Replacement Skintone Sliders for Patch 1.38: Desaturated or Realistic

What?

Have you updated to patch 1.38 and wondered what the frack you're meant to do with all these new retina searing skin tone sliders? Maybe you'd like slightly subtler fantasy skin tones, so your fairies and witchy alchemists don't look like they've been dipped in mustard. Maybe you've patched but won't be playing Supernatural, and don't have a need for fantasy skin colours in your game at all.

Whichever camp you fall into, I come bearing these default replacement skin tone sliders. These will overwrite the vanilla EA skin sliders in CAS - that's the aqua-turquoise, rainbow, green-blue (pastel rainbow), purple, greyscale/monochrome, and gold-orange colours - so you can replace the patch 1.38 fantasy tone sliders with either slightly desaturated versions, or more realistic, non-fantasy colour ramps.

Version 1: Desatured Default Replacements

Exactly what it says on the tin. All I did was just calm down the colours slightly. Full previews in the screenshots. The Aqua-Turquoise slider comes out rather greener than the vanilla version, but I felt that was an acceptable trade-off.

You can download all five desaturated default replacements (I didn't do one for the greyscale slider... obviously!) and pick which ones you want to use, or you can download all five in one combined package, if you want to use them all.

Version 2: Realistic Default Replacements

If you would prefer not to have fantasy skin colours in your game at all, try these more naturalistic replacements. I tried to keep a good mix of tones going - warm, cool, pale, medium, dark, red, brown, yellow etc. - so there's room for a lot of variety in-game. Full previews are in the screenshots. The only caveat is that I really struggled to replace the greyscale/monochrome slider - it seems to give a grey overlay to everything, and I couldn't work out what was controlling that - so that replacement is a rather cool, dark tone.

Full previews of all the skintones are in the screenshots. Again, download all six and pick and choose, or download the combined package.

Compatibility

Built and tested on patch 1.38. If you do not have 1.38, you won't have the skintone sliders, so you won't need these replacements. You do not need the Supernatural EP for these to work.

Also obviously, these are default replacements. You can only have one replacement of each colour slider, though it is possible to make skin tone sliders non-default. I don't have any plans to make non-default versions of these sliders, but you are quite welcome to convert them. There is a great tutorial here about skins, skintone sliders and colour ramps, by missy_harries.

These sliders will not affect anything to do with non-default skins. In fact, let me just make it super-clear that these are just skin tone sliders, not actual skins. You'll notice that I took preview screenshots in CAS using EA's basegame skins, so please ignore the bland and boring textures, and just look at the colours.

Here's an in-game pic with a CC default, showing a range of skintones possible with these sliders:


See? No more retina-searing brightness!

The default skin used here is Navatsea's Wild V.2, which is very detailed. You can see how the shading is more pronounced on paler skintones, and looks subtler on darker or warmer colours, which leads me to this point:

How will these look with my current default skins?

I can't answer that for you. To be completely honest, everything from in-game lighting to your graphics card and settings, monitor, and any CC defaults you are currently using will probably affect exactly how these colour ramps look in your game, especially if your preferred default skins have very strong highlights.

However, if you try them out and you're not happy with the results, why not make your own?

Yes. Yours suck. How do I make my own replacement skintone sliders?

It's very easy. If it wasn't, I couldn't do it.

Each skin tone slider is composed of two files: one .dds and one .png. Simply open the .dds file for the skin tone you want to edit in the image editor of your choice and adjust the colours as you see fit. Save it, then save again, choosing “save as” and overwriting the .png file, so you have two versions of the colour ramp, one .dds and one .png. Fire up s3pe, create a new file, then go to Resource > Import and import the .png and .dds files you just edited. Save your package with an appropriate name, then drop it into your mods folder. Done!

I recommend reading missy_harries' All About Skins tutorial, and this thread on the BBS, in which bitterquill/katana_x provides information and some custom ramps (pre-patch 1.38 sliders only) to get you started.

Enjoy!

Additional Credits:
CmarNYC for the Skininator and pointing out to me where the patch 1.38 slider files were hiding... because I am an idiot. XD

Also, missy_harries and bitterquill/katana_x for tutorials and inspiration.