Chapter 9: Skins

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Overview

Skins are special textures used in games. The quality that separates skins from regular textures is that they typically wrap around the shape of a 3D model. It is fairly obvious that 3D monsters and player-characters would have texture skins, but the term can also apply to automobiles, wheelbarrows, mailboxes, rowboats, weapons, and other objects that appear in a 3D game.

Typically, skins are created after a model has been unwrapped, so that the skin artist knows how to lay the skins out in the UV template. We're going to do the process a bit backward, simply because we should stay on topic with Paint Shop Pro and textures until we've covered the topic sufficiently.

In our case here, it isn't a big issue anyway, because I'm providing you with UV templates from previously UV unwrapped models to work with.