#dlresources

[dramallamadingdang]

My very own new hair texture! I know it's not going to appeal to probably anyone else's tastes because it is neither Maxis-match (or, actually it kind of is, literally, but not in the way that people now think of that term) nor Pooklet-type, but it is exactly what I want for my own game, so I'm very excited. :) Its features:

1) Color variation included in the texture itself for highlights/lowlights.

2) Stranded-but-rough overall texture for a more realistic but not-shiny appearance in-game. Items 1 and 2 are actually what Maxis textures have:

...but they're much...I dunno...lower-res, maybe, and the meshes are mapped such that the textures just end up looking stretched and blurry rather than rough.

3) Shine/shadow are not part of the texture at all. This makes using the texture on any hair much easier because you don't have to fiddle to make the highlights hit in the right spots. In fact, if there's no warping needed and shine/shadow isn’t desired, this can just be plopped in and then the alpha will cut out of it what it will. Quick and easy.

Shine/shadow, if desired, can be added by painting in white/black on layers on top of the texture and then using an appropriate layer blend to blend the white/black with the texture and desired hair color in a more realistic way. That way, you can also custom-paint the size/intensity/placement of shine/shadow that you want. The pics above have both highlight and shadow painted on to add shape and realistic shine.

4) Works well on any length hair, straight or wavy/curly, though of course it loses some detail when stretched on very long hairs.

The texture itself looks like this:

And for anyone who might be interested, there's a 1024x1024 grayscale PNG that you can download and play with here. Also, there's a PSD (if you want to see/fiddle with the layers) here. Some more "techy" info is under the cut, mostly meant for @furbyq, since we’ve been talking about this a little in comments, but that might be of interest to anyone who might want to try to make their own hair textures from scratch.

This started life as @zeusar's textures but is unrecognizable as that now. They proved too...straight/smooth/simple, I guess, for the look I wanted but of all the existing textures it had the most potential to become what I wanted, with editing. So, I decided to play with it in Photoshop to see if I could make what I wanted.

At the base of this is three copies of Zeusar's texture on different layers that were each heavily edited and warped and had some hand-painted bits added in different ways and that were then blended together with layer blends to create a wavy underlayer. Those layers were then merged into one layer and its opacity reduced to 65% (over a floodfilled-white layer) to mute the overall effect. Over that merged layer is a layer created with Photoshop's "Fibers" filter with some additional Gaussian, monochromatic noise added, which is blended with the edited-Zeusar layer with a Multiply layer blend. This adds roughness, more chaotic color variation, and some verticality to smooth out the waviness of the Zeusar layer a little. Over that is a simple layer painted in a medium-gray on my Wacom tablet with a custom hair brush that I made. It creates some thinner but more-defined and mostly-straight stranding and is set with a Multiply layer blend and ~50% opacity.

In addition to all of this there are a few Curves, Levels, and Brightness/Contrast adjustment layers interspersed throughout that adjust some or all of the layers, mostly to enhance high/lowlights and to make it so that the results of color actions are about the right color...although I confess I'm not excessively fussy about that. :)

So, yeah...For folks who are or might like to mess with making hair textures, that's essentially what I did to make this one.

[dramallamadingdang]

Before I dive into the liking that I’m behind on and the replying that I’m behind on...have this. :) This is the retro-y palette I’ve put together for retro-Strangetown that I’ll be making recolors of things in and generally decorating with. It’s cunningly designed so that color groups are in rows and brightness groups are in vertical columns. Sort of, anyway. A few of ‘em break the pattern. :)

I’m calling it the Ricardo palette, after Ricky and Lucy Ricardo of I Love Lucy, one of my favorite TV shows. Most of the colors are drawn from vintage paint color cards as well as scans of pages from period home decorating magazines, with a few I pulled out of the color picker because some color groups were lacking. (Notably the purples; it just wasn’t a popular color family for decorating at the time. Greens, pinks, turquoises, dark earthy colors? Sure. Purples? Not so much. But the color spectrum is incomplete without purple, so...Yay historical incorrectness! :D ) I was going to give the colors names like character names and catchphrases from I Love Lucy (Like, ‘Splainin’”) and general 50s cutesy things like “Sock Hop” or “Daddy-o” (the black color was going to be “Elvis” after his hair and the leather), but I decided I wanted more descriptive names...and ended up with fruit, wood, plants, minerals, and other natural things, mostly. The Inner Hippie will always out, it seems. :) 

I never use actions to make recolors because...Well, because. But for any interested parties, there’s a list of hex codes for all the colors behind the cut. Feel free to make/share actions or whatever if you like the colors and want to use them for stuff.

