With a body of work throughout the 1990s that enthusiastically and provocatively amalgamated dualities—word/image, real/virtual, hand/machine, past/future—American graphic, type, and multimedia designer P. Scott Makela established his reputation as a creator of postmodern visual languages outside normative graphic design. While designers of different generations, mindsets, and training disagreed acutely (and sometimes quite nastily) about what graphic design was and what, how, and to whom it should communicate, Makela was his own kind of designer. An enduring inspiration was weighty, machined stuff—the primordial analog output of industrial production, which he frequently rebuilt into dimensional letterforms, married to meaning, and presented in a succinct, unambiguous single punch. “Actually,” Makela said, “I find 2D type a backward transformation from 3D, a 2D way of describing 3D events.” Revisiting his work and philosophy is an opportunity to appreciate his prowess in reconstituting meaning and breathing life into language. I interviewed Makela in the spring of 1997 as part of my MFA Thesis at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Our exchange, below, is lightly edited and condensed. 

I think of 3D type as your signature style. 

Well, I think that it has been for the last three or four years. I’ve really never gotten tired of the mass it creates and the ability to create [the appearance of metal] alloys. I’ve always been interested in this idea of alloys. It wasn’t specifically “Oh, I want to look at 3D type because it was on a Metallica or heavy metal cover.” It really was more because of growing up in a household with manufacturing and aluminum extrusions. 

So it was about material?

Yeah. It was about material and the way it was formed and the way it was extruded out of machining tools. I grew up in a household where all these pieces were around, and I grew up with these pieces and these forms. By the other token, 3D type has become such a popular mode of trying to get people’s attention, even more so recently, that actually I’m struggling with trying another strategy because it has begun to lose meaning. Like Dead History loses meaning after it’s out.

What was the first piece you did using 3D typography?

The first piece I did officially, a printed piece using 3D typography, was the Mohawk piece, Rethinking Design, and it was the “Do Nothing” article I did with Tucker Viemeister. Before 3D programs were available, I started to use a program called Pixar RenderMan[1987], which was the old animation special effects engine for creating shapes. I tried to form typefaces using that. 

Mohawk Paper Mills promotion “Re-thinking Design,” copyright 1992, pages 14-23, Tucker Viemeister and P. Scott Makela’s collaboration “On Doing Nothing.” Scans of the original, courtesy the author.

So you and the software grew up together? 

Yeah, and then when certain fonts were available, I’d import them into that environment and create new possibilities. That was the advent of what was called Pixar Typestry[1990]. The software became a real basis for the way I would do things. Most of the stuff I’d do would actually be by default; when you moved the object, it became a cheap effect. I became interested in looking at things head-on. That style became a boilerplate.

While cruising around the grocery store, I noticed three genres of 3D type on products. It’s interesting; each medium has a different way of using it, connoting different things. 3D type is used on junk food for kids, household chemicals, and dog food. On television, I noticed that it’s used in sports, news, and toy commercials and often to imply technology, speed, or power. I found it cheesy. What’s your definition of cheesy when It comes to 3D type?

I think cheesy is newscasts. I’m so enamored of this thing, floating, hanging …

It’s slightly menacing, which I like.

I look at Stanley Kubrick films and realize what I really like about his direct use of models, like in 2001, was feeling that weight and that gravity. I’m interested in that gravity.

When you’re using 3D type, what do you feel it means?

When I think of how I use 3D type and how I used these floating planetoids, I think of them as giving me the opportunity to have XYZ coordinates. Instead of an implied depth of field, having the object appear as a real 3D object with some of the shadows it throws on the surfaces allows for a natural photographic depth. At the same time, it has the effect of being very modern. I like it when it’s not clear whether it’s a 3D rendering on the computer or a photograph. Some other designers have worked with a pixelated quality. I’m interested in how it feels when it’s burnished, really brushed and direct. It’s about implying depth. I’m interested in small, massive chunks. I don’t have a lot of language in my work. [I have] A simple language. I find it interesting to create dynamics within that equation.

So you think of type as having a back, a top, and sides?

Yeah. Absolutely. And what’s behind, because there’s a thickness and depth to the actual object, at least to me. I see it through my eyes, and that’s a problem.

Why?

I see language in the way that I’d like to read it, and it’s about reducing. When I was a student here years ago[1989-1991], Michael Hall, the head of Sculpture, had a really big effect on me during my reviews. He talked about reducing and isolating the work. I still had a lot of extraneous asteroids floating around, which didn’t solidify the message. So, for me, it became about (attaining) focus and isolation.

How influenced were you by Pop Art?

One of the biggest influences in my becoming a graphic designer was the work of Ed Ruscha. He was one of the California Pop artists, but he went beyond that because he wasn’t borrowing from commercial culture as much as from pedestrian strip mall culture—almost a lack of style. Ruscha brought language to life with his thick, floaty words. He and John Baldassari had the biggest impression on me. In the last five years, I’d say Lawrence Weiner. 

The Minneapolis College of Art and Design 1993-1995 catalog, designed by P. Scott Makela;
Courtesy the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Is there a message in the work?

The overall message in all my work is simply levitating directness in front of you. The language in the work is formed by the message or problem I’m solving at that time, but its delivery vehicle is about putting the message in front of someone and letting It levitate with a certain degree of weight. That’s the formal message. That’s the formal container.

Is the type hollow or solid?

I’d like to think the type is solid (laughter). It’s definitely die-cast solid without a hollow core. And remember, alloys contain mixtures of metals.

To me, [even] if it casts a shadow, it’s not necessarily 3D. It has to have substance as an object, and your work and Glaser’s stuff are there, even though they’re hand-rendered and funky. 

Peter Max, as well. 

And Ji Byol Lee in New York, whose stuff is done in Adobe Dimension. He rotated Univers. It has a top and a bottom and a front and a back. I look at the range of stuff, and they’re all different vernaculars. You said something about moving away from it or redeveloping it.

Here’s the thing. The way 3D type was used, was part of the 70s vernacular. The airbrushed type that was always the standard art house solution had a masculine quality. Now, with post-rave culture, 3D type has become everyday and accessible, just like how Photoshop has become, so it has become a convention now, a new vernacular. Part of my struggle now is to keep defining my work. First, when we’re designers, we can make our work about constantly jumping ahead as if that’s the only impetus for making it. You’re trying continually to refine something. That’s why it’s still interesting to me to go into those three-dimensional (programs) and try to create hybrids, which are a kind of shaving-off of skin. There are so many people doing the 3D type thing right out of the box with Pixar that I can’t help but feel that my own work is reduced if I don’t move onto a new plane of seeing how I can add more weight, more mass, even if it’s implied or more psychological rather than becoming structural or formal. 

I know people have talked about looking at the interior of typography, and I haven’t seen that exploration done successfully. It’s like the first time you saw a ceiling in a film was in Citizen Kane. So this is the thing to explore. Legibility on the outside of the word isn’t even an issue. I think it’s [3D type] supremely legible, but to go to the inside of the word, legibility is not going to be the same thing.

Yeah. We’re going to [learn to] recognize new shapes.

All you can do is look at the inversion, the concave part of a letter. If you look at the upper inside corner of the slab [serif] on an “I” it will look like the inside of a metal bird box or like you’re stuck inside a heating vent. So it’s really difficult formally to move forward. It’s why I’m now trying to concentrate on a psychological mass of something that’s implied. And that might be about a mysterious billowing like Freddy Krueger with the stretching face emerging from behind a very black surface. There are ways to interpret inflation. It’s interesting that you mention it because I’m not as interested in super-chiseled letters that feel like you’re not sure if they’re filled with liquid or if they’re solid. Pneumatics. Air. Fluid. Hydraulics. 

I was talking to Ji about this because when I look at his forms, I’m not sure what they’re made of. Plastic? Metal? They could be ceramic; it’s twirled around in that way. He said they can be made out of anything – even chocolate; he doesn’t care, it’s fine with him.

Let me say this: I think it’s a downer to be labeled as the 3D-type guy. When we went to London and visited Vaughan Oliver, he said, ooh, the 3D guy, 3D, 3D. It’s funny, but my work has never been about fine details; it’s been about the macro chunks. And that mechanism, up to now, has been successful for me. This is a strong communication of this idea; it is a strong way to present this text. But now, I feel that I’m at a crossroads in moving forward because I’d like to leave everything behind—but it’s easier said than done. I still find myself trying to refine some of those things that I barely started to scratch the surface of. And unfortunately, or fortunately, people are researching the same areas. Maybe that’s the reason to go on even stronger and continue to refine it. I don’t know.

On one hand, everybody makes work that really characterizes and showcases their interests and affinities. And to say, “I have to make a change,” if there’s still appeal, I’d say go with your interests. Because everyone’s identifiable. Vaughan’s work is identifiable, too.

But also, it [an investigation] takes 10-15-20 years, like with a painter. But as time becomes more modern and people move to the next. Do the enema paint on the wall … make little plastic dolls with penis noses … so, it’s also about the shock of the new, being able to relate to what the new is. When Ruscha’s work came out, peo­ple couldn’t figure out if it was commercial signage or an actual painting. The question is: is it a painting?

The other thing about making “new” is about making “uncomfortable.” Have you done things with this style of type that have made you uncomfortable? Have there been shocks?

The biggest shock is when something is incredibly ugly because, to get to something beautiful to my inner eye, I usually have to go through some ugly things—like I showed you some of the Sweater things. There’s a fine line between what I might do and what a 13-year-old might do in his bedroom or what Mondo 2000 looks like. It’s wanting to slum a little bit. So there’s definitely a wanting to enjoy part of that slumming. I don’t know if that’s a good answer.

What was that Pixar-generated form that was gray and dimensional?

That was Summer’s (Summer Powell, Cranbrook 1997) font pumped into 3D. It became this floating monolith that made me think of those young ravers looking up at this floating thing in front of the speakers. We talked about it. It reminded me of 70s Led Zeppelin covers when they had these monoliths, and we all sat around the table looking at these things. So that was our idea. A new god. A floating, again, a levitation. Whenever something’s floating above you, you’d better take notice. To bring 3D type to life, that industrial quality is attention­-getting because it sticks out into the atmosphere from the surface. And that’s another thing, formally, that I can’t resist.

