Photoshop CS4 - Everything and More!

My copy of PS CS4 came today, so since I have it in my hot little hands, I thought I'd answer some of the burning questions that I had, and that I think you guys probably have, too.

So, first things first, you CAN paint on the model, across the edges of the map, across more than one map, on whatever layer of the texture you want, even new layers that you've just made, and it all works just the way it should! WOOT!

In order to paint across the lower body and upper body materials, and also across the front and back, as shown, all I had to do was open both materials, and select an editable (visible non-text) layer in both of them. Then I ignored them, and painted right on the model. You can see the result.



(If you want to see that full size, you can do thathere.

That's painting, smudging, and a Shape. All the tools just work.

Couple of things; if you have the Texture (the layered file) open when you're painting on the model, you can see the paint as soon as you finish the stroke. Usually. Sometimes, the two seem to "unsynch", and changes on the model don't show up on the texture. Close the texture and reopen to make it all work again. If you paint on the texture, though, you won't see that on the model until you Save the .psb file. (Yes, textures are still .psb files.)

There's also lots of stuff they didn't tell us in the promos, which makes it even better!

For instance, you can remove parts of your model, so you can see what you're painting. Inseams will no longer be a problem!

You can also set the paint fall-off angle, so that the paint won't run across a curve and make long streaks on the sides of things (if you've never used a program that let you paint on a model before, you won't understand that. If you have, you are doing the Dance of Joy right now.)

There's a movie that shows you a bit of this stuff on the Adobe site, at here.

Even more wonderful things that I haven't seen in any of the promos, for some reason.

1. When you have a Material open, you can create a UV Overlay for it. (3D > Create UV Overlays.) You can have the wireframe, or Normals (let you see exactly where things are on the Mesh) or Shading (not useful for shading, since it responds to its own stuff, and not the lights you set. But it shows where the mesh "joins" and therefore areas to avoid putting much on, which is VERY useful!)

2. Seamless Textures! There is a really wonderful seamless texture maker, as one of the 3D tools. You just open (or make) a flat image, go to 3D > New Tiled Painting, and PS shows you 9 tiles of the image on your screen, and makes the .psb material layer for you. Then you paint, on the main image (or the .psb, your choice) and it automatically tiles it on all sides.

It's incredible! I made this seamless star texture in about 3 minutes, and it has Adjustment layers, Styles, and a couple of normal layers on it. (The Styles just work, across the image. No more fiddling with them to keep from having seams in your drop shadows!)



So, if you have been thinking of buying the upgrade, or if you haven't, but you do textures for prims or Avatars in SL and you can possibly save, beg, or borrow the money, I would HIGHLY recommend that you buy this one! It's simply amazing.

Anything else you guys want to know about it? Ask me your questions, Gatekeeper, I'm not afraid!

Thanks Robin, this is great.

My copy has shipped and I'm far from an expert or even proficient but I'm very excited to start learning this.

Thanks for your great post!

So...just making sure...

You hate it and I can save my money and not buy it?

Please?

Ok I skipped CS 3,

But now I am going to Have to get this one!

Thanks Robin.

You are most welcome, Dnali!

Umm.. sorry, Anya. It's just plain wonderful. I keep finding more things about it that I love. For 3D that's not going into SL, you can make all kinds of other texture maps (Bump, Specularity, Opacity, Reflectivity.) You can even make Shadow Catchers! So it's going to be wonderful in my other work, to actually put things places.

Infiniview, oh yeah. This one is well worth it.

I got my copy yesterday.... I think I was disturbing my husband with my constant outbursts of "Oh COOL!!" while playing with it! In addition to everything already mentioned, I love the new layer masks panel! I use lots of masks in my work. The brush preview with the rubber stamp tool! Yay!! Don't forget to buy through NAPP if you are a member... you get about $50 off the upgrade to extended.

Very much looking forward to this upgrade! Unfortunately, I'll need to complete another big project before I can afford it. The money I had earmarked for getting my upgrade is going to have to be spent on a critical home repair task that went WAY over budget. But I will definitely get this soon!

Forgot to add... the graphics card on the older Macbook doesn't seem to support all the 3D features. I have the black one. I don't actually do my SL Photoshop work on my Macbook anyway, so it's no biggie for me, but thought I would mention it.

Figures they'd start shipping it right when my subscription renewals are due on my two seats of Max. I'll have to wait til spring before I can afford it.

Robin, have you tried other models besides the SL av? My biggest concern is how well it handles a high poly count model with a high resolution texture.

Also, what map types does it support in the viewport? For example, can it display bump as bump, opacity as opacity, specular as specular, etc (preferably simultaneously on the same model) or is it limited to displaying as color one map at a time?

Thanks for the review, Robin. I can't wait to upgrade.

ETA: Good questions, Chip. I'm curious about all that as well.

Robin is this the "Photoshop CS4 Extended" version?

Hi! Yeah, Betty, I don't think I've been this excited about an upgrade since they added Layers. Or maybe ever. I dunno.

Monique, yes, this is the Extended version. The Normal doesn't have any of the 3D stuff, but it's still very nice.

There are so many, many great things that have nothing to do with the 3D features. You can interactively resize the round brushes, and see the size and the feather in the preview color of your choice. Rotate the canvas while drawing is a HUGE one for me. You can also temporarily change from any tool to any other one by just holding down the keyboard shortcut for that tool. Painting and need the marquee? Hold down m, draw your selection, release the key and you have the paintbrush again. That works for ALL the tools. There are hundreds of really cool things like that in this upgrade.

Awww, Ceera, I'm sorry. But it'll be worth the wait, I promise.

