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Sim Skin Workshop .24
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Overview 
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Sim Skin Workshop is a program to let you easily and quickly modify skins, mostly by cutting and pasting bits and pieces from other skins.

It's not a complete tool, nor will it let you make skins completely from scratch, but it can be pretty useful because I personally like to modify other people's skins (for my own personal use, not to redistribute) because there is something about the skin that I don't like 100%. For instance, my favorite mesh for women is B077, which is essentially a slightly curvier and shorter skirted version of Maxis's B007 mesh. Lots of skinners like to use weird meshes, so I would often have to alter a skin to get it to fit that mesh okay.

Frankly, I realize that most people will have absolutely no idea how to use it, and honestly, I probably can't explain how, as it's mostly a tool I made for me. 


++ New in .20 -  I added some skin 'masks'. Essentially, it's an easy way of making a skin. Also the ability to copy a user defined body area, and a few more props.


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How to Use It
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Extract it to a directory someplace. Then run it. You need the Visual Basic 6.0 support files, but chances are pretty good you already have them. 

Anyway, once you run it, you see one big window.

You should see 2 pairs of file boxes and large blank squares (picture boxes). Go to the file box (the thing that lists all the files in a folder, or in this case, all the bitmap files in a folder),and pick one. You should see the pic pop up in the corresponding picture box.

The picture box on top is the source picture box. This is the skin you are copying from. The one on the bottom is the destination picture box. It is what you are copying to.

In the bottom left are a number of buttons. These buttons describe what is copied from the source bitmap (skin) to the destination bitmap (skin).

Basically, they just copy different regions. It should be pretty self explanatory. The arms and leg buttons copy the arms and legs sections of one skin for another. The legs are basically labeled by mesh number. One for slacks, two for mini-skirts, 1 for regular length skirts, 1 for male shorts, 1 for female shorts. 

On the right side are some more buttons. They are for accessories. Rather than copied from a skin, they are graphics contained in the program itself (pretty much all taken from the original skins that come with the game). Click on the button, and it gets copied to the destination skin. Mostly footwear.

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Using 'User Copy'
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Using my program, sometimes you need to copy an area not pre defined. So, I came up with this. Essentially, just click the area on the destination window of the region you want to copy. Then pick where you want to copy from, either the source window or from nude base skins.


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Using 'Masks'
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Basically, you pick a graphic or a skin in the destination window (the skin you work on. (This can be a skin, or simply a 256 x 256 sized graphic), then you pick a mask.

A mask is basically an outline of a skin. What would be the clothing. I have about 10-12 of them in the program.

Then you pick the apropriate skin tone. This copies the nude skin bits over everything but the clothing. So the end result is a skin (hopefully).

This is useful for making matching pajamas or swimsuit to the Sim's base outfit (works best for women, I guess).

Most of my masks are for women's clothing, just because well, women tend to have a bigger variety of clothing. Basically all the sorts of clothing men wear, plus a whole bunch, many of which I'm not entirely sure I know the correct name of (particularly sleepwear)

I've included some textures you might use these masks on (the bmp files 



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Saving your work
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Anyway, once you are done, double click on the destination picture box. You are then prompted for a filename. Type it in, and press the save button. It's now saved.

Now here is the tricky bit. Once you save the picture, you have to go into some sort of paint program and manually drop the color depth (the amount of colors in the picture) from 16 bit (65000) to 8 bit (256). I think even the paint program that comes with Windows will do this (though it does it poorly).

I wish you didn't have to do that, but I don't know how to do that in visual basic. I'm not that great a programmer. 

I seem to get the best results using Paint Shop Pro. I've noticed that it looks much better if you set the desktop to 32 bit depth (



Anyway, besides that, if you modify other peoples skins, you shouldn't redistribute them without their permission. 

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General Skin Making Tips
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Tight fitting clothing looks best when you blend it in with the curves/texture of the body. On the other hand, loose clothing looks best when you don't.



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Troubleshooting
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I have it so it changes to the directory I use to keep the skins I work on, which happens to be the textures directory of simshow.

C:\Program Files\Maxis\SimShow\Gamedata\Textures


Apparently, if you don't have this directory (or folder), it will crash or give you an error. Sorry!

I didn't realize this at first, but I hopefully changed it so that if you don't have the directory, it will default back to C:\. But if that doesn't work, just create the above directory.
