If you have the Minecraft skin template file and an image manipulation program, you’re ready to start learning. The first thing that is not obvious is what is going on in that template file.
In the previous post, we learned what is involved with making your own “skin” for Minecraft. Every step is pretty simple and self-explanatory – except for the part about editing the Minecraft skin template.
If you’ve used texture maps on 3D things before, this may not seem so intimidating at all. Though, there are a lot of people who may only do this kind of thing once in their lives – in the name of having a character with a fully custom look in a multi-user Minecraft world.
A lot of people use Photoshop or GIMP in their day to day lives. Some people get by with MS Paint – but unfortunately, you need to be able to save transparent pixels to do this, so MS Paint does not have what it takes. Unless you have some really serious professional requirements for your image editing software, I highly recommend GIMP.
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It’s the free, open-source version of Photoshop. It installs and runs nice and light. You can get it here: https://www.gimp.org/. It’s not as easy to use as Photoshop – but the quality of the files it produces is second to none.
Note that I only included the “top, bottom, right, front, left, back” labels on a few of the body parts. It’s the same on each of them, so no sense making this “map” any busier than it needs to be. The parts that say (outer) are like the “armour” – they render onto a slightly larger “box” than the body. This is a really fun feature – you can leave lots of transparent pixels in theses layers, and it allows you to add shape, depth, and texture to these otherwise very primitive (and primitive looking) shapes.
I kept some of the original colours and textures that were included in the template, and made an elderly bearded dude in Mr. Spocks Star Trek uniform.
You’re going to want to set your pencil tool and eraser tool up special for this. Those little “squares” are actually individual pixels. You’re going to want both the pencil and the erase tool to have a width of 1 pixel; opacity 100%; transparency 0%; anti-aliasing NO; hardness 100; and then your tools will easily allow you to mess with one pixel at a time.
From there, you just follow the step on the Mojang pages (where you’re logged in, of course), as outlined in the previous post – and you’re done. Next time you start your Minecraft client – you’ll be wearing you new skin!
Next Next post: Minecraft Realms and how to set them up.