By 'house treasurer' I meant a parent/guardian.

Latin, instead of grumping around about how your work didnt pass moderation or how difficult it is to get permission from authors, maybe you should spend more time trying and learning to create the images you need for your themes. Terragen is a free program that renders nice landscape scenery and it's not hard to use.
If you employ your time in searching and reading things that can help you create better themes instead of posting messages every 5 mins, then perhaps you wont have to worry about having your work rejected because you've use an image without permission or waiting for a reply to your permission request.

Actually I am getting Bryce 5 for my birthday which is on earthday (april 22 )

Thats really cool
I always thought that terragen is hundreds of dollers

By 'house treasurer' I meant a parent/guardian.

Latin, Latin. Listen and learn. Listen to those whose experience outweighs you many years. I've been making my own personal WB and it's been...what?...My word. Since 1998. Or before then really. I'll get it finished someday. Maybe. >

>

I am going to try out my digital camera after school today
I have uploaded a really funny cyber patrol bootscreen

I just uploaded a black luna theme


I hope it gets past the mods
I have DEFINATELY seen renders of the Luna thing before so this has a better chance but I still have my doubts
It would be sooooo if it got in
I would feel like having a and I would get so many downloads

o ya
heres a link to the screenshot
https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=13&SkinID=4613

latin....It's an okay WB skin, but it doesn't take any talent to recolorize the default GUI. Listen to Apocalypse and Old Crab and create your own graphic bits. I make my WB skins using MS Paint and PaintShopPro. I have basically no graphic talent and I am still figuring out PSP (I just figured out how to do some things with layers the other day). I think you mentioned that you have Photoshop, it's supposed to be a pretty powerful tool. I challenge you to build us a WBskin from scratch I can't help you with graphics, but I can help you with margins and tweaking things in SkinStudio so that it is useable and looks right. I'm telling you once you get just ONE skin done....you'll be hooked on making WBskins instead of 'lurking' here

I am the opposite
I have graphic talent but am bad at Skin Studio
I can never get the images to do what I want them to
I have made a few attempts but I can never get
A. The title bar to stretch
B. the taskbar to stretch
C. I cant change the color of the inside of a window
D I often lose track of which state in a checkbox or similar alpha blend of which frame is which
I dont know how to incorporrate animation

The things you mention above are all very basic operations in SkinStudio. You just need to spend more time learning to use it. maybe you could use the time that you spend here, posting and posting and posting. That time would be well spent learning SKS.

Here's a tip for you: To change the color of the inside of a window, look in the left pane of SKS, you will see "Miscellaneous"...... expand that section and you will see "Colors". Click on that, and in then in the right hand pane, you will see allthe color settings relating to Windows, backgrounds, menus etc.

To make your Titlebar stretch, you need to set the margins first, then you can make whatever is inside those margins stretch or tile. Tiling is best, makes your skin faster.

same for the taskbar.

Please don't consider this offering of help as an invitation to bug me constantly. Just learn the program.

Once you come up with an idea of a theme start in one of two areas....either the windows section or the taskbar section. I like to start with the windows section, but other skinners build their start menu first and base everything else they do off of it. Don't worry about toolbar icons or animations for now. Get comfortable with the basic stuff first. So you want to build a skin that covers these areas...

1. Windows and Controls
2. StartMenu and Taskbar
3. XP Shell

And to answer your questions....

A and B....when you adjust sizing margins, everything outside the margin will paint on the screen pixel to pixel just as you drew. Everything inside the margins will either tile or stretch depending on the painting option you choose. When you a piece of your skin from the preview window, like the titlebar, in the bottom section of the program you'll have the option on the left side to set your margins and the option on the right side to set how everything in between the margins will paint.

C. I don't know what you mean on this one.

D. Every image titlebar, buttons, etc. has different states/frames (usually tiled horizontally) within one image. The Help tab in the bottom left-hand corner will explain it to you and whether the image is mandatory or not. Generally if your using the Blue XP skin and SkinStudio provided a image to work from, then it's mandatory. There can be up to six different states/frames for buttons and sometimes I have to move them around after playing with a skin. Something I thought looked okay as a pressed state ends up looking better as a mouseover state. It's all trial and error and the more you do it the easier it gets. Again don't worry about animations, compact menus, etc. right now. That stuff will come pretty quick.

Once you get a skin up and running, if you want I'll be happy to test it for you to find any bugs in it and offer any help I can give. Skinning takes time, you can't just sit down and crank one out in one sitting at the computer, unless you got the ability to sit there for 36+ hours straight with no sleep or eats

I do a couple of parts or so a day and then I create a part that looks different and maybe better than what's already done, then I have to go back and change a lot of things or dump the whole skin and start over with the new idea.

I dont really know how to fix things once I mess up
I always have to do a new skin and look at its not messed up states so I can fix the one I am making
Its really hard
I am having a lot of trouble on the little checkboxes and things like that
I have started making a Halo WB and the Window frame is really cool
I Have a fes more questions:
Whenever I press save on the paint doc it dosn't apply the change to the skin in skin Studio So I have been copy/pasting but I just realized that the X - and restore buttons are underneath the one's I intended to use
I cant figure out how to fix this

This might be happening to other parts of the skin but I havn't figured it out yet
Also How do u know which state corrosponds to what

latin....go here https://www.wincustomize.com/msgboard.asp?BID=WCS&id=269922 for button help I posted for you and let this thread die

latin....It's an okay WB skin, but it doesn't take any talent to recolorize the default GUI.

It takes more talent to recolor luna than it does to port I think.....

Latin, don't forget your manners when you get the problem resolved. a thankyou to those who helped will gain you assistance in the future if you need it

thank you guys
I still having trouble with the halo Wb however I am preoccupoied transfering AP_67"s Iboni sysmetrix to desktopX (with his permission of course )

Well I am getting lots of healthy critisim from the skinning comunity for uploading a recolored luna

Latin, its no good uploading a black skin of the default...
You said you did have graphic skills... Do you have any work I can see? (pure out of intrest...)

BTW, most pieces in your library are ripped, just for the record (inlcuding the halo bootskin, scriptcodes, halo icons etc etc.)

Well I am getting lots of healthy critisim from the skinning comunity for uploading a recolored luna

Well, that can be due to the fact that not only has this 'recoloring' been done before ( https://www.wincustomize.com/skins.asp?library=1&SkinID=3904 ) but also that it is not considered skinning. Recolor of a skin can be achieved with a few clicks of a button on SkinStudio, so it's not really a creative effort. Real skinners look at this as some sort of a mockery. The default Luna skin in SkinStudio serves as a template, all parts of this template must be replace with new and different parts in order to create a new skin.
WindowsXP already comes with the default Luna skin people don’t need to visit a website to download something that their systems already have.
Prior Luna skins on this site were created when XP wasn’t the dominant OS and people using Win98/Me/2000 wanted the XP look on their system.
If you are really serious about skinning, you need to read the tutorials, get to know the SkinStudio program and work on a unique design that you can present and upload and that has appeal to the people you are trying to share it with.
Anything less than your 100% is unacceptable.



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http://www.aleksyandr.com/tutorial.htm

Check that one out

latin... if you have talent with graphics, why are you constantly using other peoples work? Take a little time to produce something that is yours, instead of rushing to upload things that are not..... what is the point?

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