Skin Settings

The Skin Settings panel allows you to assign material colors, transparency, effects, shaders, or textures to particular skins of the model. Every skin must contain either a material color or a texture, or both. Material colors can be used to define the lighting of model parts. Effects can be used to apply a shader (for instance fur) or a special rendering technique to parts of the model. The colors and effects will override the corresponding settings of materials in the game script.

Material Setup When checked, material colors are assigned to the skin. You can set the red, green, blue color values in a 0..255 range, or click onto the color button to directly pick a color.
Diffuse The diffuse colors of the material, controlling the influence of dynamic lights.
Ambient The ambient colors of the material, controlling the influence of static lights and the entities' own color.
Specular The specular colors of the material, for highlight reflections; often used for a metal effect.
Emissive The emissive colors of the material, for light emitted by the skin.
Power The 'sharpness' of specular highlights, in a range of 0..10.
Alpha The transparency in percent, from 0 (full transparent) to 100 (full opaque). Make sure that this is normally set at 100.
Effect Setup When checked, an effect or shader definition is assigned to the skin  C   P  .
Definition File Imports the effect definition from an .FX file. When checking the Extern box, a reference to an external file is stored rather than importing the effect. The file name can have up to 15 characters. External files should be in the same folder as the model, and require a BIND statement for including them in the published game.
Make sure that the effect is well tested and contains fallback techniques before importing it into the model. For the effect or shader to work under any circumstances, it should not rely on material events or additional textures. Otherwise make sure to assign the required material to the entity in order for the effect to work. The material must be assigned to the whole entity, while effects can be different per skin.
Texture When checked, the skin uses a texture that can be directly painted in the Skin Editor, imported from an image file, or a reference to an external image file.
Texture File For importing or exporting a skin image file. The horizontal and vertical size of the skin image in pixels must be a power of 2, i.e. 128, 256, 512 etc. Supported import formats are PCX, BMP, TGA, and DDS. TGA and DDS textures can contain an alpha channel for transparency. Alternatively, the alpha channel can be imported or exported as a separate image file; its brightness determines the transparency of a particular pixel. DDS textures are stored in a compressed format (DXT1..DXT5) in order to save video memory at expense of image quality. They can contain precalculated mip maps.
When checking the Extern box, a reference to an external file is stored rather than importing the texture. The file name can have up to 15 characters. External files should be in the same folder as the model, and require a BIND statement for including them in the published game.
Supported Export formats are PCX and BMP.
Texture Format Set the texture size and color depth (default 256x256x16). The horizontal and vertical size of the skin texture must be a power of 2, i.e. 128, 256, 512 etc. Alpha channels are supported for 32 bit textures. When checking the Mip Map box, mip maps are automatically created for noncompressed textures (recommmended).