Now we start on image slicing. First, create a folder somewhere on your hard drive. Move your prepared, templated image into it. This is where the skin parts go. Keep the template as the top layer on your skin, and use it as a stencil. I do, so I see no shame in it. You'll need to do a lot of layer toggling, and, if you've been using my multiple-layer-intensive method of setting up skins, you'll need to rely on "copy merged" a lot too in order to get the contents of more than one layer. You may at this point want to open up one of my skins and have some of the parts handy - there's also no shame in using other people's skins as a base so you know what to paste where. I think everybody starts that way, and to this day, I use chunks of one skin to create the next one. To create a skin part, you'll need to select that part, or a portion of it, on your skin-to-be image. Then you hide the template, copy (or copy-merged) the selection, and paste the part into the correct portion of a skin file. Did I just lose you completely? Hang in there. It should make more sense later. For image-slicing purposes, start at the beginning. Select the entire top window of the skin-to-be, which will be 275 x 116 pixels. Hide any layers containing the volume or position-slider controls. Copy or copy-merged, then paste as a new image. Save that in your skin folder as main.bmp. That's the basis for the entire main window; all the other parts are laid over it. That means that if that's the only thing you have in your skin, most of the parts - the titlebar at the top, the volume bar, etc. - will use Winamp's default. Main.bmp displays under all those. Below, you see what you get if that's the only skinned part.
 So let's move on to other parts. You may have noticed, in earlier parts of the tutorial, that I mentioned the importance of having space to the right of the image. Hell, you may just have noticed that the vast majority of my skins (and most other people's skins as well) keep the character off to your right. This is because there are two parts of Winamp that almost no anime skinner will ever bother with - the balance bar and the mono/stereo indicator. This is for good reason. The mono/stereo indicator is pretty pointless; okay, so it tells you if you've got mono or stereo. Wow. The balance bar is nearly as pointless; if you have stereo, why would you want your sound unbalanced? Maybe that's just me. But I doubt it since I didn't exactly initiate this tradition. I always treat these two parts as blank space, a place to put a character's face where nothing will cover it. I did essentially the same thing with Vincent. With the back of his head, anyway. So those are the first two parts I skin. Let's start with the balance, the easiest part on the skin. See the file below? That's the balance for this Vincent skin, saved as a .gif. If you wanted to make a functional balance, you would need to do things a bit differently - I may cover that later.
 If you're making a skin of your own, take this file, increase the color depth on it, save it as .bmp in your skin folder (you DID make a skin folder, right? You need to), and open it up again. On your skin-to-be, select the balance area - refer back to the template guide if you don't know what I mean - copy, and then paste it exactly over the space that is Vincent's head. Now save it. You have a balance. Two parts down, fifteen to go. The monoster is represented, on the template, by the two unlabelled squares right under the text area. The one to the right is wider, and goes to the left of the monoster.bmp file; paste it in there twice, one under the other. The narrower one, to the left, goes in the right portion of the the monoster file. This alone foiled me repeatedly when I first tried to make skins.
  Finished that? That's three parts down. Next up is the text file. At several points throughout the skin, Winamp will call on a graphic file for text or numbers too tiny to be rendered in a normal font. If you don't edit that, it will use the default file, which is bright green on black - see below, or in the screenshot above. You don't want that. This one is Winamp's default text, slightly altered so the @ symbol will be the right size.
 Increase the color depth on that and then mess with the colors so that they'll work with your skin. In the case of this Vincent skin, we're using the purple I put in the boxes, and black text. The replace brush comes in handy here. You aren't required to use that text file, either, but it's not exactly a piece of cake to make your own. If you want to try, though, I'll cover the details of that later as well. Four parts down, and that's about it for the non-moving parts on the main window. Next step - moving parts. Not as scary as it maybe sounds. |