EHM The Blue Line

Is there a guide for making skins for EHM anywhere? I would really appreciate an easy-to-follow guide. What programmes did you use to make yours, Minstrel? Suggestions of themes would be welcome-I thought perhaps an ESPN theme?

A red, white, black ESPN one would be cool. I attempted to do a black, white, grey one but I just don't have the qualities required like Minstrel does. A TBL one would be cool too

These articles in the Knowledge Base might be useful later on: Link

That's all the help I can give you but I'm sure Minstrel can give you way more (he is the Graphics Godfather afterall! )

I'd love to see someone give a skin a go. Mainly they just take time and testing really.

I actually have a graphical guide to skinning EHM that pulls the games pieces onto four different pages then showing what pieces are created by what files where. And beyond that I have a corresponding step by step walkthrough of the pages of the graphical quide. Jeff Riddolls used it to create his Hockey Night In Canda skin so I guess it can at least be followed to a decent end result. *

The other info for a full skin customization to get everything to blend is the options in the .col file.

I've been meaning to add one additional graphical page to that set and a corresponding instructions set since I put it together back during testing a year or so ago and I have some extra things I could add. I'm going to work on that today actually now that I think of it and I'll post links to all of it here later on...

As I mentioned anyone who needs/wants my help/input on skins I'm more than happy to help people test and refine their projects.

I do all my stuff in Photoshop; but I don't have the new CS version as my copy of 7.0 was part of payment for a graphic design friend I was assisting on a project But you don't need that much program horsepower to craft a skin really.

I'm sure I'll ramble on about this again later today when I get that update done and posted



*The funny thing about project crossovers is he got me in on his making the first set of cards for the last version and I did once chunk of the alphabet just to finish the part I said I would do and told him thanks for the help but the cards drive me crazy and those were the last card project I'd be doing. He of course did thousands more after that. He did his HNIC skin from my guide and after I helped him tweak some final touches he told me the quide was good but he had created his last skin.

Cheers, Minty. I look forward to seeing your guides-I'll need all the help I can get. It is a shame that a simple template cannot be used within say Photoshop to quickly and easily edit skins...

My ideas so far are...
1) an ESPN skin-primarily reddish-orange with Black and cream tints, the ESPN logo etc
2) A TSN skin-similar in colours...
3) an NHL themed skin-the new shade of grey and black with the NHL decals..
4) Maybe a skin based on the DEL league-lighter in colour, with red, yellow and thepurpley colour seen together here:
DEL

Do you have a program that can open photoshop files? Because I do have a titlepanel/sidepanel set of templates I put together for people to create their own CustomColor versions of Metal. A bit of a hidden secret to that set though is that the metal accents are just layers so if you were to just want to make a red skin of a certain shade you could knock out the basic form of it in around 30 seconds

Check it out as they are already "masked" with hue adjustment layers to instantly change them to any color of the rainbow... just toy around with it and you can see if it's something you want to work on going from that to rounding out the rest of the game's graphic elements to a certain style/idea... there is a full walkthrough/users guide along with the templates and literally if you can double click you can use the adjustment layers.

I have paint shop pro

Paint Shop Pro can open Photoshop files (PSD) with no probs.

I've downloaded it, but it is all too complicated for me The only file that will open in paint shop pro is the 'SF Diego sample' file. The rest say that 'the specified file cannot be identified as a supported type'....

My mistake-I found the correct templates. It is my lack of experience at using Paint Shop Pro that will provide the problems. I need to download the Minstreal Metal skin as well to make sure that I can see how it will look in game...

It's more complicated than difficult... if that makes sense. It's just a lot of oddly named files in a lot of seemingly non-sensical locations

I did finish my updated Graphical Skinning Guide and uploaded it so that's your best place to start out. There is a full "walkthrough" to give more decription of the screens that make up the guide as well. It should familiarize you with the skin's major elements, it will also give you a reference to check if you're trying to track down a certain piece. That's why I did it as a graphic guide not an exclusively text version.

I started an official skinning questions thread and you will find linkage to the Guide's d/l page atop the forum and a copy of the "Guide to the Guide" is now up in the Graphics Guides section.