A Walker Art Center Fall promotion circa 1992 -1996. Scans of the original, courtesy the author

For more, listen to Debbie Millman’s 2020 interview with Laurie Haycock Makela on Design Matters Live; they discuss her revolutionary typography days at Cranbrook with Scott Makela, surviving two brain hemorrhages, and arriving at “the project of a lifetime.”

Located within the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice, Poland, Tauron Lab stands out as a state-of-the-art new media laboratory in Europe. Offering groundbreaking audiovisual technologies, Tauron Lab provides a unique platform for artists and scientists alike to explore creativity in an immersive environment.

Operated by the Soundscape Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to enhancing the urban sound environment through research and education, Tauron Lab serves as a nexus where culture, art, and technology intersect. Creative agency Meteora, located in Kraków, was tasked with developing the brand identity for this experimental audiovisual lab — no small feat bringing sound experimentation to visual representation.

Since its official opening in September 2023, Tauron Lab has been a hub of creative activity. The multidimensional space hosts a diverse array of initiatives tailored to cater to various audiences. At the heart of its offerings is Tonarium, a futuristic sound tool that facilitates experimentation with audio. 

The lab also showcases various audiovisual technologies, events showcasing cutting-edge technologies, artistic residencies focusing on innovation, workshops for both kids and adults, and installations highlighting experimental prototypes.

One of Tauron Lab’s key features is its artistic residencies, which provide opportunities for artists to delve into cutting-edge technologies such as three-dimensional sound systems and spatialization methods. These residencies aim to foster experimentation and innovation in artistic expression.

To visually communicate these initiatives, the Soundscape team collaborated with Meteora on crafting a comprehensive identity system incorporating typography, geometric shapes, and dynamic animations, each tailored to reflect the nature of the lab’s diverse events. The goal was to create a transparent identity that enhances, rather than overshadows, the content of each event.

Tauron Lab aims to be more than just a laboratory; rather, it is a dynamic space where creativity knows no bounds and the fusion of art and technology opens new realms of possibility.

Preserving Reddit’s innate creativity stood as the cornerstone of the redesign process, focusing on refining the company’s brand positioning. Reddit boasts a distinctive authenticity reflected in its platform’s unique features and iconic alien mascot, Snoo. Moreover, Reddit thrives on its curious, informed, and engaged community. With these elements in mind, Pentagram aligned the updated brand with four core attributes: inherent eclecticism, positive distinctiveness, delightful absurdity, and genuine candor.

These traits, coupled with Reddit’s empowering essence as a hub for genuine conversations, culminated in a strategic redefinition: Reddit as “the heart of the internet.” I had the pleasure of speaking with Natasha Jen, partner at Pentagram and design lead for the Reddit brand refresh, who shared the team’s insightful approach with me.

The most important thing that designers need to consider is to put the brand in a more time-based context. It’s not just about this moment in time. It’s about how you take what is most essential of the brand and then how you evolve it, but you have to stick to the spirit.

Natasha Jen, Partner at Pentagram

(Conversation edited for brevity and clarity.)

Having to synthesize years of Reddit collateral must have been quite an undertaking. You had to unite hundreds of pieces. How did your team initially approach this streamlining?

First, we had to identify the spirit of Reddit. What is their ethos? What’s driving them now, and what drove them in the past? What is driving them forward? Once we identified those big ideas, combing through the collateral became easier because we had guardrails. That guidance helped us determine what was valuable, a maybe, and what needed to go into the garbage.

We understood the Reddit brand traits very clearly. They are eclectic. They are different. They want to be positive. They’re delightful and absurd. As a Redditor myself, I see the absurdest move throughout the experience. That was very apparent to me. They’re also candid. They’re real. These traits infuse in everything Reddit does.

These traits informed a very specific brand: Snoo is critical. Why? Because Snoo is eclectic. Snoo is adorable. Snoo is the character that holds a lot of these brand attributes. We needed to keep Snoo, but we also had to give it a rebirth so that Snoo could live in the future, embodying these qualities so specific and true to Reddit.

Identifying the importance of Snoo and its emotional range, did this lead you to the new strategic description of Reddit as the “heart of the internet”? What else led you to this discovery?

Reddit is where people participate and contribute to create this massive knowledge base. It’s a knowledge base because people discuss things and contribute to the content. Each subreddit is an in-depth discussion of people who are passionate about that subject matter. Calling it “the heart of the internet” foregrounds Reddit’s humanness. It’s a hugely and purely human platform. You can’t do that with AI. Reddit does not use algorithms to rank things. The ranking is all done by upvoting and downvoting. That’s total democracy by the people. Changing “The front page of the internet” to “The heart of the internet” conveys a similar mindset. It’s just that we humanized the platform a lot more.

With this diverse and active user base, ensuring that the brand nods to the aspects that have made it familiar to existing users, how will the refreshed brand resonate and potentially attract new users to the platform?

I can hope for the best because I know how much effort has gone into simplifying to attract a new user base. Reddit has many unique features that can be overwhelming to anyone new. Two examples are understanding what r/ means and the upvote/downvote feature.

Reddit has made significant changes to streamline the user experience, particularly for those new to the platform. While this involved simplifying some more elaborate features that long-time users found awesome and playful, our intention was to create a more welcoming and less overwhelming environment for newcomers. Through Reddit’s thoughtful simplification process, the nature of the platform is still true, but it has become a lot easier for anybody to understand and use. Our job was to honor the simplification effort that started long before Reddit hired us to rebrand.

Would you say that’s the secret sauce for any major brand refresh, just simplification?

No, I don’t think so. Simplification can be over-reductive. The key for any rebrand is to truly understand and solidify brand attributes, which must reflect a brand’s ethos. You have to figure out the personality of the organization, be it a product, service, or group of people. What are the brand traits? And you have to bring that spirit into the new era. That’s how every iconic brand evolves. Think about Disney—the time when Walt Disney drew Mickey Mouse was a very different media landscape to today. Disney is one of the world’s most admired and loved media companies. What stays true is the spirit of adventure, fun, and loving, all these wonderful attributes that Disney embodies.

What does a letter feel like? It’s impossible not to ask this question when experiencing the typographic works of UK-based animator, creative director, and 3D artist Thomas Burden. He creates and explores lively worlds of words and letters with textures that look realistic enough to touch.

I’ve previously chatted with another 3D typographer, Noah Camp, about his mesmerizing practice that focuses on capturing the texture of food within his lettering. Burden is dabbling in a similar space, though playing around mostly with synthetic textures like fabric and rubber. I was completely taken by Burden’s creations when I first came upon them, so I had to know more, and he graciously answered a few of my questions below.

How would you describe your personal aesthetic?

My personal aesthetic is mostly Japanese clothing brands that reference vintage British and US designs, which is a fancy way of describing what is essentially a lot of chore coats and work boots that scream “CREATIVE DAD.”

If you’re talking about my work, then that’s a lot more diffuse than my fashion sense— although it is mainly 3D typography these days. 

Where does your love of typography come from?

It comes down to the basic principle that all images are a form of storytelling, and illustrative typography is a real belt-and-braces approach to making a design as accessible as possible to a viewer. 

It’s a kind of a visual song, without sounding too wanky. The way a lyric is sung can really shape and/or emphasize its meaning, and I think good illustrative typography should do the same in an image. That definitely sounds like something someone else has said in the past, so apologies if my subconscious is playing plagiarist. My conscious mind fully agrees with the sentiment though.

Typography is also just the way I think. I’m definitely more of a designer/art director than an artist or illustrator. I like to keep a physical and mental file of visual references, but I only dip into it when I come up with a written concept to start with. All my projects start with written ideas, rather than an image with no concept behind it.

What tools and programs do you use the most for your practice?

I use Cinema4D for pretty much everything, although I use Photoshop, Illustrator, and After Effects on a daily basis too. I’m really wanting to get more into VR and interactive stuff at the moment though, so I’m starting to learn Spline, which is a great tool for simple and satisfying UX interactions. It’s also a great way to put off learning Houdini for a bit longer.

You seem to be drawn to certain types of textures in particular— balloons, squishy rubber, plastic. Why do you gravitate toward creating these textures in your work? What’s your process like for achieving this?

I’m drawn to a lot of different things, and my subconscious is always pulling me in different directions as I take in different inspirations, so I have to force myself to stick to one particular style for extended periods of time, but this is solely for commercial reasons though. As a freelancer, there is always a lot of pressure to specialize in one niche. A while back, I did nothing but neon type for a few years, but I stopped including it in my portfolio, as it was boring me to tears. So at the moment I’m on a squishy tip, which has coincided nicely with a real boom in the squishy type market— mainly because Maxon just made it a whole lot easier to do cloth sims in Cinema4D, and now everyone is doing it. Thus it’s turning up on a lot of moodboards. 

Why 3D animation? What is it about this form of creative expression that captivated you in the first place?

I think it has the most visual impact, especially when the main objective of most design work these days is just to get people to stop scrolling for a few seconds.

Architect Katerina Kamprani is proof that failure is, in fact, an option. The Athens-based artist is the mind behind the thought-provoking project The Uncomfortable, which came to be after she failed to finish her studies in industrial design at the University of Aegean.

“This has been a journey of failures, mistakes, and disappointments,” Kamprani said of her career path during a presentation she gave at TEDxPoznań in 2018. She recounted that her first mistake was studying architecture in the first place. Her second was pivoting to a field that was too technical, pursuing a masters in industrial design. Last on her laundry list of missteps was choosing to be an industrial designer in Greece of all places, which she says is a country without any industry that’s in a state of economic crisis.

But Kamprani wasn’t done failing just yet. After dropping out of her Master’s program after one semester, she got hired at an advertising firm in Athens, but was fired after just one month. “It was an epic failure that left me devastated,” she shared with the audience of her TED Talk. This all sounds pretty bleak, but don’t worry— cue the resurrection!

With this heap of blunders in her wake, Kamprani had the idea of intentionally applying failure to the design of everyday objects. “I started thinking, what if objects were actually designed for a bad user experience instead of a good user experience? That was my eureka moment,” her presentation continued. “I finally found something smart and funny that has no responsibility to be practical. That was the core idea: to not be practical.”

