Before we begin, I highly suggest downloading DarkShallFall's texture pack. It's a compilation of a lot of textures that come in handy whilst skinning. You can find it here:
http://forums.halomods.com/viewtopic.php?t=75588
Otherwise, just google some textures that you would like to use.
I will not be using any specific Halo PC textures in this tutorial. I'm leaving it open ended for your own personal creativity. And I will be using Photoshop for this tutorial. With that said, let's begin.
- 1. Extract a texture you would like to use for this tutorial, any texture that applies to scenery (IE bloodgulch cliff texture).
2. Open up Photoshop.
3. Go to File - Open, and locate your texture (as stated previously, I'm not using any texture from Halo PC in specific, just example textures).
4. Once you have it open-assuming you downloaded DarkShallFalls texture pack-go to where you extracted the folder with the textures, and browse through and choose from as many as 4-7 textures or more.
5. Once you have them all opened up, click the Move Tool
, and drag and drop the textures you opened, onto your skin (you do this by right clicking on the texture, hold down the mouse button, and drag it onto your HPC texture, and releasing the mouse button).
6. Once you have all of your textures on your HPC texture, resize them accordingly to the size of the HPC texture (you can do this by selecting the move tool, press CTRL-T, hold shift (to keep it in proportion), and just drag it to the appropriate size). Make sure you are on the right layer!! If you can't tell which layer you are on, look at the side and it will be highlighted in blue. You can tell which is which by a small image to the left of the layer title.
(To choose different layers, simply click on them).
7. This is where the fun begins.
Hide all layers except for the background, and the skin above it. (You do this by clicking the eye
in the layers pallet).
8. Now, if you'll look at the top of the layers pallet, you'll see a box (to the left of the opacity box), and it says normal. And if you click the arrow at the right of the box, it will drop down a list of things such as: Darken, Lighten, Overlay, Difference, etc. This is what we will be using to put the textures together.
9. This is where you're own oppinion comes in. Select each individual setting within that drop-down box until your texture looks good. I personally chose "Darken".
10. Once you chose a setting that looks good, go up to the layer above the one you just changed, and click on it. It should make it visible again, if not, click the box where the eye used to be, then it should make the layer visible.
11. Repeat step 9. This time, I chose "Overlay".
Repeat steps 9 and 10 throughout the rest of your layers.
This is what my end result looks like:
And this is what the original texture looked like:
There are many things you could do differently with this tutorial. I used it more as a guide than anything to give you some sort of support, or backbone to use when skinning. Different textures will give different turnouts. It's all up to you and your creativity.
If you have any questions, go ahead and post here or PM me. Enjoy.
