Coming up on today’s epsiode:

Using 3d objects inside Photoshop and Illustrator. When developing graphics for product, using 3D objects can help position graphics on products more easily and is a huge time saver. Before we had to take pictures, or make a 3D objects inside illustrator. Photoshop’s 3d abilities get around the limitations of illustrator. By allowing you to more quickly visualize objects you rotate in your comp.

3D Objects in Illustrator
In illustrator we’ll draw half of the objects path under Effects, 3D, Revolve. We then map the lable. Then copy and past it into photoshop. Now this is great, but if we needed to rotate the object, we have go back into illustrator. Heres where we start to see the cons.

First we can’t see what it will look like on the comp. We have to re-render the object each time we move the object around. We even have to re-render if we cancel out.

3D Objects in Photoshop

Photoshops ability to read 3D objects is a huge time saver. To set this object up, we can model in any 3D app. We’ll using maya in our example. We can Modify a cylinder and or import an illustrator curve and revolve the surface. A couple things to keep in mind when texturing. First is to not use a small pic to repeat a pattern. Make sure the textures are big enough to cover your UVs. Second is that material shaders will not export. To make a color make sure the add it to your texture map. Another draw back is that lights do not render correctly. We can export this as an OBJ file. Here we can see the two file it exports. The .obj and a .mtl fle that has info on the textures. In addition you will also need the 3 textures files this object use for its cap, label and bottle color. Open up in photoshop. We can use the default size. So we get to our 3D tools by double clicking on the layer. The tools open on at the top. We select the rotate and roll tool to orbit around. This doesn’t look like the texture was in maya. The light info isn’t read properly. We can change the light settings and render mode to something else. The one I found that looked the best is under render mode, shaded illustration. Thats better, but the con to using this render is that it adds a stroke around the object. We can workaround this by cranking up the crease threshold all the way up. Then we can change the line color. If we drop down the the layer options, we can see the textures attached. Something to keep in mind is that we can’t add any new textures, but we can edit. We double click the texture name to open the texture.Inside the label texture we can see that it can handle multiply layers. This make editing so fast and easy. Just save to update any changes that always come up. The file does not overwrite the original file, but imbeds it as a psb file. Plus we can still apply layer styles.

So that’s working with 3d objects in photoshop and illustrator.