CS4 Extended Question

So I'm trying out the demo of PS CS4 Extended to see whether or not I want to add it to my toolkit, and I'm baffled by it's 3d viewport performance. When I'm rotating the model or painting on it it displays in full resolution, but when I'm not it reverts to utter blocky crapola. The attached image shows what I mean. On the left is what it looks like while rotating or painting. On the right is how it looks the rest of the time. I've looked everywhere and can't seem to find any settings to change that. I want it to display in full resolution all the time. It's especially important to be able to see full quality when painting on the linked texture rather than on the model itself and if this is just the way it is and can't be fixed it's a deal breaker for me. What am I missing? All I've been able to find is antialias settings, which just changes it from blocky to smoothly out of focus. Please tell me I'm just not finding the right settings and Adobe isn't really this clueless.

Hi Chip. I'm glad to see you're finally diving into CS4E, but I'm sorry to hear you're having such trouble. Short answer, no, it shouldn't be doing that.

As for how to fix it, I'm not quite sure. I'll see what I can break on my end to mimic the same behavior, and I'll let you know what I figure it out. That's assuming no one else already knows the answer, which hopefully someone does.

What are your system specs, by the way, just on the remote possibility that maybe it's a hardware related issue?

It's a 3ghz quad core, 6gb ram, 8800gtx, running Windows 7 RC 64bit. I haven't tried it under 32bit vista to see if it's an OS related problem. I also haven't tried a different display driver yet. It may well be a driver issue but I thought I'd see if it was a PS settings problem first.

If the model is zoomed all the way out so that the whole model is visible it looks sharp, but if I zoom in to a portion of the document what I'm getting appears to be as if I took a screen cap of that portion and scaled it up rather than the app correctly refreshing the texture. If I turn on AA, it's just the same low resolution display with AA... in other words mush.

I'll try changing to the current nvidia vista driver to see if that changes the behavior.

Okay, I think I may have figured it out. If I use the axis tool to move the model within the document and move it up to a closeup it stays sharp, but if I use the magnifying glass it just blows up that portion of the frame without refreshing the texture, and the manipulator widget goes out of frame (and is completely gone even if I scroll the document over to the top left corner). Changing to the latest 64 bit Nvidia driver doesn't change the behavior. Is the magnifying glass useless when working with a 3d model? Is there any way to move the model within the document numerically rather than having to use the manipulator widget?

Ah, that would explain it. The magnifying glass is a 2D tool. When you're using it, you're zooming on the 2D rendering of the model, not on the model itself. To move the model or the camera, you need to use the 3D manipulators.

For numeric control, use the tool settings bar. First gram one of the 3D manipulator tools from the toolbox. The one with the little camera icon in the top left corner of the button manipulates the camera, and the other manipulates the model. Whichever one you choose, you'll be able to adjust settings in the settings bar, just like with any other tool. Toward the left of the bar, you'll see the maniulation types (pan, rotate, zoom, etc.), and toward the center, you'll see fields for XYZ variables.

The widget, as you've no doubt discovered, is a little akward to use. It's a good idea, but it's not well implemented. Depending on the rotation, it can be difficult to grab the handle you want. I'd like to see them do away with it, and introduce alt-mouse controls instead.

Well what's really stupid is that even with the magnifying glass being only 2d, there's plenty of resolution in the texture that it should still be sharp, so PS isn't showing the texture with its actual resolution but is using a low rez screen proxy instead based on it's arbitrary 100% zoom of the model. That's extremely lame since the video card is more than capable of displaying the texture at full resolution. I completely agree about the clumsiness of the manipulator widget. I haven't tried manipulating a camera instead. If it's not a whole lot less clunky then I have to say I'm not terribly impressed.

The thing to keep in mind is that PS is treating the 2D image as a rendering of the 3D model. The size of the rendering is the size of the image. The size of the texture on the model is totally unrelated.

Here's an comparative example. Let's say you took the same avatar model and rendered a 2D image of it in Max, at the same size as the PS image you're now looking at. If you then opened that rendering in Photoshop, and zoomed in on it with the magnifying glass, it would look just as choppy.

Remember, with the magnifying glass, you're zooming in on the actual pixels of the rendering. You're not zooming in on the model unless you move the camera. I think it makes perfect sense.

As for the camera controls, yes, they are disappointing. However, the ability to use all of Photoshop's tools right on the model more than makes up for that, as far as I'm concerned. Your perspective might be different from mine, since you're used to having the best of both worlds with Ghostpainter. But for those of us who never previously had any means to use Photoshop's complete toolset in 3D, in real time, CS4E has been a godsend.

That said, it's defininitely in need of some improvements here and there. Alt-mouse camera controls and more flexible projection options are at the top of my list.

Yes, if you change the image size to 2048 or higher it get's better. The 3D model at rest is treated like a 2D layer and pixelates to the resolution the document is set to.

That all makes sense, but I find it disappointing that display resolution of the model and texture are locked to the document resolution that way. It's pretty counter-intuitive from standard 3d app behavior. It would make more more sense to me if a 3d model with a 2048x2048 texture on it inside a 512x512 document could be zoomed 400% before seeing any degradation of the object texture. They should really be independent until final render. I'll have to play around with document size versus texture size. Here's hoping for CS5 there's a true 3d paint mode that isn't the 3d layer inside another 2d document paradigm they're using now.

I decided now was a good time to check it out since I'm back into the void of waiting for GhostPainter to be updated for the latest version of Max.

I agree that it's counter intuitive if you're thinking of it as a typical 3D application. But when you consider that Photoshop's primary function is to create 2D artwork, it makes perfect sense. Otherwise, it would basically be two apps in one, which is not the direction Adobe wanted to go. They very decidedly wanted 3D to be completely non-modal in Photoshop.

I'm pretty sure that what they expect people to be doing with the 3D painting functions is to paint models so they look good as elements of images. The idea is rather than render an image of a model from a 3D app, and then composite the rendering into a picture in PS, you can just bring the model right in, and work directly in the picture the whole time. The fact that we can also take those painted textures and apply them to the models elsewhere is just a side benefit.

Oh I agree that that was their aim, but I think it's incredibly short sighted of them. Here's hoping it continues to evolve into a proper 3d texturing app or that that they spin one off with that use specifically in mind.

Hear, hear.