Designing Minecraft Quality Skins
Tips on Designing Minecraft Quality Skins
Minecraft Skindex has seen many an edited skin in its day, and many of those have been of the ‘not-so-hot’ category. How do you go from making a dud to a stud? We’ve got some suggestions for you to that will have you making some of the most coveted skins in the Minecraft community!
First, let’s discuss something called ‘noise’. This is just putting a slight shading variation on some of the pixels (adjusting the color very slightly from your main color) in random places. This takes it from a flat block wall of one color to giving it a bit of depth, so to speak, and it does wonders to bring a skin to life. Note this, however. Your intial thought might be, the more the merrier, but fight this tendency. This is something where subtlety is key. When you have less than 100 pixels to work with for the largest surface area of your character, you really don’t want to overdo it. Only slight color variation, and used sparingly.
If you aren’t doing a solid color and there will be plenty of different colors just by nature of your design, this is much less of an issue. But in general, imagine the texture of the object you are painting, and make the noise ‘louder’ or ‘softer’, depending on how rough or smooth the virtual material should be. For example, if you were doing something like scales or bark for a lizard man or a tree man, you would want heavy noise, so more drastic color variety. If something smooth, like say, a robe, you would want to keep the color variety of the noise very subtle, or else it will just look like your character is a messy eater.
If you are modeling your character after something specific, try not to sweat the small details. If he’s supposed to have a detailed design on his belt buckle or a logo on his shirt, you will probably end up with a train wreck of a skin just trying to make it look right with only 4 pixels of space. Just match the colors, and try to match them to where most of the colors are in the design.
Skin Creator from Skincache.com
http://www.skincache.com/create
As an example, if you were doing a transformer logo (one of the best things to design for a block man!), let’s face it; you’re NOT getting that logo to look right. Just match the colors, and do some heavier noise in the logo to show that there is more than just a red square on his chest.
These are just a couple, but very important, tips on making a sweet skin, brought to you by Minecraft Skindex. You will discover your own little secrets for making that block man come alive as you play around with the editors and practice. Load up Minecraft, and roll out!