I’m still working on stuff that photographers and designers would find useful in Photoshop Extended’s 3D capabilities. While I think there is still some room to grow before it becomes a normal part of the pro tool set, there is an awful lot that can be done right now. My new tutorial shows how to take the basic primitives in Photoshop’s Mesh From Grayscale command and tweak them for actual use.
One of the big limitations in Photoshop’s 3D capabilities is the lack of ability to do any real modeling. Frankly, I’m OK with it not being there – I think users who need more than what Photoshop can dish out right now really need more. These folks will use applications like Maya, Cinema4D, Strata or others to do real 3D development, and then go to Photoshop for scene compositing or texture editing. And of these, the commercial world is likely to simply hand those models off to another user altogether, one dedicated to using Photoshop.
So the question becomes one of use-case for Adobe. Who will really use these features? I like to think many more people would if they knew how useful it could be. In my previous presentation, I got a lot of feedback from people who never realized that they could do something more than the basic tricks. In this new tutorial, I show some non-obvious things you can do with the built-in tools (in this case, using an idea I got from Zorana Gee, one of the Photoshop program managers). It takes a little trickery to get the result, and it’s anything but scientific in approach, but it builds the foundation for more complex treatments later on. I’d like to take Photoshop’s native 3D as far as possible before stepping outside into other applications so I have a better idea of when to make the decision to use one or the other.
My real goal, however, is to show the average Photoshop user how 3D can be amazingly useful in other less-than-obvious ways. I’ve got a few tricks up my sleeve for both graphic designers and photographers, so stay tuned!
