I hope I'm posting this right....


I looked over the threads explaining make up, and the black and white templates, but I can't find anything on how to make piercings. Can anyone offer a few pointers? Anything would be swell. =D

Well... having made piercings (which you can find on this site) I think I can offer a few pointers. There's two main things with piercings: getting a good shiny texture, and getting it to lay in the right place on the skin. The second part is WAY more fiddly work than the first... There's a LOT of distortion in the areas you might want to pierce, and getting something with that level of detail to look just right is pretty tricky.

To do the texturing for mine, well, here's what I did. Your steps may vary somewhat depending on what program you're using, but this is what worked for me using Photoshop CS2:

For positioning -

1. Make a new skintone project of whatever your favourite skintone is. I use the SimCribbling ones. You can use whatever. Also make a new project for your piercings. I like to use blush for them instead of full-face makeup as you can put a thumbnail in that views in both the game and Body Shop (you can make thumbnails for full-face makeup, but it only shows in-game).
2. Open the adult female or adult male face texture from the skintone. This is for positioning purposes, so you can paint your piercings on the texture whereever you want them to appear. Make a new layer. Fill it with solid black. Call this layer Backdrop. Hide it for now.
3. Make a new layer. Call it Piercing.
4. Use a smallish brush (3-5 pixels) without much of a fuzzy edge, and paint a rough, flat version of your piercing in the area you want it, using about 30% grey for your colour.
5. Un-hide the Backdrop layer. Save what you have currently viewable, the flat grey piercing and the black background, as your texture.
6. Duplicate your Piercing layer, and hide the original Piercing layer. Name the new layer Piercing Alpha. Lock the transparency of the Piercing Alpha and fill it with white. Save what you have currently viewable, the white piercing and the black background, as your alpha.
7. Refresh the textures in Body Shop for your piercing project. The positioning and stretching on the piercing texture is probably going to be somewhat off.
8. Hide the Backdrop layer, delete the Piercing Alpha layer, and adjust the original grey Piercing layer to try to compensate for whatever distortion/incorrectness you may have.
9. Repeat steps 4-8 as needed until you have your piercing positioned correctly and as distortion-free as possible.

For texturing -

I personally found the easiest thing to do to get a decent shiny piercing texture was just to colour around the outside of the piercing texture. I locked the transparency so I couldn't colour outside the lines... Then painted around the edges with a big fuzzy brush at about 50-60% grey, then around the very edgiest edge again with a slightly smaller fuzzy brush at about 70-80% grey to give it a nice rounded look.

If you're using Photoshop, the use of Paths to do this makes it SO easy to get good shading around the edges really quick. If you're using Photoshop and not familiar with the use of Paths (which I wasn't for a long time and I thought I knew Photoshop pretty well), there's a GREAT tutorial on making realistic new eye textures in Photoshop here: http://www.kandsdesign.com/kim/eyemap-tut.html ... taught me a lot and has a lot of other good info too... just make sure you do it with the colours suggested the first time or you will be totally lost.

Anyway. Last thing to do is to use your little fuzzy brush with white to just add a smidge of highlight to a couple spots on your piercing, to create a bit of a shiny highlight.

If you find your shinyness is still looking a bit flat, best thing I can recommend is taking a look at the textures people have done previously to texture piercings and try to examine the way they've laid down the shading. You can also look at pictures of real piercings to get an idea of how their shading looks, too.

I do hope this helped - I realize my explanations are rather long and complicated, hehe. :D

Wow. Helped me lots! I am always looking for meshes and...stuff, and things never work. ur tute was helpfull. My sims look kewl now.

does anyone know how to do piercings with GIMP?

thismodernlove947 - there is no difference.
You need to learn how to use GIMP. Go online onto the web. There are tutorials, there's an entire free book about learning how to use gimp. Once you know how to do a bunch of different things with your graphics program, then you will be pretty much able to follow along most directions that use photoshop or paintshop.

hey i have GIMP and know how to use it, but how do i make things on it for sims? i cant seem to find an answer....

simchick, go into projects then open the folder that you are working on, right click on the colour picture (not grey or B&W) Then select "edit with the GIMP"

Kind of off topic, but I need help
I'm wondering in bodyshop, I want to create custom jewelry... but when I go into it I can't find the jewel icon.