At its essence, The Uncomfortable is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects: A fork with a chain in the middle of its handle. Open-toe rain boots. A watering can whose spout faces in on itself. These designs start out as 3D renderings, and then some Kamprani manufactures into prototypes. “My goal is to deconstruct the invisible design language of simple everyday objects, and tweak their fundamental properties in order to surprise you and make you laugh,” she said. “But I also want it to help you appreciate the complexity and depth of interactions with the simplest of objects around us.”

Kamprani credits growing up in Greece, a country that she says is ten or even 20 years behind others, for this unique appreciation and perspective on design. She says her background allows her to notice things that others might not. “These days, everyone gets excited about innovation, but I try to shift the focus to things that we take for granted and are conventional.”

Kamprani’s ideation process for her “deliberately annoying” designs has changed over the years, since she first started in 2011. Back then, she struggled to think of objects in a different way, so she developed a methodology to generate ideas. “It involved analyzing the object and how users interact with them, and afterwards choosing to sabotage only one of these steps of interaction,” she told me. But as the project progressed, ideas started coming to her more naturally as she moved through her day-to-day life. 

Humor is another key component of Kamprani’s project and her general worldview. “I really like humor as a creative outlet,” she said. “I also use humor as a coping mechanism; it makes me feel good. I enjoy surrealism and absurdity. To me, it’s just another way of thinking; it can be more freeing than logic. It doesn’t have the concept of right or wrong, so the possibilities are endless!” She hopes that her Uncomfortable designs bring joy to others as well. “I started this project for fun, so my purpose is to make people laugh and feel amused,” said Kamprani. 

While The Uncomfortable has these light-hearted underpinnings, it simultaneously achieves an impressive level of profundity. “By showing faulty design, we can appreciate the objects we use everyday,” said Kamprani. “I hope this project stimulates an appreciation for the complexity and depth of interactions with the simplest of objects around us.” Plus with Kamprani’s many gaffes serving as the jumping off point for the project, she considers it to be a rebellious act. “Basically whatever I learned in design school, I went and did exactly the opposite,” she said in a 2018 interview with Culture Trip.

“I really enjoy the idea of mistakes and surprises,” Kamprani told me. “It’s complicated, but I think it stems from my fear of failure and my constant effort to be perfect. Although I never feel good when I fail, later on upon reflection, I appreciate a funny turn of events or an ironic mistake!”

Tactility is Vital

SOSO predicts a shift away from 2D design as people gravitate toward art experiences that we can see, experience, and feel in person. While most art viewership engages audiences from the neck up (i.e. our eyes and brain), SOSO says that the most meaningful projects lead to full embodiment.

“Small innovations like the inclusion of tactile feedback on Apple devices illustrate that people want something more than imagery on a screen,” SOSO Designer and Technologist Yaxuan Liu told us. “It’s important that designers think about how to incorporate multi-sensory, conceptual, and immersive design to help their audiences reflect and think in new ways.”

Retro Aesthetic

Underestimate the power of nostalgia at your own folly. For every technological step we take forward, there is an equal and opposite yearning for the past. SOSO says that the general look and feel of experiential design will steer toward low resolution and low fidelity art, hearkening to a time between the late1980s to the early 2000s. “In a world of sleek, crisp, hi-fi designs, the clumsy, pixelated, lo-fi aesthetic offers more tactility that can be interesting to people,” elaborated Liu. “Using retro tools, like an analog camera, also provides refreshing creative restraints.”

In the same way we’re seeing Gen Z gravitate toward Y2K styles and vibes across industries, we will continue to see retro design aesthetics recontextualized for the modern era. “As they become technologically obsolete— or at least no longer cutting-edge— past industrial design works are easier to appreciate in aesthetic terms,” said Liu. “This is true of 1970s audio amplifiers and Polaroid cameras, for example, both of which have found renewed appreciation in recent years. The care that went into designing and manufacturing them seems easier to appreciate from afar.”

“The power of nostalgia is nothing new,” added Liu. “We should remember that there’s nothing groundbreaking about looking to the past. The Baroque style, for example, reworked the Renaissance, and Postmodernism reworked and combined other previous styles.” But it’s this blending of styles from throughout history that generates the most unexpected and exhilarating work. “Good artists who create exciting art and design by remixing past aesthetics will do so by challenging or subverting the meaning of certain elements,” he continued.

Age of AR and VR

While old-school aesthetics aren’t going anywhere in 2023, we will simultaneously see the rise of new technologies in the realm of AR and VR, according to SOSO. Designers are looking to augmented reality to enhance their design practices, with technology offering a digital dimension that provides even more creative potential.

“Artists have long blended art and technology,” said Liu. “It’s not just about utilizing the newest technology to enhance art, but rather using unconventional industrial processes to change the perception of what art can be.” Some SOSO projects do just that, like their newly finished Wish Fountain for Regent Properties. This interactive experience allows visitors to share their wishes via text message in response to a prompt. The fountain then reacts with a unique animation of rippling colors across the wooden bench and screens. “Combining digital technology with physical craftsmanship offers a new, exciting experience to people and leads them to interact with the artwork with their bodies,” said Liu of the Wish Fountain. “It’s really cool to see kids find new ways to sit and play with the installation.”

Liu is optimistic that these advancements in the realm of AR, VR, and even AI will actually benefit design and that digital technology can coexist with handcraft. “There are many concerns that using AI for art will strip away authenticity, but it’s important to note that artists have been working with teams and tools to contribute to their work for a long time,” he said. “To put this into context, there has been hand-wringing about the decline of art since the advent of photography. But even if photography did pose a true threat to traditional art, artists and designers found ingenious ways to create new forms of agency.”

Camp first snagged our attention here at PRINT with his 90s Nibbles letter series last year. He’s a wizard when it comes to capturing texture in his 3D animations, and he has a particular specialty for food renderings. In addition to 90s Nibbles, Camp has flexed these skills in his impressive Idiyums project, where he interprets phrases like “don’t get it twisted” into clever pretzel and mustard letterforms, or spells out “holla!” with the golden braids of challah bread.  

It’s easy to be enchanted by Camp’s comforting, nostalgic designs, which use lighthearted, bubbly figures and pastel color palettes to create a sugary world that feels like an escape. Camp answered a few of our questions about his journey and practice below.

How would you describe your personal aesthetic? 

I like bold, vibrant, and playful, yet organized art. My default mode is pretty dark and scary, so my art feels like the opposite: joyful, fun, and bold. My art is my playground and therapy.

Where does your love of hand-lettering come from? 

The most important event that led me to lettering and calligraphy was a jealousy I noticed for the artist Sean Wes back in 2014. I was doing graphic design at the time, working with any clients that would come my way. I didn’t understand why I was kind of angry at this hand-lettering artist with a podcast who was just trying to help people; turns out I wanted to do what he did. I took his online hand-lettering course, and I fell in love with all things letters. So always follow your jealousy.

Why 3D animation? What is it about this form of creative expression that pulled you in? 

I’ve loved 3D animation for as long as it has been available to my eyeballs. The way an artist can express surrealistic ideas in such a virtually touchable medium has always fascinated me. Seeing some amazing 3D illustrations is what ultimately sold me on 3D design, especially the expressive 3D type of artists like Chris Labrooy, Peter Tarka, and Zigor Samaniego. I focused on lettering at first and expanded from there. 3D animation was the natural next step, as I love a challenge. I don’t feel comfortable unless I’m learning. 

What tools and programs do you use the most for your practice? 

You will mainly find me click-click-clicking in Cinema 4D with Redshift, or Octane to render. I use Zbrush sometimes for sculpting, and Adobe After Effects and Photoshop are used for editing. If need be, Illustrator is used for vectorizing, and Procreate on iPad is used for sketching, mostly. 

You’re a master at creating the effect of touchable textures in your work. What’s your process like for achieving this?

Well, thanks! I think having an eye for textures is the key to getting good textures. So much of working in 3D is tweaking settings, so knowing when you’ve hit that sweet spot is key. 

Town Visuals is a 3D architecture studio that develops images, infographics and videos for real estate agencies, architects and investment funds, with special emphasis on the premium & luxury market.

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Town creates high-quality renderings with a great level of detail and reality for residential, commercial or business projects, being a key partner in the real estate sales process.

The studio, which has a consolidated portfolio of clients in Madrid and Malaga, and who have also developed projects in other regions of Spain, such as Galicia or the Balearic Islands, is one of the main premium 3D architecture studios nationwide.

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Town, whose practice started only a few years ago, came to fagerström to develop a new visual identity that would reflect the quality of their work and allow them to make the leap to larger and more challenging projects globally.

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The new brand highlights the studio’s ability to model reality and make us dream, building new imaginary worlds from scratch and making us visualize things long before they come into existence.

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The logo plays with perspective and spatial projection to link the brand with the company’s activity. The iconic letter T, formed by two non-intersecting strokes, seeks to generate a sensation of depth, creating volume from two dimensions.

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On the other hand, the wordmark uses a font whose strokes seem to be formed by folds, which gives the new brand a three-dimensional feel.

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SEE THE FUTURE.

3D artist Filip Hodas of Prague has visualized that feeling in eerie fashion with his latest series “Cartoon Fossils part II.” Aptly named, Hodas has created fossilized renderings of beloved cartoon characters of the past, including the Simpsons Maggie with a tattered blue bow on her spiked bone hair, and the unmistakable football-shaped skull of Arnold from Nickelodeon’s Hey Arnold!

Each fossil rendering is presented on a museum pedestal with a plaque, accompanied by a Latin-translated title and a superscript description—Maggie is dubbed “Homunculus Maggus,” and Arnold is “Homo Arnus.”

This is the second installment in Hodas’ series, with the first released in 2020 depicting the skulls of such icons as Goofy (“Canis Goofus”), Spongebob (“Spongia Bobæ”), Popeye (“Homo Popoculis”), and even the dame herself, Minnie Mouse (“Mus Minnius”).

Both sets of characters are meticulously crafted, with extreme, detailed textures that are arrestingly hyperrealistic. While I appreciate the artistry, I can’t say I’m a fan of being forced to reckon with my own mortality.

Hodas himself describes the series as “imagining the remains of my childhood heroes,” all while helping him better his technical skills in Cinema 4D, Zbrush, Octane Render, 3D Coat, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Adobe Photoshop, and Adobe Illustrator.

