JoeyP41 wrote: This is why the other applications matter and should not be summarily discounted as meaningless to this argument. When you consider the current playing field for high end 3D, Maya, Softimage, Max, Houdini, Lightwave, Shake, Nuke, Fusion, Flame, Combustion, etc, Photoshop is a super minority in this equation. Absolutely...which is the real irony here because you seem to be complaining about the behavior of the lowest end of the pipeline cause it doesn't work the way YOU want. Yes, it seems the IFF import plug-in is a simple, dumb plug-in that opens an image and applies the alpha so you get the RGB image floating on transparency. And when you save the IFF you end up with a "white" background because the IFF format can't deal with Photoshop's type of transparency. Well, that might be Photoshop's fault or it might be the IFF file format's fault...let's see, who owns the IFF? Uh, nobody...looks like IFF is a dead end... What I'm pretty sure you really want is a new, modern file format that CAN deal with the CGI world as well as the Photoshop world and if need be create a file format import plug-in that will open CGI files, look at the respective components, list them, show a preview and ask the use how they want to handle masking, transparency and premultiplied data. Then the plug-in would open the file into Photoshop's environment for work. Upon finish you would then need a file format export plug-in to take the components reaming in the file ask the user to determine how to deal with them and export to a suitable file format for continuation in the CGI workflow. The funny thing is that unless there were literally 10's of thousands of users, a plug-in of this nature would be fairly expensive to develop and engineer but considering the budgets of major films, it would prolly just be a drop in the bucket...how many users do you think would need such an import/export plug-in for Photoshop? What do you think a single user seat could sell for? See, if the market ain't too big, what would prompt Adobe to do something like this and just include it in Photoshop? JoeyP41 wrote: BTW, what your experience in animation? This is not a flippant question. Seriously, are you a 3d animator? Me? Naw, I'm just a simple Photoshop user...course I'm pretty good at Photoshop which lead to a consulting gig with Disney Animation at about the time they decided to go with Photoshop and kill Disney Paint. I have hung out with some ILM folk...notably John Knoll although I've never worked for ILM. As for what I do in my day job, other than write books about Photoshop, Camera Raw and Lightroom and occasional photo shoots, I spend a fair amount of time talking to Photoshop, Camera Raw and Lightroom engineers (and product managers) into putting stuff into the software. Kinda what YOU seem to be trying to do (not too successfully I might add). In fact, if ya think about it, I guess that would be my main area of expertise in this debate...getting stuff into Photoshop, Camera Raw and Lightroom. So, if you are truly serious about bringing about change, you might want to heed my advice. Either that or hire an engineer to write a plug-in... :~)
... View more