After I learnt about the new 3D Paint tool in the latest Adobe Photoshop CS4, I knew I had to try it out.

I used one of my old models I made in 3Ds Max and unwrapped it. (Yes you have to unwrap to paint it)



I played around with the new tool for a couple of hours learning new stuff and getting used to it. This is what I got.

Click to view image.




This tool is sick. IMO better than polypainting in Zbrush. I mean way better. At least PS doesn't crash out of the blue and make you scream nuts.

(Disclaimer: All the shit below are my personal opinion and does not represent anyone else blah blah blah...you get the idea.)

- 3D Paint in PS runs much smoother than Zbrush, and its capable of going very high resolution compared to Zbrush, which gets cranky once you drive it too high a subdivision. And it seems that CS4 is capable of handling very large images better than the earlier versions.
-Pasting texture from other image source is much, much, much easier than Zbrush Projection Master or ZAppLink. I mean as easy as Ctrl+C then Ctrl+V and Ctrl+E to flatten. Matter of seconds. To do this in Zbrush I have to spend half the time staring at the "COMPACTING MEMORY" on the top left corner.
- You can easily paint specular map and any other maps you would bother to handpaint. Easy to export and apply. And you don't have to flip vertical lol...
- Like Zbrush, you can have many 3D objects in many layers. You can apply different textures on different objects, something you can't do in Zbrush. On each object you can apply many maps like normals and specular. There are options to adjust material settings like glossiness, shininess etc. You can even apply an environment sampler for reflection. In fact you can complete the whole scene with lightings in PS.
- You can render raytrace. Like...wow. But don't expect wonderful results. Afterall, this is the first 3D tool ever in PS. You can also render wireframes, vertices, normals, depth and much more.
- And of course all the standard PS functions work wonders on 3D paint.

However Photoshop is still a texturing tool. Unlike Zbrush, you can't model and sculpt.
There are no fancy basic materials like those in Zbrush.
Painting goes crazy if there are overlapping UVs. In Zbrush you don't even need to unwrap to paint.
Rotating and zooming isn't friendly. I can't find a better way to rotate then having to press K to go rotate mode then B to go back to brush mode. Zooming would be in steps of 50%, 66.7%, 100% and so on with Ctrl +/-. I can't find a better way to zoom. Maybe I ain't looking hard enough.

Still the 3D Paint tool is very useful. Even for 2D digital illustration. Oh yea the other cool feature is the rotate canvas function like Painter. There are many other cool features I couldn't explore in a few hours. For its first 3D capability in Photoshop, I must say Adobe did good. Revolutionary indeed.