“To make it more cartoony, I decided to contrast the realistic look of the skull with colorful flat backgrounds,” Hodas explains in his description of the project. These bright colors add to the spookiness of the finished project, supplying a haunting cheerfulness that feels off-kilter when juxtaposed with the decaying bones of the cartoon characters we always thought defied natural processes like aging and death.

In a world that keeps on moving and changing, this constant, unflinching state of cartoon characters is one of the likely reasons we find comfort in them. So to see this paradigm shift presented so realistically is unnerving, to say the least. As if aging isn’t hard enough, now we’re being confronted by the bones of our childhood besties?

Hats off, Hodas, but at the same time, how dare you!

Today we’re sharing the top five three-dimensional artists you need to follow on Instagram; they might give you a new perspective.

Nicole Wu | @nicolemadethat

Talk about art taking you into a whole new world. Nicole Wu is a Melbourne-based 3D Designer and artist. Her artwork combines her love for surreal landscapes with outer space components to create compositions that transport your mind and mood to a new space. The colors she often uses are muted, soft, and effervescent. There’s no doubt in my mind that Nicole’s dreams must be filled with these metaphysical views, and if that’s not magical, I’m not sure what is. Once you start scrolling through her feed, you’ll realize how profound the word escapism can mean.

Jeremiah Shaw | @geo.jerm

Based in San Francisco, Jeremiah Shaw is a 3D artist and designer focused on illustration, animation, and product design. Currently, he is a design manager at Apple and has previously worked at Google and Dropbox. You’ll find everything on his feed, from a solemn little bonsai guy to more abstract compositions; there is no lack of creativity. So if your imagination ever needs a reboot, a quick scroll through Jeremiah’s feed should do the trick.

César Pelizer | @cesarpelizer

While he’s also an animation director, César Pelizer’s Instagram feed does a fantastic job of showcasing his phenomenal 3D artistry. César has an exceptional and recognizable aesthetic, exemplified through a color palette that stays consistent in his work, making for a highly structured feed. On this feed, you’ll find a relatable character throughout countless posts, lots of charming little fingertips, and even more hard-boiled eggs. You know a César Pelizer Instagram post when you see a César Pelizer Instagram post.

Mohamed Chahin | @mohamed_chahin

Mohamed Chahin’s Instagram feed reeled me in because of the emotions he puts into the eyes of his characters. They’re sweet, pure, innocent, but you can tell there’s a bit of drama hiding behind the giant and tear-filled eyes. It’s clear that Mohamed likes to explore with different styles, characters, textures, and shades, and I love that every single post brings you on a different adventure because of the endless scenes and scenarios. Please also note that if you can find the vile of Yzma’s Llama Potion from Emperor’s New Groove on this feed, you and I were meant to be friends.

Fran Rossi | @_fran_rossi

I don’t know how he does it, but the textures found on Fran Rossi’s Instagram account are beyond realistic. Based in Buenos Aries, Argentina, Fran is an Art Director focused on 3D/CGI design for print, advertising, web, branding, and motion. Each post on his feed showcases his skills and proves that he knows what he’s doing precisely. My favorite posts on this feed are the one that features a big fuzzy ball with a texture that could be anything from sheep’s wool, a barrel of hay, or air-filled dandelion. The mysterious and almost tactile surfaces intrigue me.

Designers already know and love tools like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. While these essential programs have endless potential for creatives, Adobe has also tried to gain a foothold in the world of 3D.

In the virtual press conference for Adobe’s latest software, Sebastien Deguy, vice president of 3D and immersive at Adobe, stated, “This past year, we’ve seen creators have to adapt, work from home, work collaboratively, and it’s been amazing to watch. A survey by Adobe found that 83% agree that the events that happened last year have made it more important than ever for them to expand their creative skills and adapt. And we also found a 40% increase in 3D projects.”

To support the next generation of 3D artists and creators, Adobe realized its missing link and, as of today, is launching the Substance 3D collection. This suite of tools will help designers assemble 3D models, materials, and lighting in a 3D scene. Not only that, but it includes texturing tools and stylized photorealistic images so that designer’s works can genuinely come to life.

“It allows you to create any texture and any material that you can find in the world,” said Jérémie Noguer, principal product manager at Substance 3D for Adobe. “It’s a very neat tool, and you can do endless things.”

In all, here’s what comes in the collection.

Substance 3D Stager: Stager allows users to build an atmosphere implement endless materials and comprehensive lighting realistically. You can either create basic models, import models from other apps, or use ones from the asset library which are fully customizable. You can also import your own photo as a background, and the tool will automatically match perspective. This tool is all about creating realistic photographs and renderings.

Substance 3D Painter: Painter is all about adding textures and materials to a 3D object with details that tell a complete story. You can either paint by hand, use the automatic generator, or use both tools to craft the perfect texture to your liking. Like Adobe’s Photoshop, you paint and create masks on layers for more effective and smooth creations. This tool exists to help make objects look as lifelike as possible.

Substance 3D Sampler: Sampler allows users to obtain, sample, and blend the objects around you to transform them into resources for your 3D scene. The significant power of this tool is how it takes images and converts them into materials using Artificial Intelligence algorithms.

Substance 3D Designer: Designer allows users to use smart tools and filters to go the extra mile to adjust materials or create customizable filters, effects, and brushes from scratch.

Substance 3D Asset Library: Not only can you design your own creations within Substance, but you can also use the thousands of customizable assets, including everything from 3D models, lights, and materials. According to the Adobe blog, “The models include everything from a rusty screwdriver to an airplane cabin wall and cover all sorts of uses, from fashion and automobile design to architecture and games— everything you need to get a head start on whatever project you’re planning and make your scene rich with detail and nuance.”

“One of the exciting things about 3D creativity is how versatile it is,” said Adobe’s chief product officer Scott Belsky in a blog post about the announcement. “While many designers are using 3D now to create marketing images and product catalogs, it’s also capable of creating entire immersive worlds in virtual or augmented reality that are purely the product of a creative person’s imagination. I believe many of our future experiences will come through a 3D, immersive interface. Artists are the dreamers and risk-takers who will discover what’s possible in this new medium, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll create with the Substance 3D Collection.”

So whether you’re a student wanting to develop your portfolio or you’ve been in the creative business for countless years, this new tool from Adobe is sure to make your designs top-notch and utterly remarkable.

Well, not long ago, we saw what Adobe Dimension is capable of—how it blends the art and craft of photography with the art and craft of 3D design in all-new stunning ways—and decades on, we got goosebumps once again that we might be looking at the next game-changer.

Brooklyn-based photographer Greg Comollo has long wowed us with his multi-varied talents, from his stellar product shots to his powerful profiles. He recently completed a virtual photography campaign for Ben & Jerry’s using Adobe Dimension—his first time experimenting with the tool.

In this article, brought to you by our friends at Adobe Dimension, Adobe 3D&I Creative Director Vladimir Petkovic and Comollo have a candid discussion about the tech—how it works in symphony with a photographer’s core skillset, its many potential uses, and just what role, exactly, it might play in the future of the craft and beyond.

Petkovic: Greg, before we go into Dimension and technical details, can you tell me a little bit more about your career as a photographer?

Comollo: When I was younger, I was just into photography, and when I went to college, I knew that I wanted to do something with visuals. I didn’t know that photography was a real job—it seemed like something that was on TV, or something like that. So I ended up on a path as a designer, which was really where I learned that photography was a thing, and how they worked together.

My own self-interest found me assisting the photographer at the studio I was working at; I had some mentorship through that, and that gave me my footing for photography as a professional. After it got to the point where my design career was me trying to do as much photography for design as possible, I realized it was time for me to transition full time to doing photography.

What would you say is your photographic philosophy?

Man, that’s tough, because one day it’s like, “Don’t get caught up in the pixel peeping and looking at all the details,” and then the next day, it’s like, “Look at the big picture. Nothing matters. Everything should feel natural and of the moment.” And then the next day I’m taking mirrors to perfectly bend light in the way that I want to light some minuscule macro object, and I’m using as much technology as I can to make sure that the final result works, and works as best as I can make it work. So I think it’s just creating whatever’s right for the project, or what tells the story or shares the idea.

Yeah. I can definitely relate. I call that creative anarchy.

Yeah, exactly. Two weeks ago I was shooting a model on a field putting makeup on, and it’s a whole different thing than last week, [when] I was shooting super-detailed maximum resolution for print ice cream that was scrutinized at a millimeter level, or below a millimeter level.

Let’s talk about 3D. It seems like you’ve used 3D before in your career. This hybrid work of using photography, but also 3D, is what we essentially call “virtual photography.” When you first heard the term "virtual photography,” what did you think?

My approach or attempts at 3D have always been very related to the real world. One technical example that maybe you can appreciate is that I needed to make an image that was 56 inches long at 300 DPI. … It needed to be shot in one photograph for a wide-angle lens perspective, and I wanted to know exactly the height. I had to rent a Phase One—some crazy high-end camera. This was 15 years ago, so technology was a lot different then.

And so what I ended up doing is I used 3D to get an exact sense of the height and graphic that I was going to create with the camera. So it was used as a planning tool for me in the beginning. … Before virtual photography, it was never this thing that I could do a final image with. It was always like, I could approach 3D, I could do some cartoon-style rendering, [but] because I’m not a 3D professional, it was limited to what my exploration led me to.

And then when I got to the virtual photography end of things, it was a whole new level of being able to achieve something at a level that I never really had access to before. I feel like I’m just scratching the surface of it, having done what we did together. It’s really exciting.

Yeah, it’s really obvious that you’re super comfortable implementing this hybrid model of not just photography but also 3D techniques. I’m curious, when you first learned about Dimension, how did you feel when you tried it? Was it intuitive, easy, hard?

I think seeing how it takes a space or a scene or just overall the information, and creates something from that that is both based in the traditional version of photography, and then using that in addition to the virtual aspect of it—it all made sense right away. It’s like taking a plate for a photograph, when you just can’t get these things together, and not to simplify what’s there, but it’s layering in Photoshop—and when you understand how that works, all of a sudden you’re like, “Damn, I see what can happen here. I see how this can be used.”

[It’s like] when I was 13 in middle school and saw Photoshop and said, “This is awesome. I can do everything.”

And so as far as Dimension goes, there wasn’t a debugging code script running down the side, and all these other things. It was just so much more user-friendly than anything I’d done. The front end of it is not like Maya 3D Studio Max; when I’ve seen 3D artists working in those things, it’s so deep and rich and I know that there’s good reason when you’re a full-time professional doing that, to have control over everything, but sometimes having control over everything is a problem.

