Pleiades Thursday, October 09, 2008

I'm calling the new skin (esoterically known as "g0") Pleiades–which spans four skin tones (pale, fair, tan, and dark) with or without freckles in seven makeup configurations named after each nymph. With a bit of luck, they should hopefully be available in-world by October 12 at the Gnubie Store and at my parcel in Lippert.



However, I've taken some stylistic and implementation departures from my earlier skins (for the tl;dr crowd–everything's painted on this time around–hair, eyebrows, eyelashes, skin tones are slightly less yellow):

• Hair is now painted onto the skin in black, brown, red, and blonde varieties
• Eyebrows, like hair, are now also painted onto the skin and come in the same color varieties as hair
• Eyebrows–you only get one variety (sorry–the thinner eyebrows just weren't turning out very well, and their inclusion would have resulted in doubling the TGA face permutation from 224 to 448 files)
• Eyelashes are painted onto the skin as well (Maea uses shorter lashes; other makeups use longer lashes)
• I've shifted the hues of the fair, tan, and dark skin tones slightly further towards red (away from their more yellow predecessors)

Additionally, I've also somewhat departed from a Photoshop base–but this doesn't necessarily mean Gimp users will be alienated (for the tl;dr crowd–you be gettin' AIs, PSDs, XCFs shortly after I release Pleiades in-world; as for the merely curious or purely sadistic–please read on).

Pleiades skins are about an 80/20 mix of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, respectively. The great advantage to using Illustrator for the majority of work in these skins is two-fold: 1) better control over shape and color, and 2) infinitely scalable and transformable artwork without loss of quality (i.e. pixelation).

While most of the artwork is completed in Illustrator, I still rely on Photoshop to produce raster textures that transcend Illustrator's limited raster capabilities (e.g. freckles, skin texture, etc...) and to finalize adjustment layers and layer comps that produce all the makeup and skin color configurations.

However, this approach is not without its disadvantages. The main issue with utilizing both Illustrator and Photoshop is preservation and maximization of edit-ability across applications–i.e. I don't want Illustrator to simply spit out a "flat" single layered PSD (Photoshop format). Therefore when exporting from AI (Illustrator format) to PSD, every shape in the AI file gets its own layer in the exported PSD file.



There are about 370 shapes in one-half of a Pleiades' face. This creates a fairly unwieldy PSD file–which is compounded by the issues that 1) the greater majority of layers are generically named "Mesh" or "Path," and 2) it's only half of a face–so duplicating and mirroring each shape to get the other half would result in over 700 layers.



That said, unlike my earlier skin PSDs, I won't be offering the same PSDs I work with–that'd just be sadistic. Instead, I plan on distilling my currently leviathan-esque PSDs into something more usable and intuitive–in both PSD and XCF (Gimp) formats in the very near future(1).

In the unlikely scenario that you're still reading this, miffed at my reckless audacity to not actually offer the PSDs with which I work–fear not, in the following weeks I'll post exactly (in excruciating detail) how you can produce those very PSDs from the AI files that are currently available on my repository (2) (3).

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(1) There are also secondary and tertiary reasons for this which tie into the discourse regarding "Instant Skin Business–Just Add Water"– 1) while I dislike offering a "crippled" product of any sort, I don't believe that some "features" of my skins are essential as a resource in modification or instruction (e.g. an entire range of pre-made makeup layers), and 2) I had planned on delaying the release of Pleiades' PSDs to allow it to establish its presence in-world as a freebie to discourage resale of either the skins or templates "as is." I hope go into more detail on these points in a future post.

(2) I suppose that for those who lack Adobe Illustrator and yet still feel inclined to undertake such an endeavor, I will also offer "raw" PSDs (prefaced with brief words of caution and trepidation, of course).

(3) Jokes aside, this is the process I go through in making Pleiades. It's more challenging than simply starting from a distilled PSD, but I really do believe that the flexibility and benefits of working in a vector format produce a better final skin (hopefully more on this in a future post also). It certainly won't be for everyone, but given motivation and patience (and, well–I guess Adobe Illustrator–although I'm still researching open-source alternatives to Illustrator), I think anyone can pull it off.