Tutorial: Skin recoloring

Tutorials for game development.
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Cimeries
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Tutorial: Skin recoloring

Post by Cimeries »

Skin recoloring tutorial, by Chainsaw.

(Can also be found here in the wiki. All the images are hosted on the wiki.)

This tutorial is for people who are completely new to graphics, and would like to learn an easy method of recoloring skins and textures quickly.

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In this tutorial I'll demonstrate a simple, well known recoloring technique used vastly by sprite artists.
I'll show you how to change the hues of an image by 'borrowing' another image's colors, and without any automatic filters, which, more often than not, look too obvious and unnatural.

Let's pick a texture we'd like to recolour, for the purpose of this tutorial, I picked the Adventurer's
third skin.
You can pick your own, but it would be easier to follow if you did the same for the first time.

Image

I'd like to make the cap blue, and the hair black, I'd also like the little yellow triangles to look like the somewhat purple soldier armor.

The most fitting images to borrow from would be ones that contain as many hues as possible from what you need, sometimes you'll need more than just one image for borrowing purposes.

I picked the Elf's fourth skin, and the Soldier's first.

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We begin by zooming in and copying the Elf's lightest shade of blue, and painting it over the Adventurer's lightest shade of red.

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On to the second lightest shade...

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And so on...

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And so forth...

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And finally:

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It's important that you don't paint two different colors with the same color, unless the image you're recoloring has a significantly larger amount of colors that the images you're borrowing from.

If you ran out of colors, you can always set new ones through the custom color window.
Use your own judgement.

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On to the hair, using the same concept for now.

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The hair is significantly harder, because of the way it is painted, don't worry if you mix some of the colors up, but try to paint at least 60% of them correctly.

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Image

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Now that I've used up the three shades of dark hair, I need to make my own.
I'll make it twice as dark, by setting all the colors from 16 to 8.

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Now...

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The face looks somewhat pixelated, doesn't it?
We'll have to correctly paint the area around the hair, the eyebrows, and the eyes as well.

Image

See the differences between the areas around their features?

Copy these colors as well.
Again, don't worry about making it perfectly fit, even with just 30% accuracy and 5 colors, you can still make it look good.

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Almost done, just color the yellow triangles according to the soldier's armor and do some final touch ups...

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(Notice how the purple balances the face a little bit.)

You're done! I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial, and that you've learned something.

--By Chainsaw

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:wink:
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loggymany
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Post by loggymany »

Where i can download it?
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loggymany
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Post by loggymany »

The skin colorizer
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octagon
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Post by octagon »

I think it uses GIMP ("Select by color" tool) or something.
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loggymany
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Post by loggymany »

Is there a link?
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loggymany
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Post by loggymany »

???
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Zefz
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octagon
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Post by octagon »

loggymany, I'd like to tell you: There is a google.
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loggymany
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Post by loggymany »

no no I don't no that --'
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octagon
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Post by octagon »

I understand. Alternatively, there is DuckDuckGo or Cuil. :teach:
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