How to cheat skin edit 16 colors instead of 15 and fake gold/blue skin (mods read first before delete)

When you turn all 15 colors to whatever, you'll notice black lines, you try to use the dropper tool on them and it refuses to absorb the color.

When making highly detailed or shaded skins you want EVERY SINGLE color you can. The only way to use that color is using the selection tool over those lines, copy, paste. Wala now you got 16 colors instead of 15. The only pain is that you have to copy/paste that color every time. So it's good to construct shapes beforehand and try to keep them off polygons -- if you can't find any empty space, place them on an area that you'd paint last and finally.... it's best you probably use these to draw outlines of your skin BEFORE you even begin painting.

You've seen those strubangers and gywains that are blue shaded steel. I am trying to convert that to draken's armor. There are over 17+ aquamarine colors alone, not to mention the additional colors. I've seen people attempt to make 'fake gold bots' and fail pretty hard (no offense) entirely possible -- just a lot more time consuming.

The idea is you take 3 sub/main/second colors that are as close to the original gold or blue bots as possible which is what most people do, now the smarter people who play with colors will add those to frame and user colors to make up for the in-between loss making the shading far more smooth. You'll want to take after at least 3-4 of the colors and keep the remaining 2-3 for additional colors.

For moe bots you absolutely must have 2 skin tones, a black outline (the fabled 16th color will work perfectly) so this leaves you with a final color which probably should be a semi dark grey for shadowing the 16th color.

This is skill level asian skin edit! Expect to put at least a solid week or two into your skin if you're going this route. I don't know if I can finish a skin of this level without getting frustrated and giving up, but if I manage to pull off a badass draken skin -- I might sell it for ugc after spamming it in arena for a couple weeks to prove that I was the one who did it.

An easy way is to export it out, and edit in ms paint instead.

Didn't expect it to be something new, but I wasn't sure. Opening it in ms-paint robs you of the ability to see UV lines, but it does give you the ability to make complex shapes beforehand to drag around without the annoyance of the glitchy selection tool.

Well, I have to open both windows if I get serious.
But It doesn't happen that often to me.

its good to outline the parts in a bright red shade temporarily(heck or use white) in order to start drawing outside the program. then just fix the outline afterwords

The one irony of doing this is you have to be 100% on the colors beforehand because you're using blending colors on the user/frame colors -- if you use different colors -- short of manually changing those. It's going to look goofy. Good advice though.

This is the difference between a toy and a tool. If you use any graphics software more advance than MSpaint, this should be a snap. Anything that can handle layers, like GIMP or photoshop will help you out here. Just snap a screenshot of the texture with the polymap overlay and use that as a separate layer to act as or as a base for a guild. Also, using something like those programs will give you direct access to the color map to edit as you please.

Also, it should be important to tell you that colors number 0-8 are locked into colors assigned to the model in game, so when you import the texture keep that in mind. The game will leave colors 9-15 alone.

So, basically, you want to fake a blue skin?

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Something like that?

These gold skins only use 2 Frame Colors and 3 User Colors, leaving Main, Sub and Light free as well as 1 spare color for skin tone.

S'pose with a few min's in Photoshop, i could make a Blue one for you and see how that looks?

That's exactly what im talking about(in terms of people making it and doing it badly). It's not nicely done. You can see the lines separating. You need far more colors to make it smooth, and it isn't just lines, its interweaving colors.

<-- save this, zoom in, study it. There's easily 25+ colors in this and it isn't starting with darker, then moving onto lighter with lines.

Yeah, that is the limit of what you can produce with a pallet reduced to 16 colors by hand. The choices you have is reduce the range of the gradient, giving it a smoother texture, but a less of the reflective "sheen" that makes it look "metalic", or use a far more advance method of dithering, which unless done well, will make the texture look gritty and may introduce unwanted artifacts. I can outline a process that employs a true gradient, but it's not going to give you the definition you want due to the limitations put in place by the game.

By the way, I am sure that you know this, but a metallic effect is hard to reproduce do you the way light interacts with materials, think of a metallic black paint job. There are many layers of effects that go beyond a smooth gradient, that banding that you see in those is intentional in an effort to reproduce a high sheen surface. This point is moot, as you want something with a more even/matte surface, but do keep that in mind when looking at these skins.

