Post by ℓacey ☀️ on Jul 23, 2021 8:49:29 GMT -5
in this lesson i will teach you about the [Paint Ballz] section as well as how to add tattoos to your baby using that section.
let's scroll down to the [Paint Ballz] section in betsy's file, which is the last section at the very bottom! it looks like this:
paint ballz work very similarly to add balls except that they are "flat" and wrap around the baby's body instead of spherical and 3D like add balls. an example of paint ballz would be a baby's freckles; each freckle is an individual paint ball. another example would be the "base" hair on a baby's head. if you took away all of betsy's ponytail balls she would still have the flat, round area of hair on the top of her head, like so:
this flat area is made using paint balls. you can see how it wraps around her head rather than resting on top of it like an add ball does.
let's take a closer look at one of betsy's freckle paint balls.
again i've highlighted each part of the line that is important to know when hexing with paint balls.
pink: this is the part of the body that the paintball is on. here it is on ball 8 which is the baby's right cheek (it is written as CheekL on the ball list because the balls are labeled from the baby's perspective for some reason lol)
purple: paintball size
light blue: these numbers are used for positioning of the freckle. positioning works similarly to how it did with add balls except in much smaller increments since a lot of the paint balls are designed to be much smaller (such as freckles).
yellow: paintball color
dark blue: fuzziness of the paintball
orange: outline thickness
green: texture
so as you can see it's very similar to the add ball but the numbers are in a bit of a different order!
let's practice this by changing betsy's freckle colors since they've been a bit too light for her skintone this whole time. i think a pretty dark brown would be nice, so let's go through her freckles and change the colors to a dark brown from the color chart. if you'd like to you can also do a mix of lighter and darker colors, though they should all be a little darker than her skintone so that they show up nicely. i've chosen color #202 for my betsy, which you can see here:
feel free to experiment with making freckles bigger and smaller as well! variety is super fun and definitely adds to the realism when it comes to something that is naturally random like freckles. i also find it helpful to separate and ;label the paintballs on the different parts of the body so you can quickly see what's what.
if you want to add more freckles, i recommend using jordyn's freckle tool as it will calculate random freckle locations for you rather than you having to fiddle with placement!
you might notice that i kind of glossed over paint ball movement a little bit, and that is because i hate paint ball movement. i find it to be extremely fiddly, tedious, and confusing. i'm sure not all hexers think that, but personally i find it much easier and more fun to use bmp textures to create freckles on a baby instead of trying to place each individual freckle!
you can also use bmp textures to create what the community calls "tattoos" on the baby. you may have already seen babyz who have tattoos or images on parts of their body, such as the tarot cards and moon on my baby aura's tummy:
in addition to her tummy tattoos you can also see she has a little constellation on her knee. images like this are placed on the baby using paint balls that are textured with a bmp of the image you want to use.
let's try to put a tattoo on betsy's belly. i've created a quick little tattoo bmp for us to use here:
make sure you right click and save it as "laceystartum.bmp" to your babyz>resource>bmps folder we made in the first lesson.
you can see the actual tattoo image (the stars and sparkles) has a pink background around it. that's because the babyz game reads that one very specific magenta color as transparent. anything in that color will be see-through, meaning only the stars and sparkles will show up on the baby's skin.
next, since we're adding a new texture, we need to make a new line on the [Texture List] for this tattoo bmp. this tattoo bmp will be texture #5 on the list (keeping in mind that the texture list starts with texture #0). your texture list should now look something like this, depending on what textures you decided to use for her hair:
now, we want to add a new paint ball that we will texture with the tattoo image. normally we would have to copy/paste one of the freckle paintballs, resize it, and then scoot it around a bit until it looked right on the tummy. however Ꮭilibet 🍑 has made the tattoo process significantly more painless for us with her super-convenient freckle/tattoo bases! if you follow that link you will find paint ball codes for each part of the baby's body you might want to put a tattoo on as well as templates for making your own tattoo bmps to use with those codes!
so let's just go ahead and copy lilibet's tummy tattoo code, which looks like this:
4, 240, -0.9, -0.4, -0.928477, 12, -1, -1, -1, -1, 5, 0conveniently, lili's code already has texture #5 for this paint ball, so we don't need to change that this time. now you'll want to scroll back to the [Paint Ballz] section of the file and paste this line in. i usually put it underneath the other belly paintballs (the ones starting with 4). so your paintball section should now look like this:
now, save the file and open your game. i am going to caution that paintballs are SUPER finnicky and don't always work the first time. if your belly tattoo doesn't show up at all (and you're sure you've saved it to the right place and added it to your texture list), then you might need to copy/paste the tattoo paintball again so that you have it repeated a couple times in a row to try and convince the game to read it. i actually had to have the paintball repeated three times in order for the tattoo to actually show up. it's a bit trial and error, but once you get it to cooperate, betsy should look like this:
(i think she's forgiven us for the floating hair thing now that she's got a pretty tattoo)
going back to the freckle textures i mentioned earlier, you can achieve freckles in exactly the same way we achieved her tattoo, except that instead of the stars and sparkles you would draw freckles there. you can see an example of what this can look like on kassidy's baby kandi that i hexed:
kandi actually has an assortment of belly tattoos layered on top of each other. the freckles on her belly are one texture, her bellybutton is another separate texture, and then her little icecream cone tattoo is a third texture! paintballs show up in the order that they are listed in the [Paint Ballz] section, so in kandi's case, i have the paintball textured with her ice cream listed first, then the bellybutton paintball, and then the freckle-textured paintball at the bottom. i also used bmp textured paintballs to create the freckled blush on her cheeks.
kandi's other body freckles are actually done with a freckle texture as well, which i used on some of her [Ballz Info] balls. as you can see, you can get pretty creative with freckles and tattoos on a baby and create some really neat effects!
show me a picture of betsy after you've changed her freckle colors and given her a belly tattoo!
