Answers: To Hat, or not to Hat?

Many people are not aware of, like most things invisible, the option to create a ‘hat’ for themselves in the game. So if you weren’t aware you could make a hat before, now you are. Most of the Minecraft skin editors will show you this option as you are designing. As much as you may want to get to making your perfect set of headgear, you might want to slow down and think about how to make one that looks appealing rather than simply being a giant bucket on your already massive block-head. Or, whether or not your character would look right with a hat at all?

The hat pixels are transparent right off the showroom floor, and can cover the entire head of the character if you so choose, even underneath. But if you like the way you designed your character’s face and head, the more hat you do, the less of your character’s head players will see. Or, you could actually make the ‘hat’ your new ‘head’, and have a huge cubic cranium!

If you think of the hat as the seasoning and your character’s head as the main course, you won’t go wrong with your designing. You also won’t be far off from the way wolves view you in the game. Here’s a few design ideas, as seen on many of the player skins roaming the servers.

Animal skin hats, bandanas, baseball caps, beanies, berets, comb-overs, construction hats, cowls, feathers, fedoras, glasses, goggles, headbands, helmets, hoods… masks… okay I got through H for you without even breaking a sweat, all in alphabetical order even! You’ve got to contribute too you know. But seriously, I hope this gave you some good ideas you can implement for your current character skin, or maybe even inspired a new skin design altogether!

Keep in mind though that as you design, the hat pixels are strictly 2D, so if they are not connected at the corners around your character’s, they literally have no ‘thickness’, so will not even be visible at certain angles unless enough pixels are colored in to go all the way around the head and make it ’3D’. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you; sometimes it gives it a very desirable subtlety.

This is Minecraft Skindex, letting you know that hats make you fancy! Hats make you an individual! Hats make people like you! So go make a pretty one and wear it as you punch trees.

Oh and I almost forgot… turbins. Ooo and visors!

: Myth? Legend? Or Reality?

Minecraft Skindex knows that a couple hundred pictures of character expression can be a bit limiting for some people, even if there may be those out there who claim it’s in ‘the spirit of the game’. So we went on a quest, nay, a holy crusade!- to answer this question once and for all. But, who knows what mods or updates may bring your beloved Minecraft in the future?

As a simple google search will show you, there are definitely some high definition skin and texture packs available to the player seeking them. However, as with anything worthwhile, it comes at a price. What does it take to get one up and running?

You need to find a texture pack that you like. Dig one out of the google machine and see what appeals to you. Most of these will have their own set of instructions particular to that specific mod, so pay close attention to avoid any mistakes that could cause hiccups in your game playing.

Though it might not be too hard to get one of these texture packs downloaded and installed, bear in mind this is not going to take Minecraft from Lego Land to Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. Sure, your graphics will get a tremendous boost of detail, but that detail is still contained within the six walls of a cube; no changing that. If you’re ok with that, you may also find that the game is now running slower, as you likely have “squared” (har har!) the amount of memory used for graphics.

The real deal breaker for most, is that if they wished to design a high definition skin to include in this HD modded world, it will not even truly be seen by the player even, let alone other players, and here’s why.

First, as for you as the player, you have a 1st person view. You’re never going to see all the details put into your skin design (which is NOT the walk in the park that it is for the regular skin pixel count). As for other players, well, they won’t see it either. Why wouldn’t they? Because your high def skin isn’t going to work unless it’s on a high def server, and not any high def server, one that uses your exact same texture pack. Even if such a server exists, it is still unclear whether it would work and be seen by other players or not.

So I hate to break it to you, but for now, the only ones who will enjoy your HD skin (if you can even make a compatible one and implement it in your single player games) is the mobs you kill, who likely won’t appreciate it anyway because

A) You’re killing them, so even if they noticed how nice you look, they are too upset with you to care.
B) Even if they did care, they will be dead soon from you hitting them with your weapon.
C) They are only programming script.

Too many cons and not enough pros, if you ask Minecraft Skindex. But feel free to hop on some Minecraft forums and get active; there is a group really pushing for HD compatibility for the game, and the game creator is down-to-earth enough that maybe, he just might throw them a bone so that HD servers can be easily set up. For now, however, enjoy getting stepped on by Q*bert.

Welcome to Minecraft Skindex! There are tons of articles out there on editing your character, but most of them seem to be endorsing a product, and rush you straight towards plugging their product into you, much like a teenager on a cheap first date. Though most of these editors work at least okay, it’s always good to start at the roots, so I’m going to show you how to manually edit your Minecraft character’s skin with MS Paint, pretty much the standard bare bones art software for Windows.

First, you need to get your original skin to start with. Go to your Minecraft folder, located in %appdata%/roaming/minecraft/bin/.minecraft. You will need Winzip or Winrar or 7zip or some kind of file decompression software like that. All you need to do is right click the .minecraft file and go to ‘open with’ and select whichever of those you have. Now open the “mob” file, and one of the first images you will see is your guy’s skin, labeled “char”. You can right click him and select “extract to”, and take him wherever is convenient for you. You just need to remember where he is so that you can find him for the next step.

You can go right to your char file and right click, select “open with” then MS Paint, or whatever software you have or prefer to use to edit him. But please note that MS Paint, even when fully zoomed, he will still be pretty tiny since the image is so few pixels. If you can’t make heads or tails of the mess, here’s a chart you can refer to:

http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/File:Skinzones.png

So that should help. Do note that the “Head Accessory” part is completely optional; if you change nothing about it, it just stays transparent so you don’t need to worry about it. So if you want, you can change it up, pixel by pixel, and get your character exactly how you want it. Save him with the original name (char), otherwise Minecraft might not recognize him if his travel passport doesn’t match his name on his driver’s license (seriously though, make sure you name the new skin char!). Now, how do you get this guy looking new and spiffy in-game?

