some advice from seasoned veterans ...

[doorknob]

would be greatly appreciated.

I want to get serious about uploading something but I'm having issues with retexturing this hair mesh. As you can see it's quite sloppy also I think the under neath part of the mesh needs to be reworked a bit. It's not the texture I'm planning on going with when I do attempt to upload it the current texture is for my own personal use because I wanted a messy looking hair texture. But I'm getting mad at my alpha because recently I purchased a pen tablet thinking that would solve some of my problems but I'm still too sloppy with it, plus the pressure sensitivity is causing problems with the alpha. Any one know what I'm talking about?

Any how I will be looking over some tutorials in the mean time on texturing to see if I can improve this sloppy monster. But any opinions and advice would be taken not as an insult but as constructive criticism. Also I wont be going with the bozo red that is currently the color of this texture I plan to use a more natural color. So I am aware of some things that have gone horribly wrong here.

But one other question I also combined the back and front of the mesh since they both need to be the same any how is that unacceptable by MTS standards? would I need to separate them some how (even though how I could do that at this point is beyond me). But I couldn't find anything on it in the upload criteria. (and if I need to keep the front and back parts of the mesh as separate parts I will probably not use this mesh as an upload but create something else for that purpose.)

Please any tips and advice is needed here.

[Weeaboo]

Did you create the mesh yourself or...?

[doorknob]

yes it's my mesh

woops I guess this thread is in the wrong place sorry I thought I was in recoloring thread. I was tired it was late at night when I started this thread so I apologize.

[HystericalParoxysm]

Pressure sensitivity is just something to get used to. You may need to change the pressure settings yourself in the settings for your tablet, to make it softer or firmer depending on how light or heavy a hand you use. You also want to make sure to paint your textures on a new layer, so you can then duplicate that layer and convert it to a perfect alpha for your textures. Also make sure that you put a matching colour behind your texture for the main texture, not white, or you'll get white lines around the edges (I think I see this happening on the bangs).

I'd suggest looking up some general hair painting tutorials - there's tons of them on deviantART, for making pictures of hair. It's pretty much the same basic thing. Hair texturing, for me, takes a looooonggggg time. I usually do it in several steps - base colour, shadows, highlights, detail, and with a couple different brushes - one a streaky dotty one that sort of looks like a shower head, I guess (lots of little dots in a cluster) and then just a single small dot for creating single strands.

I'm not sure what you mean about combining the back and front - do you mean you combined the bangs and the back part, or that you combined the "inside" areas of the hair with the top part (hairalpha5 + hairalpha7, or whatever)? Our standards don't really care about how it's structured as long as it works right without transparency issues, and is decently low poly.

[doorknob]

I have gimp and coral paint shop pro. But my question is for the pen tablet how can I draw thin lines with out them turning boxy? The brush I guess is the smallest it goes and in'stead of a circle it turns into a square so the line looks boxy and not natural.

Also the texture is Identical on both sides because I grouped them together so the color is the same the reason you see that white line is because there is no pressure sensitivity in gimp so instead of drawing a solid black line it parts of the line turn gray and I think that's why it's white around the edges. that's what I think any how. You can't see it in the game though just in body shop. All I have is a cheapy cheap 30$ pen tablet. Its the genius brand so it's super chintzy. I've had some problems with it, I have to re install the driver every time I shut my lap top down because for some reason it goes away. I think it has something to do with gimp because I never did figure out how to set the pressure sensitivity up with gimp. and my tablet is only 5"by4" which is good in some ways bad in others. It means I have to draw with very small movements which I'm not real use to. I probably need practice. Also I tend to photo skin because it's faster and I'm a little lazy on recoloring. Still I will look over a tutorial on painting hair and some other recoloring tutorials late after I get some sleep. But I wanted to know if what I did with the mesh was ok? It has two groups
one for the top large part of the hair ( I don't know if you can see what I'm talking about) and one for the bottom part and the bangs. I will try my hand at adding more groups to my meshes in the future. I really was making this mesh for myself but I thought if I could get away with it some one else might like it also. But if it doesn't meat requirements I might just make something else because I don't think I can easily separate the pieces now that I already grouped them together.

I know I'm not explaining this very well but basically my mesh only has two parts and I'll show you the pictures from milkshape that I'm attaching hopefully by that it will clear up what I mean.

I know that's not really the correct way to do it I guess but I combine the front and inside part of the mesh to one group since they both have the same texture and alpha any way. I always thought it didn't make sense to have them separate in the first place. But I think that it will fail If I try to upload it like that because I've never seen any one else do it that way before.

I probably need to get more brushes. I like gimp for somethings but I prefer coral for other things. I don't have any extra brushes for coral though.

Also I got sloppy all around when I made this mesh because usually I back things up as I go and I kind of forgot to do that with this mesh.

Also I put wes how's addons in milkshape but for some reason the extended manual edit isn't showing up. I can't use the bone tool because it crashes milkshape. I can see I might have to start from scratch if I want to upload this or something similar to it. I admit I kind of slapped some color on it because I was eager to play it in the game. Which it looks pretty good in the game considering but I know I have to fix some of the bone assignments on the lower part of the hair. Also should I delete the part of the mesh that clips inside the body? I was just going to leave it but if you think it's more professional to not have it clip inside the actual body I'll fix that too while I'm at it.