Skin

[Karr123]

Can anyone please tell me what's the difference between skin and model?

 

[Maker]

Skin is the texture on the model, the graphics you see. Model is the wireframe and animations.

 

[Nichilus]

In real life, you could say that skin is really skin - some people have white, other black skin, different hair colour and so on.

Model would be the skelet underneath skin, which defines shape of the body

 

[Karr123]

So can i use it in-game? Because i don't know how

 

[Binsu]

Seconded, Maker.

A skin is something you import in the import manager that once imported and has the correct path, it will FULLY replace a unit's appearance in-game and can affect a model without even choosing what unit it will change because it is attached to a specific unit AFAIK (may it be a standard or custom model as well).

A model is the same also but you could choose the specific unit to change with unlike Skin which changes only the stated unit in it.

Both skin and model can be used in-game of course.

 

[Nichilus]

Yes you can use skin if you know what you're doing.

As I've said, the "model" is the skelet - it defines the shape of the model.
Skin is a "texture" applied on the skelet. However the game does not automatically know what part of the skin is supposed to be applied to head, what to chest, and so on - to tell the game where to apply each part of the texture you (= the model maker) has to specify it by mapping it.

Now why I write that. If you look at various skins, you will see that they all are quite different - one has "head" texture in the upper-left corner, while the other in the upper-right corner of the skin.
This is why you cannot apply any skin you want to any model - because models have different mapping and if they do not match with the skin, they will show mess.

Example: the head of the model is mapped in the upper-left corner of its texture. If you give it a texture, which has boots in the upper-left corner, the model's head will have boots texture over it.


To conclude this:
If you want to change only skin of the model, then the new imported skin has to match the model's mapping.
Changing only skin will, however, replace the original one (for the map only), meaning if I change skin of for example Far Seer, I will not be able to use the original Far Seer skin as long as I leave the new imported skin in the map.
Importing skin correctly requires you to know the texture path of the model. Without it you won't replace the original texture.
For example the texture path for "Footman" is "Textures\Footman.blp" - if you do not import your custom skin with this path, you won't replace Footman's skin.

If you want to change model's mapping, you will need your own custom model.
The good thing about this is that if you have separate models, each using different skins, you can have all of them in game.