Sometimes you’re just lost in those options, right?

Yeah, so I think the cool part about the virtual photography thing is those options are decided by real-world factors. It was cool when I sent the renders to you that I had [created by combining the regular backplate photo with the 360-degree HDR panorama of the environment], and the way that you can analyze and put those two things together to marry those two worlds. It’s really difficult, and I think that’s what this does so well. Because it uses so much of the analog world around it in order to create the final piece.

Yeah, with our 3D tools, we are hoping to simplify these processes intelligently to where we’re using a lot of machine learning to analyze the photo, and just solve the compositing problems for you. All that had been possible before, but it took a lot of time. And this next question, this is something that I’m really curious about: You being a very experienced photographer, do you feel like your existing knowledge can be somehow translated into 3D environments? Are you able to use that knowledge in a way for the lighting or just compositing?

Whenever I’ve dabbled in the 3D world, you have your light figured out and you step in and then you say, “This goes here, this goes here, that goes there.” And you don’t have to worry about shadows from light stands or any of this other weird stuff. But when you marry those two worlds, you definitely use the lighting.

… And it’s the next level between what I was saying about going fully analog input to the fully digital input, where you can, along the way—if you don’t have these resources—you can use your imagination to create certain parts of it that wouldn’t be accessible in a studio or things like that. It just allows more control over what—

What’s possible.

What I’m looking for, too, yeah.

Do you think that having that additional flexibility, so to speak, using Dimension and 3D, can be a cost-saving solution or more efficient compared to a 100 percent traditional workflow?

I want to say yes. I come from the world of being like, “There’s something about that moment, and perfection matters.” And to have the same noise pattern across these things, and all this super deepness, and sometimes I have to step back and remember that not everything is going to be a 48" x 48" print on a wall in gallery quality, and that takes me back to my design side, where sometimes getting the idea across the most efficient way makes sense. And I think, yes, it is a cost-efficient way for sure to create certain things. I think there’s still the magic of photography for certain elements—

Yeah, absolutely.

The certain magic of that. But to do like we’ve been doing—settings with scenes with rendering in different products—it’s amazing how quick [the] turnaround time [is]. Within a day you can do what would take pre-production, shooting, post-production—you can do that all in one fell swoop. You can make editing changes on the fly.

I have a situation where we shot some product recently, and I need to replace some of the text on the product, and in the past, the retoucher can go in and bend and warp, but now what we’ll do is we’ll render out these plates in Dimension.

Yeah, those are great examples. We are not aiming to replace the photography, but provide a tool which is natural extension of it.

Exactly, yeah. It’s the same way that Hollywood’s done it for years, where they don’t have to blow up as much stuff in the background. You have to blow up a little bit of stuff to make it feel real. And then you can fill in the gaps with this, and I think it also has places where photography was lackluster in some of these things, when you get in these close-up details, you can do a better job with rendering. I know that makeup companies, for years they’ve been rendering their products because photography has physical limitations, so I think this opens us up to a new world too of creating images with photography that go beyond what our capabilities were.

Yeah, exactly. Can you tell me some of the features in Dimension that you especially liked? And if there was anything that’s missing that you wished was there?

Well, A, it’s so user-friendly to replace the textures; to replace the graphic files on pieces is so easy. It seemed to render really fast for me. There are things that I would like to see added in there, like to mimic exact camera settings.

Nice. Like the physical camera settings—maybe exposure, shutter speeds?

That would be cool. … And this is where it’s the tip of the iceberg.

Let’s switch gears and talk about our campaign with Ben and Jerry’s. I would love to hear about your experience there.

We have these flagship images and some of them are these giant, close-up textures of ice cream, but there are other times where we need to shoot hundreds of different flavors for different countries. Even just in managing the workflow of having five to 10 different flavors, with just these little, different details on there, it becomes, “Do we shoot everything? Do we do the food styling and shoot everything in place?” And then if we want to switch out one flavor with another one, it becomes a whole Photoshopping situation, and it’s just a lot of management on that end.

So what we were able to do with Ben and Jerry’s is we were able to create these scenarios—and we’re still using them currently—of different combinations of ice creams, or different flavors that are available in different places in the world, and as markets need. Because they have such a large reach, it would take days and days and days to shoot this packaging for all these different regions. … By creating the natural environment, that was something that I would natively shoot with my 35 millimeter camera, walk away and have a retoucher take care of it. We were able to shoot that environment and then save it and then—

Bring it into the 3D world.

Yeah. And there’s been a lot of
positive response because people that aren’t at the production level, or aren’t able to be there when we’re making the decisions on what combinations are made, can then take these resources and create their asset request list, and then we can generate these things as needed without a full other shoot with many people—and especially right now when we’re minimizing the number of people we’re exposing ourselves to and working with.

Right. You kind of answered this, but I wanted to ask you what this workflow that you established for the project looked like.

To break it down for this one, because I’d never done anything like this before, I did some tests and tried to figure out how to use strobes with this and realized that there are certain aspects of this photography that required certain technical parameters, where it does need to be continuous lighting sources and there are reasons for that, and also I’ve always liked continuous lighting sources. But it’s really nice when you can see what it’s going to be and just click “capture.”

And so it’s fun to work in a new way. I had received the [360-degree] camera from you guys, and after being given the tutorial [about how to create spherical environment panoramas], I did my own testing of it, seeing what was possible, seeing what worked and what didn’t work. Like any creative process, you need a starting point; we couldn’t just say, “We’re going to capture environments and then film it later.” You still have to be thoughtful about this stuff. It’s still required. It doesn’t replace thinking. It’s not like we could just go in there and just have all these pieces and then click, “I want this, this, and this, and this.”

Yeah, that’s the key. The same way of thinking as a photographer still applies, I feel.

100 percent.

If I understand correctly, you first set up the real scene with an actual product, just to set up the lights in a proper way, but then you took away the object itself so you could take the empty back plates and the 360-degree environment image, and now you were able to bring all of that in Dimension. You then have this customizable 3D object where you can swap different materials, flavors. … What was the reaction to the beautiful results? I know that we were impressed.

I think we all were like, “Holy shit. This is amazing.” I was so—not doubtful, I knew that it would be good—but there was doubt that it would be impressive to me or impress me or blow me away. I remember doing the first one and I think I tried to explain to people what I was doing, and they were just like, “What are you talking about?” And then a visual of it would just blow everybody’s mind.

For you, what was the “Wow, that’s so cool” moment?

I don’t know if this is going to translate to the general public, but when I would have a fork in [a backplate photo], and then [when I render it with the 3D object of a pint next to it], I would see the slight double shadow. That’s sometimes frowned upon in lighting and video and photography, but it’s natural. And when it read the environment, it clicked and I saw what it was. I mean, OK, that goes beyond.

When you walked me through and showed me the [VFX trick of using a mirror ball object to reference the reflections of the 360-degree environment image], that was my first mind-blowing moment. Actually using it and setting it up and getting all the lighting in place and rendering out the first image. And I rendered it out at really high resolution.

The results are beautiful.

Yeah, if I was to try and approach something like that with 3D software with my knowledge, it’d be like 2024 by the time I had anything that was acceptable. To be able to throw that in there and then have it just output, it’s amazing. And then to have a layered file that came from it so I could still go in and mess and tweak with just little pieces that I wanted to customize and work from there …

Overall, we are in this COVID era—do you think this is something that’s going to be potentially important as we go forward, having this hybrid model?

Yeah, it totally opens up working with people in different places. I’m just scratching the surface of it. I’ve been thinking of ways to produce almost assets that I can provide—not stock images, but custom stock sets—where a client can come in and say, “I love the way that that’s lit and looks. And I want to see my product in there.” And then I’d be working with a 3D designer to create the actual object, and create something that works, and then have a texture and skin it. It just opens up a whole new collaboration field of people that we could make stuff with, and I’ve been trying to think of ways to just have fun.

And you are a visionary, Greg, I have to say—because we are thinking about a brand-new type of content, which is essentially what you just explained. So, I’m glad to hear from professional photographers thinking in the same direction.

You’re obviously super proficient in this hybrid model, as we say, and using virtual photography, but I’ve been talking to photographers who are not as open to this new technology. What would you say to your colleagues who are now maybe hesitant to try to use 3D?

Why would you not try something new and see if it works for you? I don’t think that this is going to work for live sports photographers. … [But] because it makes sense in this product photography world, for the project we’ve done, it doesn’t mean that it’s wrong for other things. I think breaking the rules of how it’s used is going to be what leads us to the next cool thing.

Of course.

The next interesting use of it. So to those people that are rejecting it, reject it and use it at the same time. Break it to work for you, and make it work for you, and if you don’t want to do that, then don’t do it.

I think many people could be afraid of it because they don’t know where exactly to start. So do you have any advice for people like that? How do you dip your toe in?

I think you should start with—this goes back to creative director talk—start with your vision of what you want to make, and not that you’re going to get to what you want to make. Most of us have this vision and then we end up over here, but that’s what gets us there, and that’s what gets that process and that feeling going, and it’s reacting to those little results along the way that is going to get you there. It’s
almost like, aim high and start with some crazy idea and expect nothing. And somewhere in the middle will be the results of reality, and sometimes they can blow your expectations away.

That’s great advice.

If I was going to be a design professor for a minute, I’d say, “Take Dimension and make something that’s super simple but pleasing and palatable.” Just find a color palette that you like and build yourself the simple geometric composition that we would do back in design school—cut out three squares of black paper and glue them onto the white paper, and then graduate on to cutting out three squares of colored paper and then gluing them onto the other colored paper and choosing the colors that you like.

Yeah, one step at a time.

One step at a time. And I think that’s a very elementary way of putting it, but once you do that, then also the brain’s going to click, and you’re going to go, “I see what I can do with this.” …

Whereas [with] photography in the past, you can tell a kid to go take the camera and you get your perspective right away. So [with Dimension] you have to start with your imagined perspective or what you want to see. And sometimes that can be the same exact thing that we would create with a traditional camera, or sometimes it can be a simple composition, or in my case it was doing typography in a 3D world.

