Suggestion on paint tool. (1 Viewer)

[willwhitt56]

I've been recently trying to make hairs for SDT using paint.net,but the problem is that they come out a little... rough. By that i mean the edges of the hair are a bit jagged. When i look at others works, they're all nice and smooth, so i must ask what Tool i can use to make the hair smoothed out and nice. Also, anyone know a good tutorial on shading, kinda new to that too.

 

[UrMum12345]

I don't really know the answer to your problem with paint.net, because I'm not familiar with that program.

Are you trying to recreate the hairs, or cut them out of an existing picture?
The most clear hairs are, most of the time, recreated.

(For the rest of this I'm going to assume you want to recreate the hairs because of the shading question)
---------

Either way, I would highly recommend using a vector graphics program. Vector graphics programs will make your hairs look cleaner, and will let you go back and edit them freely without having to do pixel art, not to mention it being much easier to use than pixel based editing software.

There are a couple vector graphics programs I could recommend.

• Inkscape - A free, easy to use vector program. Used by a lot of people for SDT
• Adobe Illustrator - Paid, but I find it easier to use. Also works nicer with Flash for mods.

As stated in @SyntaxTerror 's Quote below, there is a good tutorial by Gingerless Soul about how to do make hairs with vector graphics programs.
But I would recommend using the template by @SyntaxTerror instead of the one suggested in the tutorial.
---------

About doing the shading, @SyntaxTerror told me this when I asked a similar question, (This is for Inkscape)

1. Open your SVG file and make 3 layers (from lowest to highest: base colour, shade, lines).
2. Copy-paste the hair two times.
3. Put the three copies on each other (with Inkscape, use the tool Paste in place (Ctrl+Alt+V))
4. Unselect all.
5. Select one copy, it will be the base colour:
   1. Remove its stroke (outside line).
   2. Put this in the base colour layer.
   3. Lock and hide this layer.
6. Select the second copy, it will be the ouside line:
   1. Remove its fill (colour).
   2. Put this in the lines layer (I suggest that you also put the hair tie in this layer).
   3. Lock this layer.
7. Select the third one, it will become the shade:
   1. Remove its stroke.
   2. Change its colour to the shade colour.
   3. Put this in the shade layer.
   4. Delete the nodes that will not be used in the shade (the upper ones).
   5. Place new nodes to trace the upper border of the shade.
8. Unhide the base colour layer.

If you want to add gradients to the base colour or the shade (or maybe to the hair tie), you shoud read Gingerless Soul's tutorial (that is a good tutorial, I've learnt the basics with it and I could make my first hair mod quite fast with it).
Nonetheless, the gradient between the base colour and the shade, and the light reflection on the edges of the hair mays be much more complicated to do (at least with Inkscape, that allows only linear and circular gradients). With Inkscape, it would require to make several other polygons and apply gradients and blurs to them.