This is meant to be a beginner's tutorial that touches on some more advanced concepts. It is recommended that you have a graphics tablet for this, although it is not necessary.

This is perhaps the easiest method of reskinning but it has some drawbacks, predominantly the requirement of a plain base texture that more often than not will not exist. There are other methods of doing this that do not require a texture like this i will be covering that technique in a different tutorial.

• Requires a blank texture (with no pattern)

But:

• It allows for easy application of a camouflage pattern
• Allows for preservation of detailed components of underlying texture, such as the fabric details, stitching etc

1. Find a suitable texture (this one has a solid colour fabric, shown here in a dirty green, but the jpeg compression messed it up a bit):
   

 

2. Create a mask of the areas you want to retexture. This is best done using a new layer and painting the areas you want to change in black. This can be done several ways although the best one, in my opinion, is to create a new layer and fill it fully black and use a layer mask. Make sure black is your foreground colour (press D to set your colours to default black and white, and X to toggle which one is in the foreground). Then press Shift+F5 and fill the layer. This method avoids having to continually switch tools around. Once your black filled layer is created, create a mask for it.
   This will at first be white, meaning it is fully visible. With the mask selected press Control + I to invert it to black. The significance of using this method rather than simply colouring a transparent later black will become obvious soon.
3. With the mask selected, colour the areas you want retextured in white (you can reduce the opacity of the black layer to make it easier to see what you are doing). After you have finished, make sure the opacity of the layer is 100%, and set the layer blending options to "Colour".
   • For masks, using the Pencil Tool is better than using the Brush Tool, because the brush tool anti-aliases the edges. Use the pencil to get a solid fill with no blured edges in a mask
   

 

4. What this should have done is de-saturate the parts of the texture you want to change. This becomes important layer when you overlay the patterns. Also, what this has done is created a template mask for all your layers and adjustments you will perform later.

 

5. In many cases, your resulting texture will be way too dark. This can be fixed by creating a Curves adjustment layer. First, select your mask by holding Control and clicking on the mask from your black layer, then with the selection active, create a curves adjustment layer from the menu just to the right of the Create Mask button. This should create a new adjustment layer that uses the same mask as your black layer. If it is the wrong way around, just invert the colours by selecting the mask and hitting Control + I.

   With the Curves adjustment window open, click the centre of the line and move it left or right, try and move it so the texture brightens up to a mid-brightness grey, but not too much or you will over brighten it. For reference, open your colour chooser and find the colour between black and white (around 100-130 RGB).

   
6. Finally, we get to adding our pattern. I assume for this part you have one available. First, select your mask again, the create a Pattern adjustment layer. Double click this and open the properties and select your pattern and an appropriate scale. Finally, choose the blending option Overlay. From the image, you should have noticed the over-bright area on the top left. This requires fixing, and i will get to that soon.
   
   
   Your pattern layer may also be too dark, or under-saturated. If this is the case, duplicate the layer by pressing Control + J or by dragging it into the New Layer button. This will effectively double the layer's effect. You can reduce the opacity of it to tune its effect to your needs. You should also get into the habit of putting similar layers into groups, or Sets, and to name them depending on their purpose. While this may not be necessary at the moment, if you start creating detailed textures with many pattern layers for instance, you will quickly lose track of what is responsible for what and also create a messy work space. For the moment, you can call the pattern layer "Base", and put it in a set called "Patterns". It should be noted that you can create a layered set, by which i mean putting sets in sets. So for a complex texture, I would have the parent set, Patterns, in which i would have sub-sets "Arms", "Legs", "Torso" and so on.
   
   

 

7. Now, the problem of the over-bright texture remains. This can be solved by creating a constant luminance, or brightness, of the underlying texture so as to not have spots that are too bright. This is performed by using the High Pass filter (Filters-Other-High Pass).
1. Duplicate your underlying texture layer.
2. Create a mask using your template like you did before
3. Apply the high Pass filter, with a radius of around 50 pixels
4. You will most likely notice your texture is incredibly bright, this is due to the curves layer which can be hidden.
5. Now, your texture may have lost a lot of its contrast and no details can be seen. Create a Levels adjustment layer and reduce some of the brightness, but make sure not to make it too dark, or too light.
   
   

 

8. Your material should be fully retextured now, although only limited attention has been put towards detail. What you can do now is create different pattern layers for parts of your texture such as pockets. Try to imagine the layers of fabric on the clothing, each will be applied so that its pattern has a seam around the edges. To replicate this, create pattern layers for each of these details and open the properties and move the pattern around a bit. This can make details such as pockets much more pronounced and less flat even without a normal map.
   
   This is where naming and grouping becomes important. Having a lot of small, similar detail layers can quickly confuse you if they are not named correctly. Having them in sets also allows you to close the set, hiding the layers so as to free up work space if necessary.

 

9. So, now you have finished the skin and have added detail, you may want to create another one with a different pattern. This is very easy if you have created a bunch of pattern layers because all you have to do is change the pattern and scale and you're done.