Photoshop CS4 questions, 3D painting?

Hi,

I was wondering if anyone else was having trouble with avatar painting in CS4? The results of which always come out with seams. The SL avatar from the website is very rough and the UV looks all wrong. Still I tried to paint on it as a test and had the resultant seams.

In an attempt to fix it, I moved the model to Zbrush and increased it's resolution by a factor of 4, used the right DPS sub-pix and I also set in the weld at .01 and so on. I export that back out as OBJ and then I put that into UV mapper to group it all over.

I import this into photoshop and it's UVs don't look wrong and I can more easily paint on this model... but again, it comes out with seams. Ugh.

Could anyone suggest a workflow to get a model that does not have these terrible seam issues?

If you don't know how but you have a model that works please share a link?

As it stands now, I'm just using the old "No white halo" style tricks to cover up the seams... it works, but I'd rather have a model that doesn't give me bad work inherently.

Thank you, I reward information with cookies =D

Oh, more data.

I'm using the SL_male.obj and SL_female.obj, I've heard that SL_avatarobj.obj from the downloadable meshes works for some and I've tried it, the UVs are correct in this one unlike the other two BUT this leaves me without a male avatar to work from. I have not tested a skin made with SL_avatarobj.obj for seems but I am going to guess it has them?

I think I answered my own question, about three days of scrambling to fix it was all I had need of =D

I got the models from http://www.ccccybernetics.com/avatar_databank/ and used them, the only problem is they are not set up for photoshop texturing. I loaded them into UVmapper and went to "Select group" and selected each group, then I went to "Assign material" and assigned them each to their own material. I saved with default saving options.

Wala, working male and female models for SL/photoshop.

When I don't want to work on the hair/lashes/ what have you, I just set their opacity to 100%.

Okay the opacity didn't work, the hair takes color data I mean for the skull.

I'm going to re-map the UVs with the hair missing since I don't want it... I think by not making a material group for it I can prevent it's rendering, and thus it's ability to suck up my paint.

I tried just making the groups for the head, body and lower body...

There is a material group called acmat_01 that I can't get rid of, it is the entire avatar lumped together.

How do I go about removing this material group so that it does not mess up my attempts to paint on the avatar? As it still tries to steal color from other parts of my work.

Got it done on my own =)

I had to take the raw avatar files from my previous link and load them into UV mapper, assign groups. Then in wings3D I deleted the groups (default, ACmat) and only left the head, body and lower body, exported as OBJ and then put into UV mapper to re-assign the groups (since they got lost somehow.)

Wala, working paint models.

I decided to share.

This is a rapidshare so it will die at 10 downloads, anyone have a suggestion of where else I could put it?

http://rapidshare.com/files/219304999/CS4SLavatar.zip.html

I'm glad you got it working, but I wish I'd seen this thread earlier. I could have saved you some time. Robin Sojourner was kind enough to provide proper OBJ's for Photoshop a year and a half ago, when CS3 came out.

http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLDownloads/Exported_CS3_Avatars.zip

They work perfectly for CS4.

It is still nice to know how to do it myself, using the other link I posted I can make avatar models that have big bellies, small bellies, oversized breast and petite.

From a stretching/distortion standpoint I'm actually happy I had to struggle =D

Thanks for the link though, that saves me time giving it out to other designers

The male models from the above link and my own have left and right seams at the place where the arms join the torso, there are no other issues.

Any idea why the shoulders are bad on the male model?