great job you need thanks

[Hazy]

I need help, i found a dds plugin, but where do i put it. and what do i do after the trail version finishes

[Zone 117]

There is no trial, it's free.
http://developer.download.nvidia.com....0307.1915.exe

[Hazy]

lol yea im a newb i guess. ty

[Jay]

Put in your photoshop plugins folder.

[XxMoNkEy42xX]

Not bad...Now show me some nice hog skins made by you. lol

[Jay]

I haven't even done anything with HPC in a while now so no. Maybe i'll show you some awesome maps build from ground up when H2V comes out .

[AtomicBump]

nice tut jay, and have u ever made like a golden hog? lmfao JK only noobs like the 'Golden Hog' do they even relise how dumb that sounds, it sounds like they want a golden pig..

[Zone 117]

I remember trying to find that on headlong when I first got XBL in 05 lol.

[AtomicBump]

find what?

[Jay]

The golden warthog lol.

[Hazy]

what do i do when the trail version runs out on photoshop

[skull14]

Heres a pic of my skins i did a warthog, ghost, and like 4 rocks