Help - Photoshop CS4 Extended

OK, so I downloaded the trial hoping that the new 3d painting features would rock. So far, I'm struggling. I did what I think is the obvious thing. I loaded the SL Avatar model OBJ file. I went into the upper material layer. I went created a new layer to paint on. Everything was going great... until I went back to the 3d avatar and actually tried to paint. What I found was that it wouldn't paint at all on many of the mesh segments. No matter how many times I went over them, no color. Others painted just fine. I tried increasing the paint falloff angle all the way to 0-90 and still nothing. From what I saw, AVPainter actually does a much better job as simplistic as it is. Surely I'm missing something here.

And, while we're at it for any of you CS4 pro's, is there some way to get rid of all the wierd shading it puts on the AV model. It appeared like the layer I painted was semi-transparent (even though it was not in the flat material file) and there was a huge amount of some sort of shading going on over all the meshes.

Help me obi-wan....

If you use the "Search This Forum" link on the right, using

Photoshop Extended

as the search term, you willl find some worthwhile reading material that might answer your questions while waiting for replies to your post.

The Photoshop Tips and Tricks sticky at the top of this forum might deal with CS4 Extended, I'm not sure.

What are your system specs? PS CS4's 3D paint engine requires a lot of RAM. Plus, to use some of the advanced features, you need a high end video card with updated drivers. What video card do you have, and what driver version are you using?

As for the "weird shading", I'm not quite sure what you mean. If you want to eliminate shading altogether, click 3D -> Render Settings, and set the Face Style to Unlit Texture. This is equivalent to turning on Full Bright in SL. It eliminates the effects of lighting within the scene.

Also, what avatar models are you using? If it's the ones that come directly from LL, they're kind of a mess. If you've got a suitable 3D modeling program, you can clean them up pretty easily. But if you don't, they're practically unusable. You'd be better off using the ones Robin Sojourner put together. http://www.robinwood.com/Catalog/Technical/SL-Tuts/SLDownloads/Exported_CS3_Avatars.zip

Thanks Chosen.

I'm beginning to suspect RAM is my issue. I'm running the 32 bit version of windows right now so my PC only offers 3.2gb of ram (out of the 4 that is installed).

The video card is NVidia and the drivers are close to brand fresh... maybe a few weeks old.

And I'll definitely take a look at Robin's models. I suspected the plain old SL ones were a mess. They caused me a lot of trouble in blender also. I may also just clean them up myself in blender.. we'll see.

And susan, thanks for the search tip. I had tried a few different searches and came up with nothing and I'm on a time limit because this is only a trial version and I must make a buy decision fairly quickly. So far, I'm not particularly impressed and I'm seriously hoping that I am missing something.

**** UPDATE ****
And the winner is... Crappy models from Linden Labs. Sure enough, using Robin's model the painting is going exactly the way I'd expect it too. I probably still need to swap over to 64 bit vista to get the extra ram, but this is going a lot better.