Executor

[Sooperburd]

Hello All,

I freaking love Executor. It's hands down the most used piece of software on my machine. I wanted a more grungy look for it and didn't find any skins that I really liked, so I decided to make my own. Here's a couple hours worth of work:

Green Organic:


download: http://www.mediafire.com/?ifmxonjzmwz

Blue Organic:


download: http://www.mediafire.com/?zognmvzgm42

Green Corner


download: http://www.mediafire.com/?ouzmytmemno

Purple Corner


download: http://www.mediafire.com/?zdytd5djdei

I hope you like them! Feel free to message me if you have questions or suggestions.

-Sooperburd

[Nighted]

Those are wild skins! I've never seen anything quite like them.

[Sooperburd]

Thanks! I guess you can see what I mean when I say that I can't find Executor skins to my liking.

[Razer1653]

Hi Sooperburd,

These are not my taste at all but what a great job you did!!!
Your skins are so uncommon and I can't figure out how you managed to get this smooth alpha gradient work with executor.

Once, I tried to make a new skin, a simple white bar fading from right to left. I never got it right and I thought it was impossible to have Executor support it. Of course, now I know I was wrong :-[)

Can you give us your way to have this nice fading?

Razer

[Sooperburd]

Razer,

I spent a few minutes modifying one of my skins to make a simple white gradient from right to left. Here's what I came up with:



Of course this is not a completed skin! It's quite ugly, but it does illustrate the gradient that I think you're looking for.

Here is the entire skin in a zip file, with the PhotoShop .psd document as well:

http://download658.mediafire.com/tfixx4ymmveg/yjio5mnnium/New+Alpha.zip

In my limited experience with Executor skins (and skinning in general), I've seen several pitfalls that can make gradients not look right.

First off, the document in PhotoShop needs to have a black layer at the bottom. The entire skin is built upon that black layer, even though you'll never see the black layer when the skin is being used. Any color other than black will give the skin a hazy look and the transparency won't work right.

Next off, I've found that I can't simply rely on the alpha channel to give me all the transparency I need. The layers that create the skin also need to fade away to nothing where you want the transparency. This is hard to describe, but open my .psd in the zip file and hopefully you'll get a sense of what I mean.

Finally, I make sure the alpha channel is absolutely saturated wherever I want complete transparency. PhotoShop can trick you into thinking you're saturated, but you must keep going over the transparent areas with your brush (or whatever tool you're using to paint) until you're sure they're saturated.

I hope all this helps! Please ask more questions if you need to.