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:
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.
