DARK skintones-Alternative importing method+TEMPLATE

Introduction

This is not a tutorial on how to make darker skintone recolors.Usually I just play with hue/saturation , brightness/contrast and then apply a photofilter to balance colors if needed.There is a photoshop tutorial on making recolors by navetsea here

This is a tutorial on how to get your DARK (or other hard to get color) skintone recolor to game and avoid fugly pixelation which happens almost always (unfortunately) when you import via bodyshop.

This is a tutorial to use if anything else has failed and your skintone is very pixelated when importing via bodyshop.

What is the tutorial skintone template?

A skintone template package which when you open in SimPE you will be able to see what each image is because it’s typed(i typed it i mean) on the texture itself! So you will just need to browse and find the appropriate BMP/or PNG to replace with the BuildDTX method.

Level of Difficulty:

Medium if you aren’t familiar with SimPE and very easy(though a bit time consuming) if you are.It is worth it however .(Look at the comparing pictures on the end of this post to see the differences.)

What you will need

1.Your finished skintone recolor.( not an already imported and extracted from bodyshop one because the pixelation damage has already been done there)

2.SimPE which you can download here

3.Download the template>>>>

Skintone template

Let’s start!And please read carefully!

The pictures provided aren’t exactly step by step ones, obvious stuff are excluded, because well it’s obvious.Pictures are to help you if you have trouble following the tutorial.Also i will be able to help you if you have trouble so feel free to post your questions here.

!!!STEP 1: PREPARATION IN BODYSHOP!!!

Do not ever use the “TUTORIAL_SkintoneTemplate_corvidophile2 package” directly. Then your recolors will not work and you will only end up with duplicates.This template is just for use with the tutorial and for re-importing it to bodyshop to create a unique file and not a duplicate.

Here is how:

1. Unzip the TUTORIAL_SkintoneTemplate_corvidophile2 package in your downloads folder.
2.Open bodyshop and start a new skintone project by exporting the “skintone recolor template” skintone and not any other skintone.
3.Export it and give your project a unique name eg: DarkSkinREC so you can find it easily later in your saved sims folder.
4.Go to your projects folder and ONLY change the swatch of the template skintone with the one you will be using for your recolor.
5.Import back to bodyshop ( give again your project a name while importing, eg. skintone recolor by “Your name” ) and then exit .
6.Go to your saved sims folder and right click on the package you just created eg: DarkSkinREC(step3) , select open with SimPE and wait for SimPE to load.

:!!: if you want to create a second or third recolor without overwriting the previous ones ,repeat STEP 1 accordingly and then proceed.

STEP 2-Replacing the files in SimPE

Go to texture images(TXTR) then click the first file in the resource list on the left.

Then click plugin view.

You will see the skintone template texture image with the name of the file written on it.Right click then click BUILD DTX.

Open your Skintone project folder and select the matching BMP file.What you see in the texture template is what you pick there.

Then set format to DTX3format and sharpen to NONE and click BUILD.Wait a few seconds if it is a body texture ( which is huge) it will take a while.

Click commit and don’t save (saving here will remove the italics from the text and you might get confused, so it is better not to save if you are a beginner, save away if you know what you are doing.)

With exactly the same steps above BUILD DTX for all 39 texture files.

Then of course go to File> Save .

STEP 3-Compressing the files

If you now check the saved skintone package you will see that it might be a whooping over 20mb one lol We need to compress the files to reduce the file size.

How to do that:

in TXTR , click on resource tab in the bottom of SimPE and select the first one on the resource list on the right above. Wait a second till it loads, then where it says” compressed” use the drop down menu and change it to “yes”.Some numbers will start changing and the file text will become blue bold italic.You know then that it’s changed. On to the next one and follow the same procedure for all of them!

After you have finished all 39 TXTR’s Save again . This time it may take a minute or two(or more didn’t count but it seemed like forever), just wait and don’t worry, your SimPE is not frozen.

Now if you check your saved package file you will see its filesize reduced dramatically.It will still be a bit more higher than your average skintone package but you will get a nice non-pixelated DARK skintone in return.

Now it is time to close SimPE and load game to see your recolored skintone.

IF YOU FORGOT TO GIVE YOUR SKINTONE PROJECT A UNIQUE SWATCH AND NAME IN THE PREVIOUS STEPS YOU CAN DO NOW LIKE THAT:

Changing the swatch image

In the resource tree go to jpg/tga/png image (IMG).Right click and select replace (use open all files extension). Use the swatch you made for your skintone. Save.

Editing string and package name
To do that go to Text lists and in plugin view simply edit the text where it says “string”. Save.

LAST BUT NOT LEAST:
I don’t suggest doing this for lighter skintone recolors because there the pixelation is most of the times not even noticeable and we DON’T want big file sizes unless absolutely necessary.

Then again who would want to repeat all these for so many skintones? I wouldn’t.

Hope you found this tutorial and the recolor template useful.

Corvidophile2

See the differences