Monthly Archives: May 2011

Photoshop CS5 Extended first impressions

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Photoshop CS5 Extended and the external hard drive arrived yesterday!
Still waiting for the new computer, but curiosity got the best of me. I installed the CS5 Extended tryout on my old notebook because I didn’t want to waste a product activation on the old hardware. I had a bit of a play around with the new 3D features–as expected, the poor dear doesn’t have the graphics horsepower to make full use of these new features, but it wasn’t completely unusable.

That image above is 100% Photoshop–I didn’t even fire up Carrara or anything like that. I imported the Despoiler as a 3D layer, set it up to use image-based lighting, and then grabbed some cheesy overcast sky background off the Internet and dropped that into a layer below it. I’m actually surprised it turned out okay. I still prefer Carrara 8’s renderer for box art and promos, but Photoshop’s renderer is easily good enough for instructions and Workbench snapshots.

I did another quickie test to see if PSD files with embedded 3D content would still load in OpenOffice.org:

And they do! That’ll simplify instructions quite a bit. It’ll be nice not to have to fire up Carrara just to do instructions.

Speaking of that big project…

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Back in February, I announced that I’d taken on a programming contract for all of March. It takes a lot to get me to agree to do contract work, but this particular contract was an easier sell for me than any of the other requests I’ve received over the years.
It was an opportunity to work with my friend Denny Unger on the new website/storefront for WorldWorks Games. We’ve worked together in the past on other, smaller projects, and he’s a lot of fun to work with. It wasn’t exactly a “You had me at hello” thing at first, I admit, but the offer of up-front payment and the fact that Denny’s easy to work with sweetened the deal enough to break the ice.

So, we’ve been working together since March on WWG’s new home on the Internet. Denny handled the graphic design and artwork, and my job was to turn his static compositions/mockups into living, breathing webpages. Here’s a little teaser that should bring a smile to your face:

Yes, that’s a product page for one of my models.
As for the rest of the project, I can’t really discuss any technical details or anything of the sort yet. That will all come in due time, when WWG begins to post teasers and announcements of their own. What I can tell you, however, is that this is a pretty huge project, and I’m doing the whole codebase from the ground up.
There’s also a second half to this big project: adding my old stuff to the WWG storefront. A bit over half of my catalog didn’t make the cut because it was just too old and stale. Specifically, anything from before 2007 is gone forever. Out of the remaining stuff, about half needs some touch-up work, a bit of a makeover, or reformatting for machine-cutter compatibility. As an example of minor touch-up work, stuff like the Sandmaster V will be getting new store graphics, like the promotional render shown below:

In the case of makeovers and reformats, stuff like the Itoyo 950 are getting new store graphics, a bit of a texture refresh, and reformatting to support machine-cutters:

As one final bit of teasing, I want to show off the catalog thumbnail format that Denny and I put together for my stuff:

Finally, it’s upgrade time!

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I normally schedule major upgrades for my hardware and software every 5 years, and I was overdue for a major upgrade for months. Just didn’t have the money or opportunity to make it happen earlier in the year. The fact that my desktop workstation, which normally handles everything that my convertible notebook didn’t have the graphics horsepower to handle, died a few months ago added a bit of uneasy panic to the equation. 
I wasn’t able to work on any models that had textures larger than 1024x1024px as a result of that hardware failure, and my large paper model output dropped sharply as the amount of time needed to work on models increased. That was a crippling blow to my already weak sales, which really didn’t help matters any when tax time rolled around. It was also another reason I took a programming contract for all of March–there just wasn’t any feasible way for me to crank out enough small paper models to make the bills.
I had resigned myself to not being able to upgrade my toolset for the foreseeable future, and I sort of came to terms with that after closing down all direct sales. Of course, fate has a funny way of going about things. I finally had an opportunity to upgrade my hardware and software the other day. There was a catch, however–the timing really wasn’t good, because of our financial situation, and it was a very limited window of opportunity that I couldn’t pass up.

I had a chance to get the full boxed DVD version of Photoshop CS5 Extended at a really steep discount from a software liquidator. My current convertible isn’t up to running CS5 Extended (it can just about keep up with plain old Photoshop CS!), so in order to make the most of that acquisition, I would have had to replace my computer. And wouldn’t you know it, there was a promotion for the kind of laptop I wanted from the hardware supplier that I had a line of credit with. Oh, I was torn. I went out to talk to a singularly unhelpful Mrs E, who was of the same indecisive mind that I was. Sometimes being on the same wavelength 90% of the time isn’t necessarily a good thing!

In the end, I pulled the trigger. If I had let that opportunity slide, I’d never be able to get back on my feet with my existing, aging toolset. On the other hand, going for the opportunity would make an already tenuous financial situation go from bad to worse. Yet, on the third hand, not doing this now could easily mean waiting months or years for a similar opportunity to arise. So, I just took a big leap of faith and did it.
As of this moment, I’m the proud, excited, terrified, and even more broke owner of Photoshop CS5 Extended, a new 1TB external hard drive, and a much more modern laptop with more graphical horsepower than my old desktop workstation and convertible notebook combined. The laptop will ship sometime in the middle of the month after it’s been assembled and tested. Photoshop and the external hard drive are supposed to arrive sometime this week. It was a good bargain, but one that I really wish had come during better financial times.
For you, this means I can actually work on the huge, bill-paying paper models once again, after the big coding project is wrapped up.