Do you think this is going to be the future of photography? This hybrid model? Or do you think there’s going to be a definition which is different, traditional photography here, 3D, and then something being—

I would’ve never thought that this was going to be a thing, so I think it’s just, this is the beginning of virtual photography. I think how the hardware also is developed in coordination with this is going to influence a lot of what we can do and what’s able to be done. Things like capturing a 19-stop HDR image take time, and in years or days or hours, we might be able to capture that same HDR image instantaneously. Which all of a sudden will change the way that we can capture these scenes and sources. To say it’s the future—it’s obviously going to be incorporated in the future of it; just to imagine photography in a world where this is not implemented would be crazy.

Do you think it’s going to have a huge impact on commercial photography in general?

Yeah. It depends on how it’s picked up and how it’s utilized. I think if it’s done intelligently, yes. It’s going to have an impact. I want to see what other people are doing with it. I want to see this after the human mind has taken it and done 10 different experiments, and I want to do my own too at the same time.

Right.

To say how it’s going to affect it is beyond my view into the future. To say that it’s going to affect it and be part of it is without a doubt, because it allows us to do basically things that we’ve been trying to do for a long time of creating a perfect image.

Well, the results speak for themselves. Have you shared these results with your buddies?

Yeah. I can show them the before and after, and a lot of people are just like, “So, you just shot a plate in the background, and then shot the ice cream afterwards?” It’s so good that I have to explain that it’s not traditional photography.

I think that’s the best feedback ever.

For more information and inspiration, visit Adobe Dimension here.

Good designers—and many brand owners—understand the importance of brand guidelines. A lot of time and effort goes into them. A successful brand book is a thing of beauty—a distillation of good design thinking, an embodiment of the brand’s direction, values and essence.

But all too often, among the logo lock-up, the typeface, the color palette and the brand story, the 3D is neglected. It is consigned to future activations or campaigns.

Adding Another Dimension to Retail

Yet 3D is already shaping and redefining the world of retail and how brands appear online and on the shelf—the way customers shop, and what they expect from a retail experience and the brands they buy. As Allan Cook, managing director and digital reality business leader at Deloitte Consulting, puts it: “The massive shift to 3D technology will completely transform the retail industry and redefine how people shop.” Brand owners need to take note and start thinking about their 3D assets in a more strategic way, otherwise they risk being left behind.

A good 3D asset can be used again and again to create different forms of content—from key visuals and CGI product shots, to 3D commerce, social content and AR or VR experiences. Investing in high-quality 3D design assets from the start saves duplication and wasted budget further down the line.

Interiors juggernaut IKEA, for example, has already embraced this approach. It creates 3D assets at the design stage, and then uses them on its product listings or as CGIs in its catalog. This has removed the need for expensive photoshoots and gives the retailer a ready-to-go library of assets—used to incredible effect in its IKEA Place app, which allows the user to visualize true-to-scale items in their own home.

Driven by Alternative Reality

AR in particular has seen rapid growth in usage over the past year or so. It is no longer seen as an “emerging” technology on Gartner’s hype cycle. Advancements such as WebAR (which allows users to view AR content directly through their web browser without having to download an app) have considerably driven adoption. All social media platforms now feature AR content, and coupled with the advent of 5G, we are seeing a huge leap in potential capabilities of streaming 3D content and experiences on the go.

In retail, these already include 360-degree views of products, with virtual try-ons of fashion and beauty products. According to Shopify, allowing customers to view a product as a 3D model via AR can increase conversion rates up to 250%. And these developments are not just applicable in fashion or home furnishings. Even for a whiskey brand, virtually placing a bottle in a consumer’s own space adds to its perceived value and increases the likelihood of purchase.

Storytelling in Three Dimensions

But 3D content is not just about the practical, about figuring out a sofa’s dimension in your home or seeing whether or not a new sweater might fit. It is also about storytelling, bringing a product’s background or credentials to life, sharing information that has no space on a pack or a label. 3D can do so in a uniquely engaging way.

A great example is a recent AR campaign from Siduri Wines. Through scanning QR codes, users can access three multi-layered WebAR interactions that include a hologram of founder Adam Lee, who introduces the wines and gets the user to engage with some interesting facts. The experience perfectly encapsulates his laid-back and fun approach, while conveying the brand and its products’ unique character.

Salt brand Reichenhaller’s recent AR experience, meanwhile, turned its pack into a 3D visual that shared the brand’s history. It included immersive tours of the salt mines as well as recipes. It was a great way to attract attention to a traditionally low-interest product and raise emotional brand awareness. Undoubtedly it fostered a welcome new cohort of loyal customers.

The three-dimensional can provide engagement that video can’t. According to Mindshare U.K., AR elicits three times more brain activity and holds 1.9 times the visual attention in users when compared to video, and can boast four times longer dwell times (ADVRTAS).

With such convincing statistics, it makes sense to give your 3D brand assets the attention they deserve. They need to form part of a brand toolkit right from the start, part of an ever-growing library of quality assets that can be used at a moment’s notice. It is a huge task for established brand owners to revise and create high-quality assets from scratch—not everyone has had the foresight of IKEA. But it’s a project worth starting, even if on a small scale.

Let’s Talk ‘Phygital’

What makes this “nice-to-have” even more of a necessity is the rise of “phygital.” The industry might need to coin a more palatable term, but it does highlight the fusion of the physical and digital. Not only does 3D facilitate at-home shopping, it also enables immersive, engaging physical experiences—and provides a bridge between the two.

Retailers are already experimenting with closing this physical-digital loop further. Fashion brand H&M, for example, has been exploring spatial computing, a type of 3D tech that interacts and integrates in the physical world, placing digitally created items into bricks-and-mortar settings. In its latest experiment, H&M teamed up with Disney to allow customers to design their own Star Wars–themed garment with digital design elements in its Tokyo store.

With wearable technology in the pipeline of all major tech brands, such 3D and immersive experiences will become even more the norm. Buying a product in a shop
window with the nod of your head, say, or being greeted by an AR shop assistant as you enter a store to point you in the direction of a product viewed online—the possibilities are exciting, and not far off.

Another Level of Creativity

For many brands, 3D also provides another level of exclusivity and creativity. It can add excitement and wonder that complement and go beyond the physically real. Last year, Selfridges collaborated with 3D design collective Digi-GAL to launch an otherworldly digital collection accompanying its in-store garments.

Or take TheFabricant.com. The digital-only fashion house recently sold a “Digi-Couture” dress for $9,500. This may seem like a lot of money, but in a world where we curate our digital selves, and virtual experiences are becoming part of our everyday, the way we look—or what we consume—online will become just as important as our choices in the tangible world.

In addition, a lot is happening behind the scenes to ensure consistent quality of 3D content and experiences. Last year, open industry consortium the Khronos group launched an exploratory committee to create standards and guidelines for representing retail products in 3D. The Khronos 3D Commerce initiative is driven by major players in technology, retail and manufacturing, such as Adobe, Google, IKEA and Samsung, and aims to turbocharge the engagement with and adoption of 3D.

So as the physical and digital become increasingly intertwined, brands need to take ownership of their 3D assets. They need to start ensuring consistency and uniformity across all channels, to become future-proof, and anticipate future 3D activations and campaigns. From product to pack, from brand story elements to founder holograms, those assets need to meet the standards that consumers will come to expect. Building and implementing a 3D strategy may not happen overnight, but now is the time to start. Brands cannot afford to be caught napping.

George Bennett is head of immersive at LOVE, a multi–award-winning design studio with high-profile clients such as Häagen-Dazs, Guinness, LVMH, Johnnie Walker and Nike. With an integrated agency background, Bennett works to solve brand challenges through a deep understanding of the latest in technological innovation and always has an eye on what’s next. He is currently exploring the new opportunities offered by web-based AR and VR experiences and working closely with brands to create engaging and impactful campaigns that deliver long-term added value for customers.

If you want to learn more about how 3D is transforming design practices and workflows, check out this case study and video with Ben & Jerry’s on Adobe.com.

3D technology is reshaping traditional commercial photoshoot creation with virtual photography. Learn how it can speed up the production of marketing assets, save money, and offer greater flexibility while still delivering the visual impact expected from traditional photography.

What is virtual photography?

Originating from the world of gaming and visual effects, cutting-edge 3D technology is powering a new frontier of visual asset creation. More and more companies are incorporating 3D-based assets into their marketing and production workflows to save money over expensive studio shoots and produce and distribute assets for the marketplace quicker than ever before.

Brands like IKEA, Coca-Cola, Target, and Amazon are already leveraging 3D technology to benefit from the flexibility offered when iterating design concepts. It can also provide massive improvements in speed and efficiency, and help ensure product and brand consistency across multiple design and marketing initiatives — crucial to any brand, big or small.

At its foundation, virtual photography is imagery that has been crafted to resemble traditional photography and represent images of the real world as shot through a camera lens. But there’s no camera and no lens involved — it’s all crafted on a computer using a combination of 3D models and materials and 2D graphics and images, plus artful lighting to blend everything together. When done right, a virtual photograph can look just like the real thing. Adobe Dimension provides what is essentially a virtual photo studio to stage your scene from scratch, and Substance material authoring lets you take it to the next level and achieve true photorealism. With dedicated practice using these tools, it all results in images that users won’t realize were created in the digital realm.

What are the advantages versus traditional photography?

Utilized properly and with 3D expertise, virtual photography can meet marketing needs quicker than traditional photography, and it allows for more freedom and flexibility along the way. By working solely in the digital realm, you can craft that elusive perfect product shot without needing to build and iterate resource-heavy physical mockups. Apps in the Adobe 3D & AR ecosystem make it easier than ever before to achieve photorealistic scenes that can be viewed and rendered from every angle, providing production-quality assets for all marketing channels. Real-world workflow benchmarks show that using Adobe Dimension for simple images is much faster than traditional methods and can also produce more desirable end results.

Virtual photography can help you fulfill all your asset needs by making it easy to alter backgrounds and objects in the shot to create variations big or small. Craft a product shot against a kitchen countertop, then change it out for a coffee table or nightstand so you can cover all types of lifestyle imagery. Or do something as simple as swapping packaging language on product shots to account for every region it’ll be sold in. You can also share templates and scenes among marketing teams across different channels, making it easier than ever to keep things evergreen by allowing designers on any end the flexibility to update photos as needs arise. A new angle, a new crop, a new color, no need to start from scratch — the creative possibilities are infinite.

