How to do skins for World of Tanks
Programs you need to do skins :
Photoshop with
NVidia dds plugin : https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-texture-tools-adobe-photoshop ( freeware )
or
Gimp + dds converter 2
Gimp : http://www.gimp.org/downloads/ ( freeware )
dds converter : http://www.gamefront.com/mod-tool-dds-converter/ ( freeware )
also its a big help to use the " WoT Tank viewer " so that you can check the progress of your skins without loading World of Tanks all the time.
WoT TankViewer : https://sites.google.com/site/wottankviewer/downloads
To open the folder in World of Tanks where the original skins are you will need 7zip, its a program like winzip
7zip : link
First steps before beginning with the skinning :
Go to the main folder of WoT, in the most cases it will be
C:\Games\World_of_Tanks\res\packages , in this folder you will find on the bottom all nations of tanks.
vehicles_american.pkg
vehicles_british.pkg
vehicles_chinese.pkg
vehicles_german.pkg
vehicles_japan.pkg
vehicles_russian.pkg
Setup the Tank viewer
make sure the tank viewer has the right path connection to your WoT folder and the res_mods folder
working on the desktop
You can open this folders with 7zip. If you open this folders, you will find all skin/folders of each tank from this nation in there, copy the folder of the tank you want to create a skin for to your desktop. But i have to say the next option i show you here is the better one. Because if you work on your desktop, you always have to copy the files after working with it into the C:\Games\World_of_Tanks\res_mods\0.9.0\vehicles\russian\R88_Object268 folder.
better way to work on skins
You also can copy it into the res_mods/0.9.x folder, but if you never used a skin before you have to create few folders first.
Lets say you want to do a skin for the russian TD Obj268, that means you have to go into
C:\Games\World_of_Tanks\res_mods\0.9.0 and create an " vehicles " folder in there.
Open then the vehicles folder and create another folder in there called " russian ".
The path should look like this now :
C:\Games\World_of_Tanks\res_mods\0.9.0\vehicles\russian
Copy the original skin folder " R88_Object268 " out of the 7zip archive into the russian folder.
C:\Games\World_of_Tanks\res_mods\0.9.0\vehicles\russian\R88_Object268
Now you can start with skinning it
If you use Photoshop with the NVidia dds plugin its way more easy as with Gimp and the dds converter. With Photoshop you only have to drag the skin file " Object268.dds " into photoshop. With Gimp ( i have to say i never tried it ) i think there is no plugin, so you have to convert the Object268.dds file first into a jpg,png or bitmap. Then u can open the image file in gimp, work on it, save it as image, and convert it back to dds format. I also have to say the dds 2 converter is a bit hard to handle for beginners.
I use always Photoshop, its easy like hell, 1 click and it get saved as dds file.
So, now we start with the skin...
1. Load the Object268.dds into photoshop
2. Create a new layer to work on. You also can paint on the original skin, but u will lose all the details from it.
3. Look for a part to begin with.. I do it here with the hull. Select the " hull " with the selection tool
4. press " shift+ctrl+c " to copy the selection and press " ctrl+v " to paste it into a new layer.
you can see that i have here now the hull on a seperate layer
, i used the fx tool to give him a light grey color overlay.
5. Now i add a zebra pattern to it and make the pattern a bit transparent, look at the red circle in the layer menu.
, i do it transparent ( around 70% so that u still can see some details from the original skin )
6. The next steps are always the same, copy some parts from the original skin, paste it, put an FX on it ( color overlay with transparency on it )
Between the skinning i always look into the Wot Tank Viewer to see if i paint the right parts and how it looks.
Little hint, if you have trouble to find / indentify some parts on the skin, create a new layer, select the part you dont know what it is, pait a bright color over it
, save the file and have a look into the tank viewer
So now you only have to repeat all this steps until the skin is finished and have fun with it.
Here is the link to the photosop file of my Obj268 skin, you can look into it, play around with it, do whatever u want to do with it. But please keep in mind that this skin is made by me and dont post it on other sites and let people think you created this skin.
Photoshop file :
http://en.file-upload.net/download-8996125/Object268.rar.html
Hope i could help you with this little tutorial, and sorry about my english, its not my motherlanguage.
Thx , Rsd1975
infos :
Skins by Rsd1975 on Facebook, join my group
https://www.facebook.com/groups/World.of.tanks.skins/
Skins by Rsd1975 on curse.com
http://www.curse.com/users/Rsd1975