Wendy's Hair Textures Tutorial

Wendy's Hair Textures Tutorial

Welcome to my hair textures tutorial!
This site is designed to provide an easy, step-by-step guide to making your own hair textures (BMPs) to use in the Babyz game. This tutorial assumes that you already have at least a basic knowledge of hex editors such as ResHacker or eXeScope or LNZPro, and a basic understanding of "hexing" .baby files for the Babyz PC game. If you do not have this basic knowledge, other people have made excellent tutorials that may help you. There are a few things you need before you begin making and using textures of your own.

You Will Need
♥ image editor capable of saving 256-colour bitmaps
♥ hex editor for inserting your new textures into a .baby file
♥ the Babyz PC game

Before You Begin
♥ Remember that any custom textures you create for use in the Babyz game must be saved as 256-colour bitmaps. This is important because any file saved with more or less than 256 colours and in any file format other than .BMP will not work in-game.

♥ Because you are limited to 256 colours, some textures will not look the same in-game as they do in your image editor. This is especially true if you are using a more complex editor such as PaintShop Pro, Irfanview, or PhotoShop. Trial and error are a part of the creation process when making your own textures.

♥ You can use MSPaint if you don't have any other image editor. Just remember to save your files as 256-colour bitmaps instead of 24-bit bitmaps.

Wendy's Babyz showing off their custom hair textures

Let's Get Started!
NOTE: All screenshots in this tutorial are from MSPaint because the majority of Windows users will have MSPaint even if they do not have another image editor.

♥ Open up your image editor and start a new file. When making custom hair textures for Babyz it is best to keep the canvas size small (60x60 pixels or smaller seems to work best in my experience!) For this example, create a new file with a starting canvas size of 40x40 pixels.

♥ It is often helpful to "zoom in" on your canvas before you begin. Because you are working with a very small canvas, zooming your workspace to 600% or 800% will help you see what you are doing in terms of individual pixel placement.

♥ Once you have created a new file, you need to select a base colour for your custom hair texture. Here, I have chosen a medium reddish-brown. Use the flood fill tool to fill your canvas completely with the base colour you have chosen.

♥ Now that you've filled your canvas with the base colour, it is time to start adding some depth to what will eventually become your Babyz hair. First, choose a colour that will blend well with your base colour, but that is also darker than your base colour.

♥ After choosing your second colour, use the paint brush tool or pencil tool to start adding it to your canvas. Make sure the size of your paint brush is set to 1 pixel. Starting from any corner of your canvas, draw diagonal lines. It doesn't matter if the lines overlap a bit. Your canvas should now look something like this:

♥ Now, choose a third colour. This can be lighter than the second colour. It can be lighter than the base colour, if you wish. The goal is to choose colours that blend well with each other, as this will prevent extremely dark or extremely bright patches from appearing in the hair texture when it is used in-game.

♥ With the pencil tool or paint brush tool, draw diagonal lines across the canvas using your third colour. Again, it does not matter if cross each other.

♥ You may choose other colours and repeat the previous step as many times as you wish.

♥ Your canvas should now look something like this:

&hearts: The next step is to save your work. To be able to access it for use in-game, you need to save it here:

C:\Program Files\Mindscape\Babyz\Resource\Clothes\your_texture_name.bmp

♥ Choose a name for your new custom texture. The file name shouldn't be too long, and it should be something that relates to the characteristics of the custom texture. This just makes it easier to recognize your flle later, and more convenient for other people you may decide to share it with. Of course, this is only a suggestion. You may name your file whatever you like.

♥ Remember to save your file as a 256-colour bitmap image. If you save the file in any other format or with any other colour depth, it will not work in-game.

CONGRATULATIONS!
You've just made your first custom hair texture for Babyz!

How To Make "Curly Hair" Files
If you want to make textures that appear sparse or curly in-game, here are some easy steps to help you!

♥ Instead of starting with a base colour, you will need to start with a transparent canvas. In the Babyz game, the colour magenta is the transparency colour. If you are using PaintShop Pro or another editor (other than MSPaint) the colour number for magenta is #FF00FF. In MSPaint, magenta is in the selection of basic colours.

♥ Again, I am using a 40x40 canvas size for this texture, and I will zoom in to 600% so I can see what I'm doing.

♥ Use the flood fill tool to fill the canvas with magenta colour.

♥ choose the colour that you want the "curls" to be. For this example I am using black.

♥ with the pencil tool or paint brush tool draw lines and curves on your magenta canvas with the colour you have chosen. Let the lines cross each other, as this will give a greater appearance of curls when you use the texture in-game.

♥ You can use more than one colour to draw the curls if you wish. The only thing to remember is that you need to leave some of the magenta canvas showing through. If there is no transparency, the texture will appear solid instead of sparse or curly when you use it in-game.

♥ Your canvas should look something like this when you are done drawing the curls:

♥ The next step is to save your file. As you did when you were making your first custom texture, save your file as a 256-colour bitmap. You can save it in the same location as you saved the first one.

WAY TO GO!
You've just made a curly hair texture!

Now What Happens?
Once you have created some custom textures, the next step is to test them.

♥ To use your textures in-game, you will need to add them to the Textures List, either in your BabyzRez.dll file or in an individual .baby file (if you are using LNZPro).

♥ The textures list looks like this:

[Texture List]
\art\autobuild\hair3.bmp 1 256 256
\art\autobuild\clear.bmp 0 256 256
\art\autobuild\cottonwhite.bmp 0 256 256
\resource\clothes\wblackcurly.bmp 0 256 256

♥ In the example, the line highlighted in red is the one with the custom texture. Notice that the path is \Resource\Clothes. This tells the game to look in that particular folder for the new texture.

♥ Once you have added the custom texture of your choice and hexed the Babyz of your dreams, start up your game and see what your new textures look like! Here's what my 2 example textures from this tutorial look like:

♥ If you aren't satisfied with the way your new textures look, don't be discouraged. It takes a bit of practice and even after you've made several textures, you still need to rely on trial and error to get things exactly the way you want them. Remember also, a texture which you think is not quite right, may turn out to be somebody else's absolute favourite!

Extras
If you are using an image editor other than MSPaint...

♥ You can use other editing features to tweak your custom texture files and create different effects in-game. You may wish to use the soften or sharpen feature to make hair look more soft or more coarse, or you may wish to use a mosaic effect filter (if your editor has one) for a more speckled appearance. Feel free to experiment when making custom textures. The sky is the limit. You'll never know what you might create until you start playing around with different filters and tools.

HAVE FUN & GOOD LUCK!