So basically Ben Purse has been bugging me how I make my skins on my replicas. I told him to screw around with transforming in photoshop, but apparently is too hard. Instead how having to give a guide for someone to use once I'll just show everyone what I do. In order to do this you need some photo editing software with these features. I'm using Photoshop cs3.
Step 1: Finding the replica. Well for this method of skinning you need a decent picture to start with. If you can't find any good pictures of the bot, your out of luck using this method. You can however do what Sonny_Resetti does for the most part. You can hand draw the skin, but I'm too lazy for that type of thing. :P
For this example I'll use the bot Janus:
Step 2: Choosing what to transform.Now that you have some nice pictures to build the replica with, you need to decide what you are going to transform. For Janus I'm just going to use the whole front panel, though it sometime looks better to skin the bot transforming all logos or anything on the bot separated. If you can, try an find as many logos as you can on google before transforming an angled shot off a bot.
Here I use the Polygonal Lasso tool to isolate the front panel. You can also use the magnetic lasso or the lasso to get off entire panels or logos.
Step 3: Separating the image.At this point if I was actually building a Janus replica I would have the template of the bots skin open in Photoshop re sized to 520x520 for maximum quality, but I'm not so I'm just moving it to a new window opened in Photoshop.
Step 4: Scaling and skewing. Now go under edit and find transform. Then, skew. I personally use ctrl + t and right click to get to scale and skew.
After a combination of skewing and then scaling to get the size right for the skin template, you should end up with something like this.
Not too bad for like 2 minutes, eh? Should fit nicely on the front panel of a Janus replica or maybe a component and the more time you put into the skin, the better it will turn out. Once you get used to how the image is affected by skewing, it becomes really easy and skinning an entire replica takes like an hour.
If you really want the bot to look nice, you can use a combination of textures and other things off of google to give the bot a good look. Like for the front panel, I could have just skewed the Janus face or even found something similiar on google and just used the same shade of orange font over an aluminum texture. It's essentially what I do for my IRL bots and makes the look fairly life like.
Thanks for reading and keep replica building alive!!! I'm sure there are others who know of better ways to use photoshop than I do (everything I know was basically self taught by messing around) and feel free to right up a paragraph showing how to use Photoshop and I'll edit it right in.
-Scrap
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did you do?