Photoshop CS1 on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine: Buggy, crashy, aggravating.
Photoshop CS5 x64 on a 64-bit Windows 7 machine: Runs like a dream.
Argh. Looks like they’re still gonna get my money in the end.
On the bright side, I don’t need to cough up a whole thousand anymore. Having worked extensively with the CS5 tryout for the past several days, I’ve found that the 3D and animation tools in CS5 Extended pretty much don’t get used at all, because they’re really rudimentary and lacking compared to what can be done in a standalone 3D app, so there’s no sense in paying the extra premium for a half-assed set of features that I’m not gonna use. That means I can get by with just regular old Photoshop CS5.
What brought all that on? Oh, just this.
These models have all been re-developed in Ultimate Papercraft 3D, now include machine-cutting files, and have also received a bit of a texture refresh. Nothing major, I just updated the layer styles and colors to use the 2010 styles and swatches.
Currently working on:
Yes, that’s a Marine haze gray scheme–I found a couple of hidden layer groups with Marine decals, so I enabled them and updated the colors for the fun of it.
I love my new machine. I have antialiasing, anisotropic filtering, and a bunch of other things enabled on the GeForce GT540M for Metasequoia’s graphics profile. That means bigger and prettier screenshots with fewer jaggies and nasties.
Speaking of which, I also found a treasure trove of abandoned models that never made it to release because of technical limitations back in 2007. Even though my dearly departed desktop workstation was capable of handling textures larger than 1024x1024px, I was still using Pepakura Designer to unfold my models, which did NOT support larger textures. So, larger models required workarounds or design compromises, which frequently didn’t really work out and resulted in models being abandoned and forgotten. Here are some of those lost models, which were supposed to go with the Hummingbird and the battlesuited Marines in 2007:
You can kind of see how they’re related to the Hummingbird visually, as they all have prominent countergrav pods on the sides, which all resemble each other a bit as a visually unifying hook.
Since I wasn’t able to do all of those models at the time, a couple of more manageable models also got axed because there just wasn’t a line left after cutting all the other models out of it:
Now, all of those models also had civilian counterparts. Those civilian counterparts predated the military models by a couple of years, and were supposed to be my half of a collaborative project with Denny Unger before it got scrapped. There are already entirely too many images in this post, so I’m just gonna pick one of them, the Veloce Brio:
Denny textured a slightly older variant of that to look like a yellow space Volkswagen as a test. No photos of the prototype survived, but it was a really cute little thing, and at one point, Matt Lyon demanded that we slap an Autobot insignia on it. The project was shelved in favor of Wormhole shortly after that first test model.
Normally, that’d have been all she wrote, but Denny fished it off his hard drive recently and passed it along to Paul Senior, who re-skinned it, and now it’s part of Paul’s upcoming Streets of Titan release:
It was really nice to see the Veloce Brio again after all those years.
Not all of our collaborative works were abject failures, though–I also did the geometry for the original Lair of the Dragon God 2.5D dragon as a commission job for Denny. He added the frills, horns, and some additional detailing, and knocked the ball out of the park with the texturing. Things sort of came full circle again earlier this year–when the Dragon God set was converted to TerrainLinX format, yours truly was also responsible for the additional dragon color variations. My favorites are the green/yellow and black/red ones.
