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Every skinner wants to get better. One way to improve is to understand more about shading. I spent a little time today playing with shading. Here is what I did and learned.
I am a Mac user, so I use Skincraft to make my skins starting from scratch. I use Pipette, a free app that allows you to grab any onscreen color and convert it to its hex code value which I can enter into Skincraft and I use PowerPoint for basic graphics.
Back to the point of the blog. The head on the Steve template is a cube and heads IRL are more spherical, ellipsoidal, or drop shaped. Some possible head shapes are illustrated here:
I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to map the shading of a sphere onto a cube to make my skins look more natural. I started by finding an image of a red sphere illuminated straight on and a little above. I laid an 8x8 grid over the sphere's image in PowerPoint and then used Pipette to find an average color value for each square in the grid. I entered the hex code from Pipette into the color selector box in Skincraft and colored each square accordingly. Here is a visual of the process. I think the end result looks pretty cool (perhaps the start of a weird lollipop skin...).
There are some problems with this approach, each side of the sphere would have to be mapped individually using the correct lighting position. Perhaps more importantly, skins in the game are subject to in-game lighting, so it would seem weird to apply highly directional lighting to a skin only to have it not agree with in-game illumination and shadows. I decided it would be better to make a grayscale shading with straight on illumination for the sphere and apply it to all sides of the cube. Perhaps it will allow someone to make a sphere shading overlay for Gimp or MCSkin3D. Here are some screen shots of the outcome. Note, I purposely did not make the shading symmetrical on the images because it makes skins less interesting to look at. I purposely selected slightly lighter values toward the right and upward.
Now for some lessons learned. If you want a head to look roughly spherical then you need to use lighter shades in the corners, not darker shades. I applied this approach to my Fairy Tale Frog skin and it looked better to me. Here is a screen shot of the improved frog skin (right) from the back next to its lagged original 2D image (left) Why is it that the 2D images never seem to update...
For comparison, I looked at the skins of the big names in skinning and had an insight. They generally don't shade the head as if it is a sphere. They treat the head as a cylinder which makes the mapping more seamless between faces of the cube and works well with treating the top and bottom of the head like a sphere. Cylinder shading is what is used for the arms, legs, and body by most skinners. Here is a good site to learn more about shading cylinders: http://www.drawinghowtodraw.com/stepbystepdrawinglessons/2011/10/how-to-draw-cylinders-and-drawing-shaded-cylindrical-objects-with-cast-shadows-with-easy-step-by-step-drawing-tutorial/
I am a Mac user, so I use Skincraft to make my skins starting from scratch. I use Pipette, a free app that allows you to grab any onscreen color and convert it to its hex code value which I can enter into Skincraft and I use PowerPoint for basic graphics.
Back to the point of the blog. The head on the Steve template is a cube and heads IRL are more spherical, ellipsoidal, or drop shaped. Some possible head shapes are illustrated here:
I wanted to see what would happen if I tried to map the shading of a sphere onto a cube to make my skins look more natural. I started by finding an image of a red sphere illuminated straight on and a little above. I laid an 8x8 grid over the sphere's image in PowerPoint and then used Pipette to find an average color value for each square in the grid. I entered the hex code from Pipette into the color selector box in Skincraft and colored each square accordingly. Here is a visual of the process. I think the end result looks pretty cool (perhaps the start of a weird lollipop skin...).
There are some problems with this approach, each side of the sphere would have to be mapped individually using the correct lighting position. Perhaps more importantly, skins in the game are subject to in-game lighting, so it would seem weird to apply highly directional lighting to a skin only to have it not agree with in-game illumination and shadows. I decided it would be better to make a grayscale shading with straight on illumination for the sphere and apply it to all sides of the cube. Perhaps it will allow someone to make a sphere shading overlay for Gimp or MCSkin3D. Here are some screen shots of the outcome. Note, I purposely did not make the shading symmetrical on the images because it makes skins less interesting to look at. I purposely selected slightly lighter values toward the right and upward.
Now for some lessons learned. If you want a head to look roughly spherical then you need to use lighter shades in the corners, not darker shades. I applied this approach to my Fairy Tale Frog skin and it looked better to me. Here is a screen shot of the improved frog skin (right) from the back next to its lagged original 2D image (left) Why is it that the 2D images never seem to update...
For comparison, I looked at the skins of the big names in skinning and had an insight. They generally don't shade the head as if it is a sphere. They treat the head as a cylinder which makes the mapping more seamless between faces of the cube and works well with treating the top and bottom of the head like a sphere. Cylinder shading is what is used for the arms, legs, and body by most skinners. Here is a good site to learn more about shading cylinders: http://www.drawinghowtodraw.com/stepbystepdrawinglessons/2011/10/how-to-draw-cylinders-and-drawing-shaded-cylindrical-objects-with-cast-shadows-with-easy-step-by-step-drawing-tutorial/
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