SKINHELP SECTION - Quake1

Right, so you know how to make a skin 'WORK' in quake but how do you actually make it look good (other than spending shitloads of hours on it!).

 The Method

Now the reason for my little moral at the bottom of this page is due to the fact that when ever I make a skin I cheat! That is to say I usually do things the easiest way. For instance, whenever I make a new skin I DON'T start totally from scratch everytime, no way!
Sure, now that I've done about 100 odd skins (well its near that number aint actually stoped to count!), I have a lots of other skins that I can nick bits from , you on the other hand dont, so heres i how to make it easy for yourself.

Step 1 - make a base

Make a base skin. i.e a skin that is ALL skin, obviously the best example of this is the 'swiped to death' Bearian skin, the base to the revco skin. I think 3/4 of the skin artists out there should give a BIG thankyou to this skin as it keeps on getting recycled, and arm here, a leg there..:))

***Note*** I am amoung those that have used the bearian also heh

Pictured below is a base skin made from the bearian base! All I've done to it really is make it all skin and added some more muscles, yeah u cant see the back of his feet, but hey most of you that use this (like me) will be shoving boots onto it anyway. At any rate I plan on updating the base skin soon anyway...

Stage 3 - Patience is a Virtue

I should mention that colorizing is not quite as straight forward as I perhaps suggested, often when colorizing the program will map all manner of strange color combinations when u translate to the quake palette. By this I mean to colorize a picture, the art program ,PSP, Photopaint, Photoshop whatever you are using converts the image to a bigger palette such as RGB for the operation. When you convert the image back into a 256 color image in quake's palette the program will generally make a right dogs ear of mapping the colours. Where once was a fluro white/blue you then get greens, topcolour and glow in the dark light blue colors all jumbled together.

Its no joke trying to edit all that garbage out of it when you realise what has happened :(((

An alternative to this approach is to break the palette up into its respective color gradients, sperating the blues, the reds from the glowing reds etc and saving them as individual palettes. For most purposes this is very handy, however you will have to take the time to do that for yourself as for starters I aint seperated the whole palette in a conventional sense ans there is no guarantee you are using the same program as me.

Method I use is this, I start the skin in photopaint, often in black and white, then i colorize a couple different versions as I have the palette split in photopaint only. Next i generally convert it to the quake palette and PCX format again in photoshop adding a couple of finishing touches as it handles the color correction better.

SO, if you split the palette I would also recommend splitting the TOPCOLOR and BOTTOMCOLOR swatches as they are troublesome if you dont keep and eye on them. They are conversly very handy if you use them correctly, if you make a base skin thats colored with the topcolor only, whatever parts you cut and paste from it will change color in quake. I've started using this a lot, generally bottomcolor is best left alon though, as it interferes with teamplay settings if you are changing this. An example of this 'topcolor' use is (are) the new KOD skin's I just did, they're on page7 of my skinworld.

In case you dont know what I mean by topcolor/bottomcolor, then play more quake dammit!!! haha
Seriously though, I'm gonna try and make a pic of the quake palette, this will be divided up into the topcolor/bottomcolor/glowing color/normal sections. This should explain it clearly for you and also explain why quake is such as violent game, as anybody that uses this palette for while becomes twisted lol.

'Patience is a Virtue, and Artists are lazy people