CS4 3d paint thread.
mod
Alright so one of the guys here just gave me a quick little demo, and i'll say that it looks better than i thought it would. Now, that isnt saying much, and i really dont know how usefull it will be, some of the things seem very quirky, in a "baby's first 3d app" sort of way.
Anyway, if anyone here has given it some extensive use, please feel free to share your thoughts.
Anyway, if anyone here has given it some extensive use, please feel free to share your thoughts.
Replies
i'm hoping we will get upgrades at work. the implementation seems a bit clunky overall, but the projection painting was satisfying. i'm looking forward to doing some more research/experimentation.
I think its the fault of either the exporter you used or the importer Adobe is using, probably the later?
Are you saying it's actually not shit beyond belief?
I'll probably stick with cs3 untill I can actually use their OpenGL acceleration (only on vista64, right?), but I'll give the demo a go to test the painting.
i tested it on xp and had OpenGL acceleration...unless i turned it on in the preferences and it didn't do anything? it seemed to be working, as far as i could tell. i do think it will only run in 64bit mode on vista64, though (xp64 is a no go).
But, I have to say the way they create and manipulate lights is kind of messed up. I'm not sure if it can do 100% self illum? But the bump painting tools are pretty cool.
I'm looking forward to seeing what you pros figure out regarding workflow, tips, etc.
It can do 100% self illum and others.
But the way we manipulate the camera and the overall speed on a 250 tri mesh with 512px texture is not really good to work with in production.
Same for the rotation tool, the Kuler tool and the brush size tool...
Ideas are good but integration are not.
export a light set-up with wour model.
( export scene as collada .dae )
The obvious and better way is just give you a 3d viewport along with your PSD and allow you to go between them and paint, keeping your exact same UI and layer options when using the 3d viewport...
totally agree with you on that. I just want photoshop painting tools as we currently have them but on a 3D model as a canvas.
My guess is that they are expecting 3D artist to just make a model and then hand over the responsibility for the colour/texture and lighting to the 2D designers to do all the rest. I can imagine this working for product design prototypes etc but for the most part I would prefer to see 3D lightinging, texturing and rendering done in a 3D app by 3D artists.
I'm all right with you about that, but this first iteration is way too late considering the market.
And we still don't have a color selector constantly opened.
thanks a lot for that, that was one of the problems i was having in x64
anyways i played with for few hours and the painting some what serves its purpose. that is if you want to mainly fix seams and do minor texturing.
i noticed some bugs that stopped me from doing a full blown texturing. the texture connection was buggy. sometime i would paint in the actual texture and go back to the 3d and it would update smart object to reflect all the change i did. same way if i painted something in the 3d view it updated in the selected layer i had in the psd file. but sometimes it disconnects and i would have to reconnect the texture. it also creates a cache texture by itself sometimes in C: drive. i may be doing something wrong too.
the painting is definitely more useful than zapplink, zbrush or new mudbox or even body paint.
whats also useful is the ability to pain bump in realtime and see how it looks, same goes for alpha. i am not sure how the specular works.
painting across seams is working ok too.
some of the bugs i had may be due to lack of openGL acc, so i will give it another try with the fix above.
the canvas is pretty much the viewport, you can navigate around it, change light directions etc. the 3d layer is basically the portal to the 3d viewport and the texture viewport.
also, it has a normal map channel i think and may be using object space normals instead of tangent space.
the biggest workflow problem i had was the same as MM experienced: the connection between the 3D layer and its corresponding texture would stop working after awhile. meaning you paint a few strokes in 3D and the texture updates immediately, paint a few strokes on the texture and the 3D model updates quickly, paint a few more strokes on the texture and....nothing. you have to close the texture and reopen it. this is a MAJOR workflow killer and will hopefully be fixed asap.
That's pretty much all I want/need out of a 3d painter. Much prefer it to be right inside photoshop myself, since I'm using it anyway for most of the texture work.
I really need to try this and see for myself.
Was thinking about upgrading anyway just for the 64 bit version and canvas rotation. Guess I'll think about it a little harder now.
Still messing around, but already I'm enjoying this more than using modo, mudbox, zbrush Enzo or anything else I've tried so far for painting in 3d. It's definitely not perfect but it's much better than I expected. Most important of all is that it's photoshop.
Pea: yeah custom brushes, and just being able to add new layers as I needed made me smile. My main 3d painting app before this was modo and I really hated the lack of layer support in it. It really turned me off of using the app in general for 3d painting. I think I will probably upgrade my copy of photoshop over modo and mudbox for now, as neither of those offers as much as I would like for paint work at this time. I'm spending less on software these days so putting my upgrade money where it counts the most has become a bit more important.
