Why I would like products to include more photoshop layers in the future
linvanchene
Posts: 1,382
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I provide UV templates with my products. (and if a template is not available, you can output one from Studio) I have thought the same about the Photoshop PSDs. However, there are a number of issues with providing these. These come to mind immediately.
1. The file sizes can be huge. (but they could be in an alternate/optional location)
and here's the big problem.
2. I use a good number of 'merchant resource' textures. My method is to mask a fully tiled layer to show the texture in only the right areas. However, this leaves the full tiled texture in the PSD. That means I would be delivering the texture in its original format which is against the terms of use for almost all merchant resource textures.
As a PA, I have to stay 'legal' first. :) And DAZ demands we are staying 'legal' as well. Yes, I've had a few legal questions during the product submission phase. So far I've always had the right answer. :)
It's a well thought out post and i see the point you are making. I have thought along these same lines myself when I see complex shaders included with products that I can't use because of my renderer preferences. I don't ever use 3delight and rarely use firefly, mostly luxrender, and then occasionally maxwell and hopefully octane once I upgrade my GPU. So because of that I never buy or even use the shaders sold here or elsewhere and never use LIE. I have a fairly decent collection of seamless textures and if i need specific texturing, it's not that hard to make my own textures. If all products just came with the texture (diffuse, bump. spec, normal, etc) sheet, then all users would have surface settings based on their talent and experience with the renderers they use.
Personally I hate the cloud based subscription plan for software, just don't like the business model and don't see myself ever using it if I have a choice (probably the same mentality that has me owning my car rather than leasing every 2 years). I have an older version of PSD as well as an older version of PSP installed along side the latest version of GIMP. Personally I find I use GIMP more than anything, have all the brushes installed in PSD, installed in GIMP. It's funny about your last part that the more you use other renderers the more you use image editing software, that has been my SOP since I have been doing 3D.
I do like the added features added as a PSD file, would be helpful when altering textures and I would even be more inclined to buy more characters from here since i could then more easily correct the areas that never get shown here at DAZ and that usually keep me from buying. Not to mention easier editing of eyebrows and such, BUT I can see from a artists POV that i created this character to look a certain way, so if it is released all on PSD files, then my creative vision is lost and it might as well be a merchants resource then.
What I'd find most useful is a PSD that contains various masks that the creator used to make their textures. I had to make a custom mask for the recent XTech outfit, for example, to use as a driver for a mix material in LuxRender to treat the areas between the orange raceways as a different material. This wasn't too hard in this case, given that the displacement maps gave a starting point with flat/netural colours to make mask selection easy. But most of the time, the area you want to create the mask for is not easy to select out because it's overlayed on other texture materials (most common case I want this for is skins that have things like stars or other shapes overlaid on them and trying to make "clean" masks for these is so frustrating I usually just give up).
I don't care about the underlying merchant resource materials. I just want the various overlay masks so I can do things in Lux like mix different material types in.
I don't plan to buy PhotoShop.
I have GIMP, but so far, it's too fiddle-y.
I am a nerd who uses MS Office package which most people have (or LibreOffice) to such an extent I guess few people at Microsoft imagined to be possible. SO I'd prefer transparent PNGs instead of PSD layers. There is an outrageous lack of good PSD to PNG converters.
Yanno .. I considered doing this early on but decided against it. The idea is great in theory but the practicality is tricky. As soon as a PA introduces a new option for their products, such as including the .PSD file, we have to face the following potential issues:
- Why are you supporting Photoshop? Adobe is evil! I use ______. Can you make them in that program instead?
- Eeeew cloud based? No way.
- I don't care for .psd files for _______ (pick a reason, any reason), can you make me textures instead?
- QA: This works in the newest version of PS but some customers are using PS7 so can you support all versions ever made?
- Royalty Free texture resources are typically allowed for commercial use but not for redistribution.
The list could get longer but those are the reasons I decided not to do it. Just gets messy. :)
I am certainly not speaking for all PAs. I just wanted to share my own point of view, for what it is worth. On this side of the fence, these things are almost never quite so simple.
~Bluebird 3D
Hmmm the size is a BIG issue with PSDs. I can tell you just one of my of my custom characters PSD's collected in a single folder equate to 1.82GB (And thats not including WIP and previous versions of that character)
Now just one folder containing 16 custom/personal characters with their collected PSD files is 24GB. I work allot with layers, and always keep the PSD's for future editing. I LOVE the format, but if I were to have every bought character from PAs with their associated PSD's (Although awesome as I do allot of custom jobs) My computer and external drives would be maxed out.
Of course PAs could cull the file size by keeping layers minimal, but then you may be left with something no more useful than a compiled JPG of the full thing.
Just food for thought.
valid point. I have my own makeup/options added to existing textures and the layers make for a huge file size usually.
You're proposing making support for the default renderers an optional extra. That seems somewhat problematical, and definitely counter to the chosen market position of DS and Poser as entry-level systems with maximum accessibility to new users. Optimum results for a new user using purchased items/textures shouldn't be dependent on them using non-entry-level renderers. Now if people want to provide stuff on top of optimised DS/Poser textures I have absolutely no problem with that, but it should be an add-on, not a replacement for the default 3Delight/Firefly support.
I use 3delight almost all the time with the occasional but rare lux based render. I use paintshop pro not photoshop. Most of my surfaces use multiple maps (in some cases a map in nearly every available slot). Nor does having the maps mean that nearly every setting doesn't have to be fiddled with to use it in a different program.
I'm also a PaintshopPro user, not PhotoShop, but I can open and save PSDs, so close enough I guess.
I would not want to give out my unmerged files for resons already mentioned.
#1 file size of PSDs
#2 not allowed to redistribute some resources
#3 no desire to redistribute my original raw materials in that format
If users like cwichura had a very specific need of a very specific image, and it was for pesonal use only, I would send them a PNG file directly. Most general users do not have any use for the unmerged files, or they would be creating their own textures from scratch themselves anyway.
A nice idea, but (apart from the other problems mentioned upthread) what about PhotoShop version compatibility? Not everyone has the latest shiny new version, and some people will never use the cloud-subscription stuff Adobe's now switched to (a hideous mistake, IMHO, which will inevitably bite Adobe in the anatomy before too long). How compatible is a current-version .psd file with, say, CS1 or CS2? Or even a pre-CS version?
The target application is the only requirement for support. Not its plugins or bridges to other apps or rendering engines, just what is included in the base application itself.
Anytime support for another app is added then its more time and effort required by the PA to make those adjustments and make sure they work. This can greatly increase production time with no guarantee of increased sales or profit for having done so.
As much as we would all love for 3D stuff to be universal across the board, it is not! Not everyone uses the same set of apps or even likes the same set of apps. If anyone want a product or freebie from one app to work in another or to be able to render in a different render engine then they need to do research and foot work to make it happen.
Each major software company builds and supports its own software package and content. Then there are those who find ways to bridge the gaps between them.
ps, I dont like Adobe or Photoshop.
I do all my renders in 3Dlight. I did pick up Luxus, but I haven't spent any serious time working with it, since my goal is painterly, not photo realistic. I still do regular modifications to surface settings, since 75% of the rest of the Poserverse is trying for Photoreal (or at least so it seems). I do have to say, though, I'd be pretty annoyed if settings for Lux or Octane started becoming the default. Vendors who did that without providing settings for base DS/Poser would end up dropped off my list pretty quickly.
I don't own Photoshop. I do my postwork in GIMP. I also use GIMP to alter textures when needed, if LIE won't do what I need to do. Unless Adobe offers Photoshop actually, legally free, I don't see me picking it up any time soon.