Procedure for making player skins?

[OneManClan]

Hi people.

Q1: What is the proper/intelligent/professional way to make high res player skins?

I've been rtfming about the situation with Quake and textures, but haven't found a 'step by step' guide. Currently my (newbie guesswork) procedure is:

1. In QME, open the model, and export the skin.

2. Open the skin (pcx) in Photoshop.

3. At this point we are ready to paint, but how do you pick the colours you want to use? I began by seeing if the colour exists in an existing skin, and using the eye dropper tool to select it, and then draw using that colour. After some more rtfming, I opened open up the quake pallette (as shown ), and , but this (for some reason) resulted in messed up skins. [DISCLAIMER: This might be because I changed the format to RGB (so I could use layers) and changed back to '8 bit indexed colour', and something else might have gone wrong]


I found this , but there must be a different format for skins, because when I open player existing (TF) skins in Photoshop, they are all 8 bit Indexed colour. The resolution is very low. But there must be another format for skins, because I noticed a head on the ground (using fte client), and it was .

Q2: What is the procedure to make high resolution skins like that? Is there some 'restriction' where player skins can't be high res? Or does it depend on the client / resolution / graphics settings?

Finally, I found this backpack .mdl in my /progs folder with Bill Gate's face on the back, and it looks reasonably high res - clearly this was a photo which was 'processed' to a) remove non-quake compatible colours, and b) be compatible/look good in Quake... HOW?

thanks

OneManClan

ps. I have already read the QUAKE GRAPHICS EDITING FAQ (http://joz3d.net/documents/qgraphic.txt) and I know about fullbrights

[Spike]

there's a couple of different ways to do high res skins (which you're not going to like, of course).

there's the ezquake way:
make 14 different copies of every skin each painted a different colour.
brute force aproach. bypasses colourmapping support in the renderer and moves it into the skin loader.

and the dp/fte way:
make 3 separate images that each contribute to part of the skin. the maths is: base+(lower*lowercolour)+(upper*uppercolour).
(of course, there's also fullbright, normalmaps and specular images too... but those are technically separate features. be glad you don't need 14 copies of each of these).
this means you can still have rich colour choices like green-and-yellow: color 0x00ff00 0xffff00. You could hyjack one of these colours to add other stuff... But you'd oversaturate rather than replace (you can theoretically work around that by providing your own glsl code, giving you some way to select a subsection of a different texture to use as a head or whatever, but that's probably just a little too engine/model specific...)


If you import an rgb skin into qme, then export it as a pcx, you should have a pcx using the proper palette that you can then use as a player skin. Just discard whatever model you imported it into afterwards. Of course, doing this is a hassle.

[OneManClan]

[Spike]

okay then. shorter answers.

A1: They use tga/jpg/png. Not pcx. Only crazy people use pcx.
the only advantage to pcx is that the palette is known and can thus be colourmapped like software always did. you wouldn't otherwise use it.

A2: not painting per pixel. not using palettes. get an actual artist to describe that cos I suck at that stuff.

[goldenboy]

[OneManClan]

[goldenboy]