Category Archives: Photoshop

Photoshop exercise

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I frequently do little Photoshop exercises just to warm up, especially when I’m suffering from texturing block, and most of them end up in the recycle bin after they’ve served their purpose. I thought I’d post this morning’s exercise for the fun of it.

2 reasons: it’s one of the goofiest exercises I’ve done, and because some of the cardboard boxes in the storeroom props set from 2007 have Barve Megafoods markings. And just to segue from there into the realm of backstory, I frequently work with basic backstory outlines in my head while designing models, and these boxes weren’t an exception. It all kind of comes at me fast, and it’s not like I sit around for hours trying to come up with this stuff–it literally just kind of pops into my head, and most of the time I’m pretty good about filtering that stuff so customers don’t start wondering if there’s something wrong with my head. 😆

In this case, I think my brain was trying to come up with as many vomit based puns as possible when I was texturing those Ambient Elements cardboard boxes in 2007. Barve Megafoods used to be Chunderson-Barve, which was the merger of Chunderson Foods and Barve Products, 2 competing companies owned by Ralph Chunderson and Chuck Barve. Now, Chuck is kind of an oddball character–his big dream was to engineer a boneless fish/chicken/pork substitute that could be aquafarmed, and it wasn’t until well after his death that his descendant Charles Emesis Barve IV finally nailed it and named the resulting abomination “Chucken” in honor of the family patriarch. Fast forward to 2012–I came across this hilarious photo of some sort of disgusting looking fish when collecting texturing references, and I immediately thought back to the Chucken backstory and decided that was going to be the subject of this morning’s Photoshop exercise.

Art and programming, part II

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I figured out how to abuse the data-driven graphics feature of Photoshop CS5 even further so I could use it to spool out cars with unique shop numbers and roof numbers. This time, more pictures and less boring text.

First, I set up the texture PSD file of the classic Interceptor scheme as a template. This involves just creating variables and assigning them to layers.

The next thing I did was set up a comma delimited text file to use as the data set source, in good old Notepad:

Yes, that’s it. Just a list of values.

Once both of those things are set up, a few button clicks in Photoshop will change the text layer strings and save each change out as a separate file:

A bit of duplicating and re-merging in Ultimate Papercraft 3D gives me an 8-up layout, and all of the materials have been reassigned to the new texture variants:

I also spent a few minutes tweaking a copy of the OpenOffice layout template to work with the 8-up version:

Okay, all of that is just a one-time setup thing. I literally only have to do that once. From this point on, I can simply copy the Ultimate Papercraft 3D and OpenOffice 8-up templates to another folder, and after assigning variables to any other scheme, I can painlessly export a different 8-up without tediously editing a lot of layers and saving things out by hand.

The only real limit on how many variations I can include in a single PDF is completely dependent on the amount of video RAM and system RAM on my machine, and the amount of work needed to set up the unique variations is much less than it used to be when I had to do them all individually by hand. Nice. I definitely could get used to this feature.Note: Don’t worry about how odd the texturing looks. The model is currently wearing a baked global illumination lightmap, which is the source of all the shading, and that lightmap is only used to make the Metasequoia work-in-progress screenshots look a bit nicer. I usually crank the lightmap opacity almost all the way down when exporting paper models for real, so the PDF won’t be anywhere nearly that harshly shaded.

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.