Originally posted by 101ABN
Can someone give me the first idea on how to make skins. I want to learn how to do make some.
Besides having a good editor like PSP or PS, you need some basic resources. To begin with, you simply have to have a good quality line drawing of the plane you want to skin, so you know where all the panel lines are supposed to be and what they represent. Most of the stock skins left over from AH1 have the lines in the wrong places, or use the lines from a different version or even type of plane, so you need to fix that.
Find as many photos as you can of the type of plane you want to skin. What you're looking for are the little details. How prominent are the panel lines and/or rivets? What shape and color is the exhaust stain? What types of oil leaks and other stains did this type of plane commonly have? Where did the paint chip the most from servicing and flying? You need all these details to make your skin look like the real thing.
Then you need some historical plane to make a skin of. HTC wants real planes, so go find something with a paintjob you like and that you can document. Use photos, color profiles (or even better, color 3-views), web pages where guys show off plastic kits they've built and document their own research for them, etc.
The final part of this background info is having some reference on the proper sizes and proportions of the national and unit insignia. For instance, do you know the proportions and overall size of the RAF Type C.1 roundel? What about German crosses?
You also need a box of paints. In the world of skinning, this means having some generally accepted R/G/B values for the common paints of all the various air forces at the different points in the war when they changed. Search in here and you'll find a number of links to good sites of such things.
And last but not least, you need Bright.exe. This is a freeware DOS program that converts 24-bit .bmps into the 256-color format used in AH. It does a MUCH better job of this than the built-in functions in PSP and PS. So once you save your skin as a 24-bit .bmp, run it through Bright.exe to convert it to 256-color, and then put it in the game to see what it looks like.
So, now you've got the plane and paintjob you want to do, and you have a good idea of how the overall thing is supposed to look, from panel line and fasterners to camo pattern to exhaust stains to the size of the national insignia, and you can paint it in the correct color. Now how do you turn this into a skin?
This being art, everybody has his own opinion. What I like to do is make my skin layers stack up in the same order they are on the real plane. That is, panel lines at the bottom, paint on that, markings above paint, and stains over everything. This naturally means you have to make all layers above the panel lines a bit transparent, so the underlying details show through the way you want. This is cool, however, because reducing the opacity of the paint layer, for example, "thins" the color a bit, which you need to do to make it look right in the game. It's just like having to thin paint on a plastic model to make the color look right for the scale.
Everything after this is just mechanical. Do something in the editor, save the skin, run it through Bright, and look at it in the game. Take screenshots of problem areas, then go back to the editor and fix the problems, using the screenshots as a guide. There are a few tricks you'll figure out for yourself as you do a few skins, and you'll get more proficient with your editor as well, so in no time you'll be making better looking engines and landing gear components than came with the game, as well as doing your cool new paintjob.
One tip, however. When you look at your skin in the game, ALWAYS be zoomed in. This greatly reduces the amount of distortion in the 3D model when you're right up close to it counting how many pixels you have to move a panel line.