That has to be a bug, right? Otherwise that'd just be scandalous!
Can anyone check whether they get a lower framerate in cs4 than in an older version of ps?
Got a OpenCanvas trial isntalled as well and the sampling frequency as well as the framerate (booth = smoothness) feels in Phtoshop <CS2 and the others so much faster.
I work alot with Flash and its basicly the same since the MX2004 release and even worth in CS3 (flash cs3) the GUI performance got the worst of all.
But back on track:
if you want to boost the performance in Photoshop CS3+ goto full screen (2x [f] key) and hide the tools [tab]-key that should speed up things.
Other things that help is to disable the Version Cue and the font preview- its makes switching tools and esspecially the texttool alot faster.
As for my expierence with the GPU support:
it actually made the photoshop expierence very bad- the whole navigation (zoom, drag, pan,...) was extremely slow (felt like 4-8 fps). So I assume that my GFX card is not yet so well supported or my computer lacks something else.
CS4 definitely runs slower on my work machine, but that was to be expected. The most noticeable issue when I loaded up the same 4k mesh and psd file was the 3d viewport being extremely slow during navigation. I could see it struggling to update as I rotated it, dropping frames like crazy to keep up, but I could still paint on it reasonably. All the newer software runs like ass on that machine though. Mudbox 1 runs better on it than 2009 - texture painting in that program was even worse for performance than CS4. Time to upgrade the hardware I think.
How COME that painting in CS3 or CS4 is much slower than in CS1 on the same machine? I understand that a newer release of a program is bound to introduce new features that might require stronger hardware. But how come that menus or even brush strokes become slower and slower? Isn't code supposed to be improved with time?
BTW I tried some CS4 painting on one of the very lowpoly Bobo head models with a 512*256 and it was unuseable even on a badass Vistax64 machine. Haaaaaaaa!
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Blinn's law:
"That law, Grant says, is that any renderer, no matter how fast processors get, will always take a couple of hours, because that's the tolerance level of artists".
The same goes with programs as well, perhaps?
I have been complaining about this for years already on the flash site- many people there even switched to other dev and coding tools because writing and editing code in FLash has become almost impossible due the horrible GUI performance.
Its the same sadly with Photoshop,- with instant actions such as copy, paste, delete, filters,... you wont notice much of it but if you paint a speedy performance is very important so that the high pressure frequency of a Wacom tablet makes even sense.
Sadly GUI performance (not filter render speed) hasn't been on the photoshops todo list since CS3 - I hope that the next version will run significantly faster when painting.
Of course the whole performance issue is less of a problem if I work on my QuadCore but on a 3000 Ghz or Dual Core its sometimes more or less noteable - and it sucks.
I noticed for example that OpenCanvas on the other hand is highly optimized for high response painting but as soon as you do some layer merging or other layer based actions (filters, copy,paste, selections move,...) it gets horrible slow. So my guess is that OpenCanvas has some robust caching mechanics that are more optimzed for painting and not like Photoshop just for displaying large documents.
not sure if it was already posted here but this is a nice offcial guide on how to tweak Photoshop CS4 as it is kinda a known issue at adobe:
win:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404439&sliceId=1
mac:
http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404440
Some of the new features are useless for me, and some others are great. The smudge tool in cs4 64 is better than in cs3, more poweful, but image scrolling is slower and not so smooth as in cs3 :S. Pencil of radius 800 or higher are much slower in CS4. When i create a new image of 5000x3400 cs4 64 is a rocket
This version is a bad thing, i use too many plugins...
Of course, turning that off removes the ability to rotate the canvas (I don't know if it removes 3d paint though).
Completely idiotic, if you ask me.
I can't even open the 32 bit PS on Vista 64 at work...it crashes before it even opens!
I haven't had much experience with Photoshop (had the old CS for a long time) before upgrading, but are Adobe usually good with releasing patches and upgrades?
Ive still got to try painting a blank character in CS4 with a fresh diffuse etc.
thanks alot, clone does work! that was wierd though, I guess they expect you to place the texture that you want to project onto the layer above and use opacity of about 30% and then clone brush it onto the model. works well enough, I might start using this more actually.
Seriously wtf.
It has been like this since CS2 on Vista.
Painting on a 3d model is OK if the texture doesn't have layers, but i tried painting on a model that had a psd w/ like 20 or so layers and it wasnt very fun.