Just put the guy back in his home! Go back through %appdata%/roaming/bin/.minecraft, open it back up with Winzip/Winrar/7zip, open the “mob” folder, and drop him back in there. When prompted whether or not you want to replace, click yes if you’re confident (you might want a backup of your original character skin just in case he doesn’t like what you did to him…), and start your game!

Now as easy as that sounds, the more irritating part of it all is working with that little image in MS Paint. The next article will review some of the Minecraft skin editors out there and their features, so you can choose whichever sounds good to you and start creating new skins like the pros do. So read these Minecraft Skindex articles if you want your character to become the envy of cubic pixel land!

At Minecraft Skindex, we recognize that some people enjoy making skins even more than they enjoy playing the game itself! If you are one of those people spending hours letting your imagination run wild and making your own library of skins, the think tank might get a little low on fuel sometimes. So here’s some ideas to get the spark plugs firing again to hopefully get you moving in the right direction.

Everyone’s favorites seem to be: celebrities, game characters, cartoon characters, movie characters, and of course, super heroes. There are mountains of virtual 1′s and 0′s out there of people who have made skins for these popular figures and left them to rot in large Minecraft Skindex like archives across the net. How can you make yours stand out, even if just for a day? How can you be different and unique in a virtual world of literally millions of players?

Well it can be tough, but here’s some suggestions:

Try to keep up on your news and pop culture! Find out what’s big, and model something after it. Find out what celebrities are in trouble for what, and try to theme your character after it. Charlie Sheen, Brittany Spears, Lindsey Lohan, all the trainwrecks, love them or hate them. You might not get much attention in-game, but you will definitely create a few smiles that day on Minecraft.

Go for the less sought after characters; Minecraft is an ‘indie’ game, so the players will appreciate an obscure reference more than the average bear would (speaking of which, Yogi Bear was built pretty blocky in the cartoons…). Start thinking about some smaller side characters in the popular entertainment, or popular characters in not-so-popular entertainment.

How about some animal men? Some moo-cow men, pig-men, Man-Bear-Pig, Mr. Snuffleupagus, Big Bird, but I’d stay away from stuff like Teletubbies on a Survival server; I think even the mobs will have a higher likelihood to attack you first out of the crowd.

You can model skins based on occupational uniforms instead of characters; chefs, football players, construction workers, oh why not just throw together the Village People while we’re at it? Throw in an Indian, a police officer, a cowboy and a leather clad motorcyclist while you’re at it! I’m sure many a player would have bladder malfunction seeing you and your posse cruising around Minecraft like that. You could alwasy do KISS instead; at least people would take you more seriously. Well, a little more seriously.

Well, Minecraft Skindex has delivered what ideas it could, and any more paragraphs is likely to result in an attention span dropoff of readers by approximately 86% statistically, so we will move on to other subjects in our other articles. So log onto Minecraft and build a YMCA, now!

People often ask which skin editor is “best”, and Minecraft Skindex will do its best to answer. No software downloads necessary for any of these; like the game itself, it’s all browser based. You could have a three year old using any one of these in no time. Here’s a few of the more popular ones that we will discuss.

Miners Need Cool Shoes

http://www.minershoes.com/editor

There’s no downloading of any software, you just go to the link and get started. Once you have it just how you want it, you click “download” to get your new skin saved on your computer. One feature I do like about this one is it has a subtle amount of ‘noise’ (slight shade variation amongst the pixels) built right into it, making an otherwise very flat, blocky, bland image come to life a bit more. That’s just as much of a drawback; you lose a bit of the control when choosing your coloring, and when you have so few pixels to draw on anyway, it could end up being a bit of an irritant if you’re a meticulous artist. But for whipping out a quick skin, it’s about as good as it gets.

Some aspects of this editor leave you with the feeling of paint brush control of Leonardo DaVinci, while other aspects of it feel like you’re trying to tame a wild bronco. So basically using this editor feels like Rembrandt doing one of his famous masterpieces while participating in a rodeo.
Skin Creator from Skincache.com

http://www.skincache.com/create

It has really useful features like unchecking certain body parts so you can focus on one at a time (helps for detail work), zoom for more visibility and control, my favorite, being able to paint in 3d so you can just rotate your character any which way, and even some basic shapes, lines and shading! You can also set several ‘pencil’ colors which each have their own blended color palette. My only real beef with this little editor is that the shapes and line tools leave you with very little color control; they all have built in shading and color blending, and for so few pixels, it tends to make a mess of things in a hurry.

Honestly if you use the shapes and line tools sparingly, this is a fantastic skin editor for your masterpiece.

Skincraft

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/571250

I gotta admit, above all else, by far my favorite interface is held in Skincraft. It’s very simple and straight forward, and their ‘mastcot’ really just brings it all together. You can choose to edit just one body piece at a time. It’s automatically nice and zoomed in, so accidentally clicking the wrong pixel is a rare event, so erasing is at a minimum. One of my only complaints is that the preview 3D image of your character is quite small compared to the others, but it’s really not that big of a deal. All in all, this editor is done with some class.

There’s others out there that may be worth a gander, but these seem to be the most popular, and there’s a reason. These three have all been tested and are Minecraft Skindex approved. Now go get editing!

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!