I guess "skinning" is taking the art from a non-Foundry asset and applying it to a in-Foundry asset -- is that right? Can someone point me to the correct guide or walkthough among the dozens out there?

Also, there's a mission where the player scans "friendly" ships, and one turns to an "enemy" ship. How would I accomplish that?

I'm guessing: Make an enemy ship and an identical friendly ship, have them occupy the same space, but the enemy ship is invisible and inactive. When the shooting is supposed to start, the friendly ship goes inactive and the enemy becomes active.

Skinning is taking a unit or NPC and changing it's appearance to look like something else... but it has to be an in game asset. Examples include making a custom costume for an NPC contact. I made some ground costumes for Boslics. Those aren't available in the premade assets at all.

yeah, use the visible/invisible functions. Cryptic missions have other functions they use, but we can't use those. You can do this on ground too. Just set an NPC to become invisible after you reach a certain prompt, and simultaneously set the combat unit to become visible with the same prompt... It's as close as we can get.

Thanks. Where can I read about skinning?

Swapping the ships works very well in space because they just fade in and out. It's actually pretty close to seamless.

Be sure to place the two ships at exactly the same coordinates. If one is an NPC Contact and the other is an enemy group, then reskin the lowest actor number in the group to be the ship you want, and place that ship in the exact coordinates as the NPC Contact. I recommend using either the cruiser or the battleship group, but if you use battleship then you also need to reskin the highest two actors and place them in the same location as the NPC contact (with more players the last two battleship actors instead). Optionally you can also reskin the other actors as fighters or other support craft, which will make it less weird if additional ships spawn due to more players.

I bet if you look StarbaseUGC.Com has tutorials on this exact thing.

[quote=markhawkman;7660431]Skinning is taking a unit or NPC and changing it's appearance to look like something else... but it has to be an in game asset. Examples include making a custom costume for an NPC contact. I made some ground costumes for Boslics. Those aren't available in the premade assets at all.[quote=markhawkman;7660431]
Then the real fun is when you load a cryptic made costume and mess with it. That is how you can get Federation Gorn and Nausiccan Npcs wearing fed uniforms and put a tail on any npc you can come up with. I would love to see those Boslic npc! I made one myself as one of my BO's but have mixed feeling about her.

http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/#/d5sza07

http://marhawkman.deviantart.com/art...arhawkman&qo=1

done.