Personally, I don't like that effect in digital art or anywhere else, it is garish and frankly doesn't look good.

Nerf's Title wrote:

(mods read first before delete)

Why'd you put that? XD

Astral_Goddess wrote:

Nerf's Title wrote:

(mods read first before delete)

Why'd you put that? XD

Mainly because from the thread selection page, most recent post in x topic, it says "How to cheat the ski..." or something along those lines.

/feedmodeon

because many humans would stop at the third word

/feedmodeoff

Shu Shirakawa wrote:

Yeah, that is the limit of what you can produce with a pallet reduced to 16 colors by hand. The choices you have is reduce the range of the gradient, giving it a smoother texture, but a less of the reflective "sheen" that makes it look "metalic", or use a far more advance method of dithering, which unless done well, will make the texture look gritty and may introduce unwanted artifacts. I can outline a process that employs a true gradient, but it's not going to give you the definition you want due to the limitations put in place by the game.

By the way, I am sure that you know this, but a metallic effect is hard to reproduce do you the way light interacts with materials, think of a metallic black paint job. There are many layers of effects that go beyond a smooth gradient, that banding that you see in those is intentional in an effort to reproduce a high sheen surface. This point is moot, as you want something with a more even/matte surface, but do keep that in mind when looking at these skins.

Personally, I don't like that effect in digital art or anywhere else, it is garish and frankly doesn't look good.

With smaller things I can easily make something look shiny with just 3 colors and look good, but what were talking about is something larger than a space of 4x4 pixels or a 5x1 line -- the larger the space, the more detail required. Things like eyes or small detail is easy enough -- What my plan consists of here is...

Select 3 (3 shades of each 9 total /main/sub/user) colors that are as close together as possible in shade -- the game only entitles you a pre-set selection of colors. Most of them being so far apart or completely different colors that using the last 2 color sets (6 total) to try to bridge the shades...

I haven't gotten down to the 'grit' of my project so far, I don't even know if it'll work and the worst part is I'm going to be screwed to only a single color with multiple shades. I really don't think this will work lmfao...

Main color(user color)Main color(user color)Main color(user color)
Sub color(frame color)Sub color(frame color)Sub color(frame color)
^-- used up all the customizable colors and only left with "light color" and the 16th color. So i'd have a really really really blue-ish armor bot with skin tone and black lines with no shadowing. FML I think im gonna scrap the idea, still learned some neat stuff and been thinking about the whole "layers" thing in photoshop, while you may get the UV to use you'll have no idea where some of the things go and how to wrap a skin on it to make it properly match up, granted corrections can be done later, but it sort of requires a visual memory of sorts. I personally prefer to watch the 3d model and see where the lines are or where they can meet.

Nerf, I think I see what you're asking about here, the term you're probably looking for is "dithering" where you make a pattern of two colors at the pixel level that looks similar to a checkerboard. If the two colors are similar, the effect looks like a color blended between the two.

Dithering is used a lot on the fleshtone portions of moebots already in the game, and a lot of us skin makers use it to make blended effects in other places as well. It's surprising how many 'virtual shades' you can make with dithering if your resolution is high enough.

If the resolution on the part skin is low, however, the whole method comes out looking like crap.

Gradients are pretty easy, it's the "look" that's hard to get. Below is an example of Tengu BS. Tengu BS is actually a bad example however because the part itself is so undetailed (limited pixels)



I wasn't going for the blue/gold/silver bot look, but it's still an example of gradients :3

I seen that bot before and I know how to do that i did it to drakens "horns" didnt turn out any better than yours. =/

Didn't someone in the player base develop an exported skin-modifying tool for this kind of thing? Does that work well?

Friend me on CB and we can discuss/share skins and such

Someone can post the pattern of the fake gold/blue and silver to start skinning my bots? please

I think i wouldnt mind a copy of this myself XD would love to see my patty's armor in blue silvery armor

donggyu wrote:

Gradients are pretty easy, it's the "look" that's hard to get. Below is an example of Tengu BS. Tengu BS is actually a bad example however because the part itself is so undetailed (limited pixels)



I wasn't going for the blue/gold/silver bot look, but it's still an example of gradients :3

Large parts tend to have this cheap look because of the size of the canvas in comparison of the part size :\