Reds Quartz ffd7d0 Peony ffb9ad Geranium e96b61 Lava b81f24 Garnet 7d0400

Oranges Dune edd3af  Adobe e39e7d Cantaloupe f1984f Tangerine d65211 Spice a64e00

Yellow-Greens Banana fae5a2  Lemon f3e462 Sprout b0c635 Avocado 506d2a Gold aa7708

Greens Agave cae9bf Jade 98c3a8 Spearmint 6db46e Willow 496f5c  Forest 113a23

Green-Blues Tidepool b2dae2  Powder 92afb3  Kingfisher 65a3b2 Turquoise 4bb1b3 Teal 036564

Blues Sky c7e1f4 Wedgewood 93b3cc Colonial 5683a4 Nautical 374b75  Navy 182846

Purples Dust d5c3d2 Dawn b4adc9 Petal caa2ba Amethyst 5c5171 Eggplant 312547

Neutrals Parchment e6d9bf  Desert a48c72 Sandalwood a06045 Mahogany 64311c Earth 36281e

Grays Snow eeeeee Mist c1c1c1 Stone 968b87 Charcoal 4c4f54 Ebony 232323

[dramallamadingdang]

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while and am finally getting around to it.

This is a PSD that I developed for making texture images for new custom roofs as painless as possible. It even automagically adjusts for the fact that the game doesn’t display roofs in the color you intend. Easy-peasy. Well, relatively. :)

The file includes the PSD and a copy of the image above that details how to use the thing and what the layers do. Of course, once you make your texture images, you still need to, you know, actually make the roofs. If you don’t know how to do that (it’s a little more complicated than a “standard” recolor because you have to make clones, but it’s not hard if you already have recoloring skills), there is a tutorial by Numenor here.

Note: You will obviously need a program that reads PSDs to use this. :) Photoshop does, obviously. I use good ol’ CS2, but this should work in newer (or older) versions, too. I believe The GIMP can also read PSDs, yes?

Download here.

[dramallamadingdang]

Hi! How did you get rid of the pattern on satinistic loveseat in order to recolour it?

I’m looking at the template I made for that recolor, and I think I just painted it out. *shrugs* Usually, I just fiddle with brightness/contrast, moving sliders around until most of the existing pattern is gone (while preserving shadows and highlights, if I want to preserve them) and then painting over whatever that doesn’t get rid of. (The “clone stamp” tool in Photoshop or other image editors is your friend. :) ) Sometimes that doesn’t work and I have to just put in a texture layer over the original texture and then repaint any shadows/highlights by hand on other layers, but apparently I didn’t have to do that on this one because there is no separate shadow/highlight layer(s) in the PSD.

Anyway, I tossed the PSD up on my SFS account, if you or anyone else would be interested in it. It’s here.

[dramallamadingdang]

This is for @hemfbg, who was interested in having the edited alpha that I did for this hair. (A comparison to the original alpha is here. Basically, I edited the hell out of it to make the thing fuller in general, and to fill in some of the gaps and make the ends less jagged and more hair-like.) So, I exported the edited alpha channel from the above texture and put it on my Imgur account here. I’m hoping it will “save as” at full size from there? It should be 1024x1024.

According to the default I downloaded and that I’m just replacing textures in, this hair is “Peggy 7094,” which I assume is for males but might have been converted from a female hair? I dunno. But I suppose you can get the mesh/textures out of that default if you need it? (Somehow? I’m truly a complete idiot when it comes to hair.) Otherwise, I have no idea where you might find the mesh now that Peggy’s site is gone.