On being a responsible modder

At this point in time, Colorskins is a skin-mod shop. What that means is that we have taken the templates that someone els provided (in our case, we use the Eloh Eliot templates) and we make changes to them to make something different than what was provided. These changes may be simple or complex. And sometimes the subtle differences are the most complex.

But what makes a responsible - one might almost say "ethical" - modder, is that the modder acknowledges that not all of what they've released isn't their own work.

Now, in our case, we always acknowledge that our current line of skins are based on the Eloh Eliot templates and we thank her for the help she's given us by releasing her templates for public use. The only restriction (beyond the GPL license she used) she's given on their use is that no-one is allowed sell them unmodified. I think that you can safely say that none of our skins are unmodified. What may not be so obvious is just how much work has gone into the versions we've been releasing.

First, you have to understand that the Eloh Eliot templates are different than most of the other templates that are available for purchase. All of the other templates we've looked at (though we haven't looked at all of them, so we don't speak for all of them) are basically three Photoshop files, each with a single layer that has all the parts on it. The Eloh Eliot templates have lots of layers, each with different pieces that go into making the skins. For instance, the female skins have at least 5 different layers that make up just the curve & shadows of the underside of the breast. And every single one of those layers has to be modified, every time you change the base color of the skin.

What this means is that for us to produce just one skin tone, we have to make hundreds of adjustments for them to look right. We've been very careful about tuning each skin to produce the best quality skins possible from these template. In fact, with all the work we've put into them, we like to think that we're producing better quality skins that the ones Eloh produced with the same templates.

In addition to changing the skin tones (as time consuming as that is), we've been producing specialty and limited edition theme skins with custom tattoos and colorations. And all of those have been our work, even when we draw inspiration from other art pieces. At no time do we ever use unmodified clip art and claim the work as ours.

However, one other thing that we've been doing is trying to move beyond just modding someone else's work. We're in the process of developing our own template, using the inspiration of Eloh's many-layered approach to build it up piece by piece. Of course, we've only recently started this process, so it will be some time before we're ready to release the first version of it, but that will give us plenty of time to finish coming out with all the men's skins as well as updating the women's skins.

Any way you look at it, we're going to have a busy year coming up. And thanks for putting up with us wandering all over the conceptual landscape today.