Making Maxis Match hair recolors

[claudiasharon]

I'm trying to find a tutorial on how to make Maxis Match hair recolors. Specifically of Raonjena's hair. I've done a search and haven't been able to find anything on making the hair color match Maxis'. If I've missed something, I apologize.

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks. I'd appreciate it.

~Claudiasharon~

[Quinctia]

To make a truly well-done MM hair recolor, you're probably going to have to learn to do a little bit of handpainting yourself. The artists tend to handpaint textures to match the mesh. You can try to copy and paste other textures, but unless you luck out and a mesh already exists by Maxis that has the same kind of shape to the textures as the mesh you want to redo, it's not going to look well done at all.

I've done a couple (I'm not big into MM, but I like to paint hair and my art style goes pretty well with it) and this is what I do. I open the original texture file that BodyShop exports, and I change the image size to make it twice as big. It's always good to work bigger than your finished product. I use layers, and I make a new layer on top of the original texture. I then fill it with a base color - I like to use reddish brown as that seems to be good to use for recoloring - and then make my new top layer partially transparent.

In a slightly lighter color with a brush size of about 3, I paint some base strokes over the places where the old texture was. It's an easy way to make sure your texture will match in direction. Once I've got everything "mapped" out, I make my layer completely solid and with various brush sizes between 1-3, fill in with some nice strokes in the right direction. I generally keep going slightly lighter, though I will go back and do a few darker strokes. The idea is to make it look fine and stranded like hair, without going too far from that cartoonish look.

Once I've got my hair nice and filled in, I use adjustment layers to add highlights, extra shading, and to tweak my colors. Aside from painting a texture, that color tweaking is important, because you'll want your hairs' shades to match, too. I use the same base texture file to make all the colors. You'll want to keep your psd or psp file saved separately for that. :)

When you go to import, you just have to remember to size your texture back down to its original size or Bodyshop won't be happy.