#dlresources

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.