Showcasing 360-degree views of items on web marketplaces can help customers get a better sense of a product than 2D images can provide. It allows them to view it from multiple angles, rotate and zoom in and out in realtime, as well as change styles, sizes, and colors with just a mouse click. Those same models can be leveraged for interactive AR experiences that allow them to visualize how the product might fit into their own space in the real world. Furniture companies like IKEA offer AR apps that do just that, letting you “place” couches and chairs in your living room via IKEA Place to see if they’re a good fit (in both style and size) before deciding to buy. It’s just one way AR creations can make it easier than ever for companies to showcase their wares — and for customers to decide if they’re right for them.

How to create your own virtual photos from scratch

1. Design your 2D elements in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.

Use whichever app suits your needs best for creating any 2D components that you might need. Illustrator is great for crafting graphics and logos to place on 3D objects, while Photoshop can be used to create brand images or edit existing photos.

2. Create new 3D materials using the Substance suite.

Refine the appearance of all the objects in your scene by adding a range of realistic materials. Pull from the robust library offered by Substance Source or, with more 3D practice, personalize your textures using Substance Alchemist.

3. Build your scene in Dimension.

a) Place 3D models of the objects you need in your sc
ene. Dimension comes with a library of models, materials, and lights that you can find in the Starter Assets panel. You can also browse Adobe Stock for even more choices, or import models from other sources. Dimension supports OBJ, Autodesk FBX, STL, and SketchUp SKP file formats.

b) Place the graphics, logos, and other 2D images created in Photoshop or Illustrator on the 3D models, either as decals or fills, and then adjust the layer’s material properties to get the look you want.

c) Arrange the objects in the scene where you want them. Experiment with different camera angles, adjust the lighting and materials to find what works best, and add a background to your scene. Choose a background image from the Starter Assets panel or Adobe Stock, or import your own. Use Match Image to automatically create realistic lighting based on the background image, or adjust the Environment Light and Sunlight settings yourself.

4. Export and share 2D and 3D files from Dimension.

a) Export the images as final files to be used for any type of marketing needs, such as websites, ads, or even virtual product showrooms, and import them into InDesign to lay out for print and digital media.

b) Share and publish traditional 2D images or 3D designs with 360-degree views (with bookmarked camera angles) via web links or embedding on the web. Assets can also be utilized in augmented reality experiences created in Adobe Aero to offer immersive experiences that can showcase products overlaid in the real world. The free Aero app gives viewers an engaging experience that lets them interact with your designs in a whole different way.

5. Export assets to Photoshop.

By importing the finished image files into Photoshop, you can make minute changes and touch up your images right down to the pixel to further add to the photorealism.

Showcasing brand visualizations in 3D is a powerful way for designers to make better decisions while creating, persuading an audience, telling a story, and enticing customers. Discover the tools in the Adobe 3D & AR ecosystem that help visualize any 3D design you can imagine.

Why visualize 2D designs with 3D?

When developing new branding concepts or product designs, it’s of crucial importance to ensure that there is a mutual understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish among all those involved in the project, especially during the early ideation phase. Misunderstanding the design intent or the functionality of a new product or simply not seeing eye to eye on new brand identity designs can lead to costly setbacks and slow down the timeline required to get the product into production and out into the market.

Adobe Dimension delivers high-quality renderings that let you visualize 2D designs in the real world. Drag and drop a vector graphic or image onto a 3D model of just about anything — paste it onto a box, a building, or wrap it around a coffee cup in a few clicks. Dimension comes loaded with 3D models that you can utilize, and Adobe Stock offers thousands of 3D assets perfectly optimized for Dimension. Take your designs further by creating new 3D interpretations of your brand concepts in Dimension directly, rendering out 2D images to then place onto objects.

Scenes created in Dimension allow you to mock up products in 3D and real-world contexts to better visualize the end result. Relying solely on sketches and 2D illustrations can result in a time-consuming trial-and-error process of developing costly physical prototypes. 3D allows for a clearer picture overall to help viewers determine whether it captures the designer’s intent. Now, 3D models, combined with your graphical patterns, colors, and materials, can be leveraged in multiple ways to help effectively showcase a developing product and speed up the prototyping and production phases

Companies that are involved in any aspect of brand concepts and product designs can benefit from using 3D visualizations to accurately communicate the intent of their designs.

Improving design processes for prototyping.

By visualizing 2D designs created in Photoshop or Illustrator in a 3D context, designers have a better opportunity to visualize a final project and iterate quickly to make the best design choices. It also allows them to persuade their audience by more accurately displaying their intention and showcasing it in the best possible light. It can help streamline the back-and-forth necessary to make changes to address stakeholder and client feedback, thus speeding up the process of bringing new ideas to market and increasing the frequency of iterations.

With Dimension, 2D vector graphics and images can be placed on or wrapped around high-quality, fully realized 3D models, which can then be showcased in ideal scenarios. Rich lighting and realistic props and environments can bring designs to life and provide accurate context and a clear sense of how it will look in the real world. Experimentation is also simplified and sped up with the ability to easily change 2D decals, materials, background images and environments, lighting, and the arrangement of objects and graphics. Development costs can be lowered by reducing the need for physical production of prototypes and related photo shoots that might be needed to share new or updated designs with company stakeholders and clients in context. The freedom to experiment and explore designs in a 3D environment can also help designers zero in on the best shots for showcasing their work, as well as discover design variations that might otherwise not have occurred to them.

Designs created in Dimension can be further customized and enhanced with the 3D authoring options available in Substance, allowing you to easily customize the look of models with different material options. You can create your own custom materials in Substance or browse 3D content available on Substance Source or Adobe Stock to enhance your models to a level of photorealism that precisely showcases the full intent of the design.

Designs can also be easily showcased in 3D, not just 2D renderings. From Dimension, share 3D models online with a 360-degree web viewer. Also export them to Adobe Aero to see them overlaid in real environments, letting viewers explore them live from any angle. Both a web viewer and augmented reality provide a more engaging experience that users can control while focusing on what’s most important to them. Having interactive AR content that can be easily updated and accessible to stakeholders and clients can help further streamline review processes by providing a new perspective on the latest designs.

Improving design processes for final, production-quality assets.

When it’s time to introduce a brand or product into the market with final assets, leveraging 3D models to create high-quality renders can speed up the process and provide a multitude of options to present to potential customers.

How to craft your own photorealistic renders.

1. Design your 2D elements in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop.

Use whichever app suits your needs best for creating any 2D components that you’ll need. Illustrator is great for crafting graphics and logos to place on 3D objects, while Photoshop can
be used to create brand images or edit existing photos.

2. Author the 3D elements in Substance.

Get just the right look for the products you’re showcasing by adding further materials and textures to the 3D models in Substance Painter. Personalize your textures using Substance Alchemist, or pull from the robust library offered by Substance Source.

3. Build your scene in Dimension.

a) Place 3D models of the objects you need in your scene. For example, if your scene is set in a living room, you’ll need the basics, such as a couch, a table, a lamp, etc. Dimension comes with a library of models, materials, and lights that you can find in the Starter Assets panel. You can also browse Adobe Stock for even more choices, or import models from other sources. Dimension supports OBJ, Autodesk FBX, STL, and SketchUp SKP file formats.b) Place the graphics, logos, and other 2D images created in Photoshop or Illustrator onto the 3D models, either as decals or fills, and then adjust the layer’s material properties to get the look you want.

c) Arrange the objects in the scene where you want them. Experiment with different camera angles, adjust the lighting and materials to find what works best for the scene, and add a background to your scene. Choose a background image from the Starter Assets panel or Adobe Stock, or import your own. Use Match Image to automatically create realistic lighting based on the background image, or adjust the Environment Light and Sunlight settings yourself.

4. Export and share 2D and 3D files from Dimension.

a) Showcase quick iterations and variations as needed, such as creating different camera angles, adjusting colors, graphics, lighting, materials, and more.

b) Share and publish traditional 2D images or 3D designs with 360-degree views (with bookmarked camera angles) via web links or embedding on your own site.

c) Create final assets for customer experiences, such as virtual product showrooms on the web and AR apps.

5. Export assets to continue working in other apps.a) By importing the finished image files into Photoshop, you can make minute changes and touch up your images right down to the pixel to further add to the photorealism. b) Import the assets into Adobe XD for use as 3D brand visualizations as part of mobile app designs. c) Import the assets into Adobe Aero to see them overlaid in the real world.If you are interested in learning more about this product workflow, see the entire tutorial here.

Do more with Adobe Dimension.See what's possible in 3D, from branding projects to packaging design.

The difference between your standard 3D graphic and an image so cinematic and realistic, you wonder if it's a still from a movie, often comes down to lighting.

It's the glow from a streetlight. The reflection of light on water. The difference between direct overhead light and infused light from a window. The nuanced beauty of light that we experience every day, that takes effort and attention to perfect in 3D.

Consider the fact that, when making an animated movie, it's usually someone's full-time job to focus only on lighting. Light is the essence of how we see and visually experience the world. The right lighting can set a mood, influence perception and evoke emotion. It's why it's impossible to leave lighting for last when setting up a 3D scene. Rather, your entire scene is centered around it.

Since our goal with 3D is to reflect the real world, some of the same principles we use for photography apply to 3D. Like photography, the right lighting as well as a keen awareness of your subject and composition are important. It all plays together to make a striking, believable image that resonates.

With this article, we'll share examples of various lighting techniques and give you general principles you can use in your own compositions. We will show you how you can get dramatically different results just from changing the placement of your light sources, and how you'll significantly improve the quality of your 3D work with purposeful, detailed lighting.

Setting the scene

First, let's take a look at a series of images that I created using Adobe Dimension. If you're not familiar already from our other articles, Dimension is Adobe's 3D scene design tool paving the way for designers and traditional graphic designers into the 3D world. (If you're just hearing about it or stepping into 3D for the first time, start with this beginner's tutorial.) Dimension offers default lighting set-ups for your 3D work, but today we'll be focused on manual methods to create your own lighting.

Being super inspired by the recent SpaceX launch, I wanted to create a simple scene with some sci-fi and space themes. Here is the result:

We'll use this image to examine the different types of lighting and how you apply them in 3D. Later, I'll show you how I achieved specific lighting effects for this image in Adobe Dimension.

