Placing shading on body texture?

[xKaylaHallison]

Hey guys, I've been working on making skin body appliers but I'm having a hard time placing shadows on the template, under the arms, the back of the arms etc without it looking off or causing seams, I feel like I may be missing a method to do this, I've tried using avastar and baking a shadow map with the default body to then use as an overlay on my skin but the map doesn't turn out great at all and it looks awful, not sure of a workaround to this, I was just wondering what methods does everyone else use or if there are any shadow map resources available for skin creation? Thanks

[MaxMare]

I use 3ds Max so I won`t be able to tell you what settings to use in Blender, but generally, any 3D software has a bunch of settings related to bake to texture process, definitely look into this..Another issue is that default SL body is  low poly in comparison  to mesh bodies, so either apply subdiv (make sure UV mapping didn`t get distorted in the process, this is fixable), adjust your bake settings  and quality of baked maps....HOWEVER, I don`t think baking an AO and using it as an overlay is the best solution for this particular task, besides, you won`t capture correct anatomy for simple reason-it is not modeled in the mesh. 

From what I see on the market atm and what is popular and worn are realistic skins created with real life photo textures (you can buy these on texture sharing sites) blended at the seams and added highlights (drawn by hand)...another, more advanced and complex procedure would be hand painted skin which requires some serious drawing skills, knowing how to use color to create illusion of 3rd dimension and ofc some understanding of human anatomy as well as UV mapping (regarding placement and how polygons stretch when textures are applied). Another thing you will need are skin swatches/palette,  there are tons of presets on pinterest example.. There are also tons of amazing drawing/painting tutorials for each body part example1, example2...drawing is rather easy, but using color is not...takes a while to get used to it (best to start monochrome until you are happy with the result then do the same in multicolor)

Photoshop Extended has an in built 3D option which is, in my opinion, the best tool for this task...it works with layers as usual, but let`s you paint in 3D viewport so you can literally paint over seams which is then captured on the flat UV...

One final note, having a decent graphic tablet would make your life easier and is worth investing into if you want to go down this route...

Hope this helps (and that I made sense explaining lol), good luck!

[xKaylaHallison]

18 hours ago, MaxMare said:

I use 3ds Max so I won`t be able to tell you what settings to use in Blender, but generally, any 3D software has a bunch of settings related to bake to texture process, definitely look into this..Another issue is that default SL body is  low poly in comparison  to mesh bodies, so either apply subdiv (make sure UV mapping didn`t get distorted in the process, this is fixable), adjust your bake settings  and quality of baked maps....HOWEVER, I don`t think baking an AO and using it as an overlay is the best solution for this particular task, besides, you won`t capture correct anatomy for simple reason-it is not modeled in the mesh. 

From what I see on the market atm and what is popular and worn are realistic skins created with real life photo textures (you can buy these on texture sharing sites) blended at the seams and added highlights (drawn by hand)...another, more advanced and complex procedure would be hand painted skin which requires some serious drawing skills, knowing how to use color to create illusion of 3rd dimension and ofc some understanding of human anatomy as well as UV mapping (regarding placement and how polygons stretch when textures are applied). Another thing you will need are skin swatches/palette,  there are tons of presets on pinterest example.. There are also tons of amazing drawing/painting tutorials for each body part example1, example2...drawing is rather easy, but using color is not...takes a while to get used to it (best to start monochrome until you are happy with the result then do the same in multicolor)

Photoshop Extended has an in built 3D option which is, in my opinion, the best tool for this task...it works with layers as usual, but let`s you paint in 3D viewport so you can literally paint over seams which is then captured on the flat UV...

One final note, having a decent graphic tablet would make your life easier and is worth investing into if you want to go down this route...

Hope this helps (and that I made sense explaining lol), good luck!

Thank you so much for replying ❤

[Stephanie Misfit]

These sound like the sort of thing you were trying to make, they were quite popular back in the day when I was making skins. Whether they are any better than the results you got though, I have no idea.

https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Fake-Bake-Shaded-Avatar-TGAs-Tutorial/140146

 

[Janet Voxel]

Wow, the good old fake bake. That takes me back to the applier days.

[xKaylaHallison]

Thank you, I'll give them a whirl

[xKaylaHallison]

Does anyone use photoshop 3d to make skins? I figured it would be the easiest way to deal with seams but since the upper and lower body parts are seperate objects, I'm not sure how to crossover paint between the 2 as if it were one whole object, without messing up the UV's..

[Stephanie Misfit]

18 hours ago, xKaylaHallison said:

Does anyone use photoshop 3d to make skins? I figured it would be the easiest way to deal with seams but since the upper and lower body parts are seperate objects, I'm not sure how to crossover paint between the 2 as if it were one whole object, without messing up the UV's..

I used to, been a while though. I had a 3d object of the whole avatar to paint on, with separate upper and lower textures of course. So I could just paint across seams. I don't know where I got that full avatar object but it will be obtainable somewhere.

[xKaylaHallison]

7 hours ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

I used to, been a while though. I had a 3d object of the whole avatar to paint on, with separate upper and lower textures of course. So I could just paint across seams. I don't know where I got that full avatar object but it will be obtainable somewhere.

Ahh, I tried exporting the upper and lower body parts (as separate objects but placed together) from blender, but photoshop just treats it as one object with one uv map and i'm not sure how to correct it (as shown) so frustrating that i'm so close yet so far, ahhhh  

 

Edited September 29, 2019 by xKaylaHallison

[Stephanie Misfit]

The link in this thread still works, I am pretty sure it is what I used, it has the full avatar with 3 materials 

 

[xKaylaHallison]

36 minutes ago, Stephanie Misfit said:

The link in this thread still works, I am pretty sure it is what I used, it has the full avatar with 3 materials 

 

Omg, yes it works, thank you SO much!! ❤️

[metabih]

On 9/29/2019 at 4:18 PM, Stephanie Misfit said:

The link in this thread still works, I am pretty sure it is what I used, it has the full avatar with 3 materials 

 

im using the kit on photoshop but there is a gloss to it that messes up quality any details on how i set it up correctly to add template i doubt im doing it correctly. ive been asking around and this is so hard