Head Tutorial by Desdemona
2. Getting the
file ready
Open the base
head in one skin tone. A C001 head will do for most meshes, eg. all
Fionn's real hair meshes. If the color palette to your right doesn't
contain all colors, choose Colors -> increase color depth -> 16 mio
colors. This allows you to use all colors and all tools in PSP.
Now
open the bases in the other skin tone. Copy the image and paste it onto
the first base as a seperate layer (choose Edit -> paste -> as new
layer). Do the same thing with the remaining skin tone. Now you should
have an image with three layers.
To keep yourself from getting
confused, you can rename the layers by right-clicking them in the Layer
Palette. Name the light base 'light' and so on, this will make things much
simpler as you go along. Here's how the Layer Palette should look, this is
with the pale skintone included:
Keeping
each skintone as a different layer will make it much easier to make heads
in all skintones. You can skip this step if you only want to work with one
skin tone, but you still have to keep the base as a seperate
layer.
Now you save you
work as a .psp file. This allows you to keep the layers intact. You might
as well name the file correctly from the start in stead of having to
rename the file later.
The first part of the file name is a code that
will tell the game which mesh to use and the age, gender and skintone of
that sim, so it's important to get it right. The part after the '_' is the
name you give the head. Here's how the 'code' is made:
The first
letter is 'B' for body or 'C' for head.
The three
numbers following is the number of the mesh fx. '710' or
'001'.
Then there's a gender/age code: 'FA' means female
adult, 'MA' means male adult, 'FC' means female child,
'MC' means male child and 'UC' means universal child (both
male and female).
The texture (the .bmp file) also has one more code
for skincolor: 'lgt' is light, 'med' is medium and
'drk' is dark.
The part that comes after the code is the name.
It's separeted by an '_' so it's easy to tell apart. The name is up
to you to decide.
Basically, your head must have the same code as the
mesh you're using plus 'lgt', 'med' or 'drk' (use the 'lgt' for pale skins
as well) and then add your own name after the '_'. I'm using the mesh
C1k2fa_battie by FrillySims for this tutorial, so I'll name my head
'C1k2falgt_desdTutorial' - when I do the other skin tones I'll just
have to replace the 'lgt' with 'med' or 'drk'. If I decide on another
mesh, I'll just have to replace '1k2' in the name with something
else.
IMPORTANT NOTE
ABOUT SAVING YOUR FILE: To get your file to work with The Sims and SimShow
you must save it as a bitmap (.bmp) file in 256 colors. But because the
.bmp format doesn't support layers, you will have to work in .psp format.
This means that you save your work as .psp, then decrease the color depth
to 256 colors (colors -> decrease color depth -> 256 colors) and
save it as a .bmp - I use the Maxis/SimShow/GameData/Textures folder. When
you've checked out your head in SimShow, just open the .psp file and
continue working from that. That way you'll never loose the layers you've
created.