Chip and Chosen, it's everything we hoped for. I opened a tree model last night, just to push it. Tree, Branches, Twigs, Leaves; 61010 faces. It imported the .obj with no trouble at all, and I can spin it, move in and out, and generally do whatever I need to do without difficulty. (It takes a few moments to load it into RAM when I first ask to manipulate the model, but after that, no difficulties.)

All the map types are supported in the viewer. Diffuse is Color, Self-Illumination is Glow, Bump is bump (with a slider for Bump Strength,) Opacity is opacity (I put an Opacity map on all those leaves, to give them real leaf shapes, with no trouble at all.) Glossiness is specular amount, Shininess is specular diffusion, Reflectivity is reflectivity, Environment is a spherical environment map used for reflections, Normals are normals, (yep, Normals!)

They are all just what they should be, and yeah, all shown perfectly right in the viewer, just as they should be. And you can paint on any of them; just choose the one you want from the "Paint On" drop down in the "Scene" part of the 3D Panel. If there isn't a texture image for that channel yet, PS will now make one. Or you can make it manually.

You no longer have to import models with textures already applied. As long as there's a Material, PS can make all the image maps you need.

How much of all of this you see, of course, depends on the Render Settings Options you're using. You can fine tune them, too, so if you're doing Line Illustration, for instance, you can choose to render the faces as Solid Shaded, Unlit Texture, Ray Traced, or a bunch of other things, and also choose the Crease Threshold, Color, and Weight of the lines. Faces, Edges, Vertices, and Volume can all be styled independently. You can also make a couple of different kind of Stereo renders, if you are so inclined.

And, of course, you can set the anti-alias levels you want. So you can work in Draft, and then set it to Better or Best for actual output of your image. (Those do take a little while to render, especially if you have Reflections, and your lights are using Soft Shadows. But the Soft Shadows themselves are nice and smooth at the higher Anti-Aliasing levels.)

If you want to use the models in PS, as opposed to exporting them to use somewhere else, they even have Shadow Catchers! You can put several models on the same layer, and set one of them so that it Catches Shadows, but doesn't Cast them, and is Invisible. This only works if you're using Ray Tracing, of course.

Models don't interact with each other unless they are in the same layer, by the way. So if you want them to reflect on each other, you have to combine them, and then Ray Trace.

It's not perfect; there are little things, like Bump value has to be an integer between 1 and 10, and stuff like that. It's not going to replace the render engine in your normal 3D package.

But it's amazingly good.

Anything else you'd like to know?

Waitaminit. There's lighting and baking? Not just drawing...you can render lighting effects to the textures?

[finds credit card and awaits an answer]

Here's another question...

Can you blur across seams? Not with a tool, but with a filter? That is, does blurring at the edge pick up color from across the seam or does it still pick up color outside the UV map?

You can render them, but you can't bake them. Sorry.

The rendering is in PS only.

So if you want to put a model into a picture that you're working on, you're all set.

But if you want to take the lighting into SL, you have to bake it somewhere else.

You can export a model as Collada DAE, Wavefront/OBJ, U3D, or Google Earth 4 KMZ. Among them, hopefully, is something that you can open in a program that will let you bake shadows etc.

Sorry that I can't give you better news. At this rate, I would expect Texture Baking in CS5.

Thanks, Robin.

[sheathes credit card, but keeps it at-the-ready]

I have Lightwave but A) I have unresolved rendering issues with SL models and B) it'd be nice to do this all in one program, with Adobe's attention to detail.

Yes!! I just laid down a 50% grey overlay layer on my top and bottom materials, then popped back to the 3D avatar and dodged, burned and blurred across the seam line... worked brilliantly!!

ETA: oops... didn't notice you were asking about with a filter...haven't tried that yet.

Good question, Anya!

And the answer is; across seams, without a hint of underlying color.

I filled the area around the avatar mesh from the cross seams example I posted last night with bright green, and used several different blur filters. PS threw up a dialog that said (in more words) "Hey, Preview probably won't work right, but it's okay." In fact, the Preview didn't work at all, for me.

But the filter itself worked beautifully, masked or unmasked, and not a hint of that green shows through.

Take a look.



Of course, the grid isn't blurred either, but that's because it wasn't on the same layer. The green was.

Also, I wouldn't let the fact that you can't bake the lighting keep you from buying this, since there's a limit to how much baking looks good on all models in SL anyway. Especially now, with Windlight, the baked shadows on the Avatar look .. ummm.. less than idea in most situations. This is particularly true if you're baking large busted shadows onto shirts that women who are less endowed might want to purchase.

Speaking of Burning and Dodging, (which Betty did) the Burn and Dodge tools have been totally revamped in CS4, so they don't bleach or muddy the color.

You can still have them do that if you want (uncheck "protect tones" in the Tool Options bar) but if you didn't like them because of that, you might just change your mind now.

They are still destructive, so I'd advise working on a copy of the layer, but they're much better than they were!

Thanks again, Robin. This is very good news. And since blur works across seams, other filters should, too.

Thanks a bunch for all the additional info, Robin. Sounds like they got it right. Guess I'd better start saving up!

I asked abou the filters because I'm assuming the tools all work as you'd expect across seams. That's reason enough to be happy, but filters, too? [bounce bounce]

Yes I was testing it for you, but Robin beat me to it!

Wow, Robin. I practically had to run to the closet and grab a bucket to contain all the drool while I was reading your last couple posts. From your description, this sounds like (almost) everything I've ever wanted a 3D painter to be. As soon as I get paid for my last project, I'm upgrading!

One thing I have noticed and perhaps for those with more 3D experience than I (practically none) this is expected, is that filters and fill are only applied to the part of the avatar that is facing forward. Any way around this?