I need some hints or a tutorial on how to make better "control textures" - the diffuse and specular it's easy to do. I made a hair but it's UGLY if i use different colors.

Controls ist he texture that defines the recolorable parts of the hair - tips, highlights and the roots.

Any help?

One thing I found useful, if you have Photoshop CS or greater.

On top of your diffuse, create a new layer. Pick a big blobby brush, and blob some white over the area you want to, say, highlight, in the direction of the highlights. As if you were painting on highlights, but you don't have to be real precise or perfect.

Then, add monochromatic noise at a pretty high rate. You want it nice and crunchy.

Then, do a Motion Blur filter, again, at a fairly high rate - it'll make it all streaky. You can adjust the angle to go with the shape of the hair.

Lastly, use the Warp tool (Edit>Transform>Warp) to smush the hair into place so it nicely follows the contours of the underlying texture.

Repeat until you've got all your highlights made, then combine them, stick them on top of a black background, and copy it to use as your green channel. And so forth for roots and tips as well.

I can work up some real quick and dirty pics if you like. This way works pretty well for rather straight or lightly curved textures, and is one hell of a lot easier than handpainting.

Thanks :D
I'll try to do that ^^

Well, don't know if I can post here, but the alpha channel must be at the top of the channels windows? Cause I've done that and it didn't worked...

No, it need to be at bottom(I Think).

I'm guessing you're using GIMP, savio? I don't believe the actual order matters so much as setting the dropdowns so that each channel is set to the right thing when you re-compose your image. It'll say in the little dropdown the channel name - it normally picks 'em based on order but you can change each to whichever you want.

Also, I know this is a double-post but it's on the original topic...

I found some time to work on another hair, and in doing so, I was doing the way I've been doing controls and figured I'd snap some pics.

This is done using Photoshop CS3 but you can use any graphics program to do most of this. The only thing I'm not sure about is the Warp transform type, but maybe other programs have an equivalent, I don't know.

First, get your diffuse texture done up - I'll explain how I do this later, but it doesn't really matter too much for this demonstration. Then, you'll probably want to put a darker layer on top, set to partial transparency, so your diffuse texture looks darker. It's not absolutely necessary, just easier that way to see what you're doing.

Then, create a new layer, and blob on some white that roughly follows where you'd like your highlights to go. Let the way your diffuse is done be your guide. This doesn't have to be perfect, but you just want to make sure you don't have any perfect edges, and that some areas are whiter than others.



Then, add monochromatic noise at a pretty high rate. You want it to be nice and crunchy, but not so much that you completely lose your blobs of white in the noise.



Then, do a motion blur. Set the direction to follow the direction of your hair, and the amount to pretty high - you want it to look nice and streaky, not crunchy at all, but not TOO streaky. Exactly how much you do it will depend on your texture, so fiddle with the slider till it looks similar to the amount in my pic:



Lastly, use the Warp transform type (Edit>Transform>Warp) and grab the adjustment handles and smush it around so it nicely follows the contour of the hair. Even if it's a very slight adjustment, not having this perfectly straight looks better than just leaving it.



Repeat for the rest of the hair, then combine all your streaky blobs into one layer, drop bucket fill black behind 'em, and use it for one channel of your control.

HP, no, I'm not... But solved the problem. That was super easy.. hehe

I discovered a way that works well for doing conversions. At least, I think it works fine. I'm using GIMP, too. The highlight is the hardest part, the green part.

If you export the grey, elder texture from the old Sims 2 package (or your prepared diffuse texture works, too), you can edit it by going to Colors > Levels, Colors > Curves, and heck, even Colors > Posturize (but never too much of that anyway). I just play with it until I get the highlights really highlighted and the darks barely visible (up next to a black background, I mean).
Put a layer of straight green on top of it and mess with opacity and whatever until you're happy with it.

I typically like to do a Gaussian blur afterwards so it's not super sharp, and blends better on the mesh in-game. (Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur -- 5 pixels is usually good for me.)

Similar to the same method, if you invert the initial texture, you can use the same steps to make the tips and base colors as well. Just play around with it a bit. Here are before and after pictures for me.
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i...ng?t=1248931671
http://i73.photobucket.com/albums/i...ng?t=1248931734

It's not perfect, but should suffice rather well. That's just my method.

Like I said, if you just play around with those options and you can easily come up with something works relatively easily, without excess painting and whatnot.

Of course, this only works if the texture you have already has the highlights.

*bumb*
What exactly the "halo" does?
I mean. My texture is ok, the control too, but in CAS, when I move the sim, appear a weird "lilac thing" (link the env-cube in TS2). Is that? Halo = enc cube? /)

The halo is the shine applied to the hair.

I'm using the halo key "key:00B2D882:00000000:9C8F76BE31BAF565" provided in "Tutorial:Sims 3 Hair Basics" And the hair gets way too shiny. Ingame that's supressed, but in CAS it's really annoying. Do you know if there's an opaque halo, or how to do one?