Tommy Khajiit's How To Make a Tattoo
The Gimp is a powerful and free image manipulation program. On this page I will show you how you can add a tattoo to an already existing facial texture using the Gimp. I assume you're familiar with the basics of retexturing, if not have a look at Srikandi's Skinning Tutorial.
The keyword for this excersise is Layer, we will keep the tattoo seperated from the original face in it's own layer at all times. This enables us to edit the tattoo without touching the face. Therefore I recommend saving the image in Gimp's .XCF file format. Because Morrowind textures have to be either.BMP, .DDS or .TGA, we will save the final result as an .BMP file as well.
Bear in mind that this is only one way of doing this, and not necessarily the best. You're encouraged to experiment with all the options to find the results you like best.
Anyway, here goes.
Looking for an image I could use for the tattoo, I found this one at World of Escher
Select the part you want to use, copy paste it as a new image.
Now we have to remove everything we don't want. First enlarge the view of the image using the magnifying glass.
Then using the path or bezier tool, select the parts you want to remove, and remove them.
Time to load the original facial texture. I selected a standard male Nord: TX_B_N_Nord_M_H04.bmp, you'll find it on the second CD that came with Morrowind.
Copy the bat image
then past into the texture image.
Make it a new layer.
Move it to the desired position.
Time to add some colour. Select Filters, Colors, Colorify
I liked blue. ;)
Using the Hue-Saturation tool adjust the colour to your likings.
Duplicate the bat layer. For the top layer I selected mode Overlay with an opacitiy of 100.
For the second layer I selected mode Burn with an opacitiy of 25.
The final result.
