Here it is, at long last - the skinning tutorial. Just let me mention that in these introductory paragraphs I'm not going to show you how to use a hex editor to assign the textures to models. My reasons are that I no longer have a hex editing program, and so I can't show you any screenshots, and two I've already explained using Milkshape to assign the textures (see Modeling tutorials) so I don't see any need to repeat myself.

The skin I'll be using as an example is the first of a small pack I've made to illustrate a character from my novel, Black Adder. I'm also going to be showing you how to do this with Adobe Photoshop. You can make skins with Paint Shop Pro, but just remember that all skins without transparencies must be saved in 24-bit .tga format. Also, image dimensions have to be multiples of 32 if I am remembering correctly. To ensure you don't have errors from creating new skins, I recommend you begin by opening an original skin, selecting all, and deleting what's there if you need a blank slate to start from.

Ready to begin? All right. The skin we're going to work on goes with this model (yes, I made it).

I'm going to assume that unlike me, you don't have a million loose skins just sitting in a directory in your hard drive, so let's start by opening Win-Zip. Using Win-Zip, press Open and browse to your Vampire main directory. Locate and open the Resource.nob file. Inside of it, locate the files NormalGirlCombo.tga, ZilHair.tga, zilHair_dbl.nam, and ZilMPFace.tga. Extract them, making sure that Use folder names is checked, directly onto base hard drive directory (usually that's C but in my case it's D). By leaving Use folder names checked, you have just created a folder called 3d, and inside of it, a folder called Materials contains the extracted skins. You're done with Win-Zip for the time being, so close it down.

Open Photoshop and use it to open the NormalGirlCombo.tga. You should see this.

Press the zoom button, then right-click the image and choose fit on screen. With the image magnified to a workable size, choose the lasso tool. Here's a breakdown of the tools in case you need to know.

Now, choose the lasso. Make sure you've got the free lasso and not the straight-line or magnetic lasso (if you click the lasso button and hold it down a minute, the rest of the options there will pop open) and draw a loose selection around the shirt on the NormalGirl skin. If you mess up, you can hold down alt and that will enable you to remove some areas from your selection without losing the entire amount you've selected, or you can hold shift to add to it. Don't worry about getting the white space in there. I'll show you what to do.

When you see this, go back to the toolbar and pick the magic wand. Hold down alt and click the white areas and/or any areas of skin that you've accidentally selected. This deselects them. You should have this on your screen now.

Now, go to Image/Adjust/Hue & Saturation, or press Control + U to bring up the Hue and Saturation window. We're going to turn this pink shirt to green.

That's good, however the contrast isn't what I want. I'm going to go to Image/Adjust/Contrast and fix that. I won't show you a picture here, because all you do with that is pull the little sliders around until it's the contrast and brightness that you want.

I'm going to deselect it, but I'm seeing something I don't really like. I have a thing against showing too much nudity in skins, and even though you probably won't notice this in the finished product, I'm still going to smudge out the, um, "details" on the chest. I select the blur tool and smooth out the shirt a bit.

Okay, for this outfit, I'm going to add in a blue stripe across the bosom. To do that, I'm going to pick the rectangular marquee tool. I'll just select across the chest, and then change the hue and saturation again to make it blue without losing any of the details of the shirt.

I'm going to make the stripe go all the way around, but I'll probably have to make some adjustments to get it to line up, so I'll worry about that in a moment. Now I want to show you a simple way to color the fingernails. Use the lasso to draw around the fingertips. It doesn't matter if you get some of the white, but be careful not to select the flesh around the fingernails. You can deselect the white easily enough but in this particular skin the nails are flesh colored so the magic wand won't work too well. Once that is selected press control + U to bring up the hue/saturation window. Check the colorize box. This tints the nails. You can now adjust the color, saturation, and lightness to what you want it to be. I'll make it blue to match the stripe on the shirt.

Okay, now that all this is done, it's time to save the file (you probably would want to save sooner than this, but anyway...). If you have any layers, go to Layer/Flatten Image and flatten it. You won't be able to save in the proper format if you still have layers. This tutorial isn't covering layers, so you should be fine. Save-As a 24-bit tga file into the 3d/Materials folder. Now close Photoshop and open Milkshape. Please see the Modeling tutorials section for how to assign textures in Milkshape, then return here for the next portion of the tutorial, which is preparing the file for use.

I will tell you now that anything that needs to be double-sided, such as long hair, or the lower parts of trench coats, should be assigned to a .nam file. For example, if your skin's jacket graphic is called SamJacket.tga, you'll need to create a file called SamJacket_dbl.nam. I recommend that you extract with Win-Zip one of the original .nam files, open it in Notepad, and change the information inside to your texture's name and then re-save it with the proper new name (be sure you get a .nam extension, not .txt or txt.nam). In Milkshape you don't have to do anything but rename the appropriate group to (in our example) SamJacket_dbl, leaving off the extension. Since this is a text file instructing the game to double-side the texture, the parts assigned to it won't show up properly in Milkshape, but don't worry. It should look great in-game.