- Getting Started

Setting up a Palette
The easiest way to make a skin is on a palette. Open MS Paint and make a large .BMP image in that you will have enough room to move things around. Make sure the background colour is the same as the colour on the grid you plan to put your skin on. Line up the frames you plan to use, plus any effects you want to add. If you just want to make a rip, then the palette is pretty much usless.

Finding the Characters
Alright, now where do you find the character that you want to put on your skin? There are several places to look. You can create a skin literally from any image. The most popular resource is videogames. You can use emulation ROMs or Mugen to find nearly any character you want. Whatever skin you make, you must remember that your colour palette is limited due to the 256 bits due to the game's engine.

Mugen is a program that was designed so people could make their own fighting games. But the program is equally as useful for ripping skins. First, you will need Mugen.

Next you will need the character files. A great place to find these is at the Mugenation. Once you've downloaded the zip, open it up and extract the files with the .sff extension. Put those in a file where you can easily find them once you've downloaded and are running the Mugen program. (For example, make a file called 'Characters' inside your Mugen file.) For the rest of the Mugen tutorial, go back to the main page and click the Mugen link.

Putting the Skin Together
Once you have all the frames you want, make sure the background you built them on matches the one on the skin grid you're going to use. (You should have gotten different skin grids when you downloaded the 'Wos Viewer'. Refer to FAQ.) Open a skin grid that is the correct size, make sure you flip the images so that they face the left.

Place them where each frame should be: In the bottom center of each grid frame. Unless your character is jumping, flying, or you just don't want them to be touching the ground. If you don't at least center the skin in each frame, the images will overlap into other frames, and well, you don't want that. Make sure your frames DO NOT go below the shadow line; there will be a line through your skin. And there you have it, a finished skin! Want to do something more to it? Read the other tutorials.

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