Overlays, tattoos and custom skin textures

Tattoos, face paint, and custom skin detail in HS2 Studio all come down to the same loop: pull a texture out of the game with Material Editor, edit the PNG in an image program, then feed it back in. Once you know that export, paint, import cycle, you can go well beyond the built-in tattoo slots, fix lopsided face paint, and carry a nice skin detail from one character to another.

1. Export the base texture

Open Material Editor and select the part you want to work on: body, head, or a clothing item. Find MainTex and choose Export. That saves a PNG matching that part’s UV layout, the same texture the game is actually drawing.

Treat this PNG as a placement guide, not a finished texture. It shows you exactly where your art needs to sit on the UV map, nothing more.

2. Paint your design over the guide

Open the exported PNG in Photoshop, GIMP, paint.net, or the free browser tool photopea.com. Add new layers above the template and paint your tattoo, pattern, or detail there, using the template purely to line things up.

If you’re combining pieces from more than one source, export MainTex again after placing each element and line the resulting PNGs up in your editor before doing the final export. When you’re done, hide or delete the template layer entirely, keep only your finished art (with a transparent background if you’re going the overlay route below), and flatten before saving.

3. Bring it back into Studio

You have two options. Reimport straight into MainTex if you want to permanently replace that part’s texture. Or apply your PNG through the Overlay system instead, which layers your art over the base texture without overwriting it, and is the better choice for anything skin-related.

Overlay-type files (skin overlays, reusable tattoos, lens dirts, cum or milk overlays) are conventionally kept in UserData/Overlays/. Material Editor’s overlay picker is a plain file browser, so exact placement inside that folder matters less than keeping it organized enough to find your file again later.

If you’re working on a loaded scene rather than in Character Maker, overlay and underlay controls aren’t in the normal Studio panels. Press Shift+D to open the Studio Character Editor overlay, which exposes them, plus the rest of Material Editor’s material controls, without leaving Studio.

Adding more than the two tattoo slots

Character Maker’s paint screen only gives you two dedicated tattoo slots. Rather than fighting that limit, bake extra designs into a body overlay instead: a second-skin PNG at the same size and UV layout as MainTex, applied as an Overlay layer above the base skin.

Because one overlay image can hold as many painted elements as fit on the sheet, you can combine any number of tattoos into a single overlay texture, positioning each one using the exported template as your guide layer. The two built-in slots stay untouched; everything extra lives in the overlay.

Fixing left/right asymmetry in face paint or eye makeup

Mismatched face paint or eye makeup between the two sides of a face is easiest to fix by mirroring rather than repainting.

Export a clean head texture (no existing paint applied, or with any existing paint erased first). Paint just one side fully, the way you want both sides to look. Duplicate that layer, flip it horizontally, and slide the mirrored copy into place over the other side, using the same clean template underneath to keep the alignment accurate. Flatten and export. Both sides now match exactly, because one is a literal mirror of the other rather than a second freehand pass.

Copying a detail texture between characters

Material Editor exports and imports every texture slot separately, not just MainTex, which means you can lift a specific effect, like a cellulite or skin-detail pass, off one character and drop it onto another without repainting it.

Select the source character’s body in Material Editor and export its Bump map. Select the target character’s body and import that same file into its Bump slot. Because the Bump map only affects surface shading detail rather than color, this works even when the two characters use different skin tones.

If you’d rather not paint the effect yourself, characters with this kind of detail already applied are commonly shared as full character cards. Load one in Material Editor and extract its body overlay or Bump slot from there. It’s also worth checking the Skins or Suntan section in Character Maker first, since some cellulite-style texture options already exist built in.

Matching skin tone after a recolor

Recoloring a body in Material Editor by changing its plain Color field only shifts the base tone. Skin also carries a Subsurface Albedo texture, which controls how light scatters just under the surface, the warm translucency you see in ears, fingertips, and the nose.

If you recolor the body but leave Subsurface Albedo untouched, the face, fingers, and toes keep scattering light in the old tone and end up visibly mismatched against the rest of the body. Recolor or reimport Subsurface Albedo to match whenever you change skin color, on the body and, if the head uses a separate material, the head as well. This uses the same shader and material fields covered in how to change a shader.

If a visible seam remains where head and body skin tones meet, nudge the two colors closer in Material Editor, add a neck overlay or underlay to blend the transition, or simply cover the line with a choker or collar. See fixing skin tone and shader issues for more on tone matching.

Removing blush or other makeup

To strip blush without touching anything else on the face, open the character’s makeup entries in Material Editor (or via Shift+D in Studio), find the Blush color field, and set its opacity to 0. That switches it off cleanly while leaving eyeliner, eyeshadow, and other makeup layers exactly as they were. See facial detail, teeth, and makeup for the rest of the face material slots.

Texture slot quick reference

What next

If you’re still finding your way around Material Editor’s panels and slot names, start with Material Editor essentials, then come back to apply the workflow above to your own tattoos and skin work.