Skin Creation Help

[Thucydides04]

Can anyone post a link that can get me started on designing my own skins? I have never done anything with this feature and would like to give it a shot. Thanks in advance.

[FeralKittie]

Unfortunately, I never did find a good beginner's guide myself. There are tips and discussions on the LoTROInterface forums (http://www.lotrointerface.com/forums/index.php) you can browse through. Personally, much of that made no sense to me when I first started playing around with making a skin (and plenty still doesn't). Luckily, even with only a little working knowledge of your photo program, you can manage some pretty neat results (speaking from experience :p).

Here's (http://forums.ddo.com/showpost.php?p=3528195&postcount=40) a post I did with a couple tips on altering colors.

Also, I mentioned it there, but, saving a working image in a layered format is very useful. More than once early on I realized I wanted to make minor changes to an image I'd worked on extensively and had to start over from the default image because I had only saved my final merged image.

I'll try to come up with some other tips and post again, but definitely post any specific questions you have and experiment on your own in your photo program. You can figure out quite a bit by just poking around. Making a skin can really be alot of fun, and I encourage this behavior! :)

[FeralKittie]

My apologies if you know this stuff already, just thinking of what I'd have told myself before I started.

The most current Art Pack can be found here (http://www.lotrointerface.com/downloads/info394-Update7UISkinArtPack.html). Just like with a regular skin, you'll want to extract the download to Documents>Dungeons and Dragons Online>ui>skins, creating the "ui" and "skins" folders if you don't have them already.

The art pack contains all the images that have been made available for skinning and the SkinDefinition.xml. The skin definitions basically tell the game, "when the program asks for X (the ArtAssetID), use the image X.tga (or .jpg)". If the skin definition lists an ArtAssetID, the corresponding image must be in the same folder, otherwise you end up with a blue and white grid in-game. Last time I checked, the skin definitions weren't up to date, but the download includes a text file, Update7_Differences. To manually update the SkinDefinition.xml, open it, then right click the body of the skin definition window and go to view source. This opens up a text document version. From the Update7_Differences text, you can copy each added line and paste them into the skin definition text where they should go alphabetically. The Update7_differences also lists some images that were removed that you can delete from the skin definition text (the whole line).

While we're dealing with the skin definitions, some things you may want to do before you upload you skin or anytime along the way:

Change the name inside the quotation marks where it says Name=

For any images you're not going to change at all, you can delete the line that refers to it in the skin definition text and get rid of the image to lighten the memory size of your skin.

Some of the images are jpgs and refered to as such in the skin definition. This is fine, unless you wanted to add some transparency to that image (AFAIK you can't add transparency to a jpg). In that case, be sure to save the image as a tga and, in the skin definition, replace .jpg with .tga.

More later!

[Thucydides04]

Thanks for your help. I will mess around with it some and see what I can do.

[BOgre]

I'd love to do some skinning as well. It seems that with the highly customizable ui in DDO, a few more choices in ui skins would be great. I personally like the Rival skin. It's great for those who use many hotbars, as it's clean and uncluttered. My problem with skinning DDO is that the current Asset list is over 1100 items long, and there is no template. That is, with so many assets, many of which are microscopic, how can a skinner even hope to create a full and comprehensive mod without a template?

Devs: could you please release a set of composite images, showing the placement of your assets in the various ui elements? I'd guess that such a composite and Asset map must already exist on one of your artist's computers somewhere... Let us have access to that and we'll give you some nice free added content :)

LotRO's faq/guides are fairly good at getting one started in that game, but the DDO side is sorely lacking. I think that after 5 years, to have only a half dozen or so user-created skins on the site shows that there's something missing there.

Thanks.

[BOgre]

If anyone is reading this expecting a Dev reply, here's something that may help:
http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=305630

[FeralKittie]

If anyone is reading this expecting a Dev reply, here's something that may help:
http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?t=305630

Nice! Quarterling did some great work there. I had been contemplating making a key listing images placements, but that's a huge undertaking, lol! Organizing the images into their general placement categories was a great idea.

I will add just a few images of note:
box_centerTexture_darkLeather (shown in red, note: this image is also behind the map and transparency here will also apply to the open map)
box_centerTexture_darkLeather_50 (shown in blue)
gui2_box_lvl0_metal_center (shown in yellow)

http://i313.photobucket.com/albums/ll398/KuriousKat_photos/ScreenShot00086.jpg

Even altering these three images alone can radically change the look of the skin since they show up as background in all the windows.

[BOgre]

sweet. that's excellent. ;)

[FeralKittie]

Since Quarterling mentioned a handy dandy little program called TGATool3 (http://www.gamefront.com/files/651990/tgatool3.zip), I can finally give a simple description of how to make an image transparent and, I believe, this works in conjunction with any image editing program.

When you first use TGATool3, you'll want to go to Prefs>Select editing program, and find the editing program of you choice. TGATool3 acts as a go-between to allow simplified editing of tga files.

The transparency of a given image is determined by the Alpha Channel, a greyscale mask of the image where white is opaque, black is invisible and shades of grey range in-between. Go to File>load and choose the image you want to make transparent. If it doesn't already have one, click "create alpha channel", then select Image>Send Alpha Channel to Editor. This will open up the Alpha Channel in your chosen program as a regular greyscale image you can edit with ease.

When you're done editing, go back to TGATool3, select Image>Reload after Edit (the second one, under "Send Alpha Channel to Editor") and save.

I am officially in love with this program since, for me, altering transparency used to involve loading the Alpha Channel as a mask layer which really limited what could be done with it. This program makes it way easier! :cool:

[BOgre]

Oh man, can't wait to try that. I have the same issue, loading the Alpha channel as a mask layer. Sounds like this will make life easier. :)

[FeralKittie]

Oh man, can't wait to try that. I have the same issue, loading the Alpha channel as a mask layer. Sounds like this will make life easier. :)

Oh, totally easier. It loads the alpha channel as a background layer, so not only can you actually see the greyscale instead of dealing with transparent red, you can actually, /gasp, use the eyedropper tool instead of eyeballing a match! Who'd a thunk it? lol!

[Quarterling]

I edited my thread and added a video tutorial. Enjoy! :)

Click here for the thread. (http://forums.ddo.com/showthread.php?p=3636199#post3636199)