U-boat Skinning Tutorial/FAQ somewhere?

[panthercules]

Thought I'd like to play around with trying to make/modify a skin for a u-boat, but I have absolutely no clue how to go about it or even get started - I examined some of the modded skin downloads but found it unenlightening in my current state of total noobness with this stuff.

Is there some FAQ/manual/tutorial out there that explains what tools/programs you need and what files you need to mess with?

If I just wanted to start slow and take one of the stock skins and change the basic gray color (to make it a darker gray, for example), would that be hard to do and would there be a tutorial/FAQ that would explain how to do that?

[U-4053]

Hello!

I skin Planes for IL2Sturmovik.
Skinning anything is basically the same deal, here is a Link to a Skinners Forum Hope this helps, there are alot of tutorials out there, basically you work with layers.
And from there all you need is patients and imagination.
Hope this helps at least a little .

Charlie

Simmers PaintShop:

http://www.simmerspaintshop.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=13

[panthercules]

Thanks for the info - that looks like an interesting site with some pretty useful tips and things, assuming you know how to even get started. The layers tutorials should prove useful - I had a heck of a time getting that layers thing right the first time I messed with them (and that was just to do something simple like an emblem for my u-boat). It looks like it's going to be even trickier with a project like this.

My biggest problem remains, however, and that site didn't turn out to be useful for this (since it seemed to be focussed on IL-2 and other flight sims) - is there anything out there that explains exactly which files in SH3 contain the pictures/templates or whatever that make up the sub skins, and (if they are not simple .tga or other image file types) what sort of tools you need to open them up and play with them? When I looked in the submarine type files in ...data\submarine\NSS_Uboat7b (for example), the only image-looking file type I saw was a .tga that was only a simple square of gray color (and when I tried changing that color, it appeared to make no difference in the game when I took a Type VIIB out for a single mission spin) - When I tried sending some of the other files in there to Paintshop Pro, all I got were unsupported file type error messages.

I was hoping I would find some sort of nice .tga file with all the images/textures or whatever in it that I could just start "painting" on in PSP (like I did in the pilot skins for IL-2 where I just pasted in a photo of myself on top of the stock pilot picture in order to see myself in the cokpit- which was very cool, BTW), cause that would probably be all I need for my initial purposes in SH3, but I haven't found anything like that here yet.

Can anybody point me to the files I need to be dealing with in order to get started?

Thanks

[HEMISENT]

Panthercules
You might try PM'ing Fubar, He does a lot of skin work.

[panthercules]

well, I guess I'm making some progress - I stumbled across a reference to Pack3D, DL'd it and fired it up - found i could see inside the .dat file associated with one of Fubar's skins I had downloaded to play around with, and "exported" something ( I think it was one of .tga files/folders, but I'm not sure) into some "3d" folder. one of the files in that exported 3d folder was a .tga file with what looked like the main hull template, and I tried just painting some stuff on there and saving it back down.

After that though, I got stumped - I couldn't really figure out how to get the revised .tga file back into the .dat file - I figured it had to have something to do with the "import" button, but so far no luck figuring out the trick. Gotta go plow through the rest of the sticky threads and see what else I can find out about packing this changed file (actually both of the files I need to pack up - the deck and the hull templates/.tga files) back into the .dat file in question.

[panthercules]

Woot - that worked - managed to pack the altered .tga files back into the .dat file :)

now for some fun :)

[panthercules]

Panthercules
You might try PM'ing Fubar, He does a lot of skin work.

Hey - meant to thank you for the suggestion earlier but forgot - I did that, and Fubar was very helpful in his responses.

I managed to figure out just enough so far to get my immediate project completed - just for grins you might want to check out the results in this thread:

http://www.subsim.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=50109

As you can see, Fubar has nothing to fear from me in the way of skinning competition :rotfl:

[HEMISENT]

Panthercules
If this turns out for you perhaps you might consider putting together your own tutorial from the viewpoint of an complete novice, I wish someone would as I've always been interested in this too.

[tbarak]

You guys have to be a bit creative in dredging up information. I am new to SH3 too but in a few hours I learned how to skin in it. I couldn't find much info about SH3 either but after looking at the files I noticed some had the .dat extension. Fubar mentioned it in one of his posts, but DL the Chessmaster dat converter. It will go from dat to tga and back so it's all you need. Well the mechanics are the easy part of course.

You can read tutes on the art of skinning but they're a lot like books on drawing and painting. They show you what to do, but it's on the person to practice. Making skins is art, and you need talent, acumen and of course hard work: things tutes can't teach you.

But I read about the art of skinning by looking at the Lock On Modern Combat site and following links. LOMAC has a good skinning community a few guys have written on the art of skinning. Also I remember reading a tutorial on skinning for Quake 3. Sorry I don't remember the links anymore, but there were quite a few tutes that showed you Photoshop techniques. LOMAC is much more complicated to skin for since it uses CDDS extensions with mipmaps and multi-layered files. But the article I read talked about the painting techniques, how to weather, make decals, all the fun stuff. So in other words, use Google and search for skinning tutorials. They may not be for SH3, but the techniques are transferable.

I am not good at skinning myself since actually I am not an artistic person - er, I can't draw worth a damn, but I am creative in other media. But photoshop is a great tool and with practice becomes easy to use. I also use to build and paint plastic models and that taught me a lot about colour and weathering. GL

[JonZ]

What is more important to me is references. I use google but unfortunately it very limited (and becoming worse over years). I don't know how you guys always come up with very detailed references pictures from various things related to what you want to mod.