Is it possible to cut out eyebrows from a photo and put them into Skyrim?

[Kernel39]

If you're trying to create a character preset whose likeness is as realistic as possible to the person it's based on, is it possible to cut out eyebrows from an actual photo and then convert them into a .dds file with GIMP and use them on your character?

 

Will they show up in the eyebrow slider? I tried doing this, but was not successful.

 

If you are a veteran modder, especially a texture artist, please give me some imput! How do I create custom brows? I know that eyebrows are a texture overlay.

 

I cut tattoos out of actual photos of this one woman and cut and pasted them onto the female body texture and it worked.

[Coopervane]

No, not really.

 

This perspective is comming from an amateur 2D artist, i've not made eyebrows for Skyrim, though plenty of other textures for both it and other games. Though i know you'll need to make more than just a texture for that, you'll also have to create some new records for it in the Creationkit or TesVedit to put that ingame (download any mod that adds new eyebrows, have a look at what the author did to make that happen, then do the same with your own texture mod). But i do know a thing or two about texture work..

 

 

Using photo's in videogames, ironically enough, actually creates a far worse and much less belivable end result.

 

Videogames, very much like cartoons, straddle the uncanny valley. We know that what we're looking at is not actually real, but as long as the world that we're presented with is internally consistant, then we can look past that, suspend our disbelief, and allow ourselves to be immersed into the world that is placed before us. Applying something actually real, like a photo, into this world of makebelief shatters that illusion, and makes the player reject what they are seeing.

 

This is why game companies are willing to spend the money hiering 2D artists. In truth it would be much cheaper for them to just hire a freelance photographer and say "here's a list of stuff we need pictures taken of, go take them and we'll pay your rate", and if that actually worked then that's what they would do. But they don't, because it doesen't work.

 

 

No, you need digitized textures in a videogame, or things will look bad, very bad (go look up unmodded screenshots of "Opperation Flashpoint" to see how bad, that's a game that did photoskins to do it on the cheap, and it looked awful!).

 

 

 

As in, this kind of bad (hoping the direct-linked image loads correctly):

 

 

 

 

 

That's not to say you can't use photo's in your work, you can, just not directly. What you can do is load it as the baselayer of your layered image, and then paint ontop of that on a sepparate layer, using the photo underneath as a template and guide for your work to create a similar, but digitized result. That works just fine, and is frequently done by 2D artists.

[Kernel39]

If I try taking an image of an actual face and erasing everything on it but the eyebrow, save as .dds file, and copy and paste that file into my computer/program files x86/steam apps/common/skyrim/data/textures/actors/character/female brows, it doesn't show up in the eyebrow slider for some reason.

[Setekh]

100% agree with Coopervane, photoskinning has always looked bad in games.

[Kernel39]

What about taking certian parts of someone's face like their eyebrows, and putting them into the brow slider?