The different types of lighting techniques

Just like the real world, there are many different types of lighting techniques that can create various effects. Placing a single light source in your scene, for example, results in dramatic shadows. Using only direct sunlight looks very different than soft, indoor light setup. Depending on the mood and feel you want from your image, you may have to experiment and find what lighting setup works best for your scene. So let's start with your main types.

Three-point lighting

This is arguably the most important and commonly used lighting technique.

As the name implies, this technique uses three light sources to illuminate your scene: key, rim and fill. Each of these light sources play a unique role in lighting your scene. Your key light is the primary light source that will illuminate your subject. The rim light illuminates the back of your subject, creating depth and allowing us to understand the shapes of the objects in your scene. Lastly, fill light is meant to eliminate harsh shadows in your scene and add some even lighting.

Humans use light to understand objects and shapes with our natural eye, and three-point lighting gives us a full point of reference. This lighting technique is seen in every medium, including film, photography, product photography, event lighting and television.

Soft lighting

Soft lighting, as the name applies, means light is being distributed evenly throughout your scene. Harsh shadows are removed, creating a result that feels soft and balanced. This kind of lighting is commonly seen with product shots, or with traditional portrait photography. You can see in this scene it has changed our original image to feel much more calm.

To achieve soft lighting in your scene, simply place large light sources in your scene that are a good distance from your subject. The larger the lights, and the farther away from your subject they are, the softer your shadows will be. The default studio environment light when starting with Dimension is a form of soft lighting.

Single-light source

As the name implies, this technique uses just one light source. Single-light sources are typically used to create dramatic lighting, since having only one light means harsher shadows and areas where light is not illuminating your object. This creates a sense of drama and mystery.

This technique is used often in cinema as a tool to center
your focus and set a mood. Use it to your advantage to create interesting moods, or where your subject does not clearly have to be defined. It's a simple method, but when used right can be the perfect lighting trick up your sleeve.

Direct sunlight

As the name implies, this lighting technique relies on a single light source: the sun. Direct sunlight is great when you want to replicate a natural outdoor scene. Using sunlight as your main light source will naturally result in harsher shadows, since sunlight is incredibly bright and the appearance of the sun is very small in relation to us on earth.

Using sunlight to light your scene is very popular for architectural lighting. Most 3D programs, including Adobe Dimension, include the ability to add a sun to your scene. These programs also typically aim to replicate the real effects of light from the sun based on it's positioning in the sky. For example, lowering the position of your sun will typically result in a "sunset" effect where light is much warmer and shadows are hugely elongated.

When using sunlight as a light source, I highly recommend using it alongside image-based (HDRI) lighting environment to get real-world reflections. This is because the sun exists within an “environment” or sky, and to get realistic results you will want to simulate both a sun and real-world environment.

More on environment lighting below.

Backlight

Backlight pertains to placing your primary light source behind your subject matter. As with the single-light source technique, this method will also produce dramatic results. It also adds a sense of mystery as it obscures the details and shapes of your primary subject.

This type of lighting is typically seen in film and in promotional sports photography. Though this lighting technique is one of the more rarer ones used, it's a great one to have in your back pocket if you're going for a cinematic vibe.

Environment or image-based lighting

Environmental lighting generates light based an existing image, typically in the form of an HDRI (high dynamic range) image.

HDRI is a 32-bit image (meaning it contains huge amounts more of data) that stores a range of exposures, which is impossible to do with an 8-bit image. An 8-bit has pixel color values ranging from 0-1, whereas 32-bit can go as high as 100 (in case of the sunlight). This will differentiate a white object in the HDRI, for example, from a white LIGHT source. HDRI images can provide an incredibly rich source of light to your scene that replicates what we see with our naked eye.

Environment lighting is great if you want to quickly generate a simulated real-world lighting environment. Adobe Dimension includes these in the format of lighting presets, though you can use your own HDRI maps as well. The largest drawback to using environment lighting is you lose the ability to control the placement of your light sources, since the lighting is based on an image with predetermined light positioning.

An example of an HDRI image:

And now with that image applied to our scene:

In Dimension, HDRI maps can be applied under the Environment lighting options.

Different types of light objects within 3D programs

There are various different light objects you can use to light your scene in any given 3D program. Some use different names for the same type of light tools or objects, but it's helpful to know the difference between each.

Directional lights

A directional light object is one that emits light in a single direction, much like the sun. Typically, the light direction can be adjusting in the program as well as the edge softness.

Point light

A point light will emit light in all directions from a single, small point. Light will be cast evenly, despite the direction the point light is rotated. These type of light objects are typically used for things such as light bulbs or candles.

Area light

An area light emits light that is confined within a single object, such as a rectangle or sphere. An area light object will simulate an effect very similar to real-world lighting objects, such as fluorescent lamps or lighting studio equipment. In Adobe Dimension, you can recreate the effect by applying a Glow material to an object. You can then even add texture to the light by placing an alpha mask into the Opacity slot.

Sun

We've talked above about using sunlight to light your scene. To achieve natural sunlight, you will need to use a sun object in your 3D program of choice. Typically, you can adjust the sun positioning, angle, brightness, and cloudiness.

Breaking down our 3D scene

Now that we've covered the basics of 3D lighting techniques and light objects, let's break down what I did to I achieve the results from our sci-fi inspired renders.

For this simple setup, the lighting is based on a three-point lighting technique. There is a large "key" light illuminating our subject. This is lighting the majority of our spaceman, along with creating the largest reflection in the helmet.

Next, I've added a large, soft fill light with a red tint set directly behind the camera to fill in the harsh shadows. I then also created a rim light to illuminate the back of our astronaut.

You can toggle on environment lighting in Dimension with a single click, and choose from a variety of presets.

Finally, I've added a highly reflective material to the visor of our astronaut, as well as applied some darker plastic materials for the suit. I've also applied some normal maps to all of my objects for added texture, more on normal maps below.

Pro 3D lighting tips

Use clay first

I'm not talking about literal clay. Rather, remove all the materials from your models when setting up your lighting. This will allow you to view the lighting without the distraction of reflections or color. Later, when you are happy with your lighting setup, you can apply your materials to your objects.

Composition is key

The placement of your lights is very important. It's also important to place your objects in a way that will allow you to easily light and manage your scenes. For example, if you want a particular subject in your scene to stand out, you'll need to light them properly and place them in such a way that will naturally lead our eye. Try placing your subjects in areas that are most well-lit, ensuring not to make areas of secondary areas brighter than your subject area. For areas you want to be less distracting, try reducing the light.

Toggle lights one at a time

To get the best idea for where your lights need to be placed, try turning off all of your light sources and only keeping one on at a single time. This will help you understand where you need to make your adjustments to your light placements without the distraction of other light sources.

Be mindful of reflections

The materials you use in a scene can have a big impact on how your lighting reacts. Since some materials absorb light differently, such as metal as opposed to a fine cloth, you'll need to be intentional with your material choices. If you want a lot of reflections in your scene, consider using a lot of materials that are metal or contain a high amount of "roughness" or reflection. Sometimes, adding more reflective material to your scene can increase visual interest simply because of the light bouncing around and off of your reflective surfaces.

Sometimes it also helps to add objects to your scene that will bounce light and add additional reflections. An example of this is adding a floor object in your scene, or setting a "glow" value to objects you've strategically placed in your scene.

Use materials with normal (bump) maps

Another way to add realism and use lighting to its full potential is to create materials that have "normal maps." Normal maps, also referred to as bump maps, contain height information in the form of bitmaps that simulate textures or imperfections on the surface of your object, based on the way that light is hitting your objects. Since all real-world objects contain some sort of imperfections, they are incredibly useful for creating realistic scenes.

Here is a before and after of the same exact shot, with and without the normal map above being applied:

Adobe Stock has some fantastic materials that come pre-made and optimized for Adobe Dimension, with normal map information already included. I highly recommend using materials with bump maps applied over simply using the defaults of whatever 3D program you are using. You can also generate normal maps from images or textures in Photoshop as well. Personally, I find normal maps work best when scaled down, thus increasing the amount of tiled patterns and heightening realism.

Angles matter

Don't place lights directly in front of your subject. Avoid placing your lights in symmetrical positions from one another. Instead, always tilt them at off-angles or 45-degree angles in relation to your subject. By doing this, you'll avoid "washing out" your objects and allow for more shadows to play in your scene.

The larger the light, the softer the shadows

The larger your light source, the more light will diminish shadows and create a softbox for your subjects. In contrast, using smaller light sources means harsher and more direct shadows. If you are finding your shadows too harsh in your scene, simply enlarge them.

Add color

You don't have to use straight up white light for your scenes. Sometimes, you can bring interest just by adding a color tint to your lights to give it a different feel or that cinematic touch. In most programs, including Dimension, you can change the color of the light source.

Experiment!

Sometimes to get that "perfect" shot you may need to simply play with the lights in your scene. Each object and composition is different, so sometimes you may have to play with your light placements and colors to get the perfect look you want. Don't be afraid to move things around or break the rules.

Note: special thanks to Raoul Marks, Angelo Ferretti, and IUPUI University for the 3D models featured in this article.

Jon Vio is a freelance designer, illustrator and Arnold Schwarzenegger fanboy based in Nashville. He also makes a mean hot sauce.

When Adobe Stock announced its Design Trends for 2020, the world was a different place. In some ways, we knew what we would wake up to each day and our sense of calm and peace were defined by a different cultural context. Today, the world is different. We are different. But that need – the need to find peace, calm and courage while weathering a multitude of storms is more of a necessity now than ever.

One of the trends for 2020 is that of Semi-Surreal – a movement guided by a dream-like, fantastical look at the world. Colorful, engaging and tactile in nature, semi-surreal provides people with a temporary place to escape from reality and the ability to see the things in a different light. At a time when we, as a culture, are struggling to make sense of the world and our place in it, there is a critical need for people to experience something magical, something beautiful and to try to find a serene moment away from the hardships of our current reality.

With this in mind, the Adobe Stock 3D and Dimension teams have partnered with Minjin Kang and Mijoo Kim of Mue Studio to create a set of tutorials and creative works centered around this trend. In this first installment, using free assets from the Adobe Stock Semi-Surreal collection, Mue Studio will take you through a multi-part Dimension tutorial, resulting in a set of three in-progress scenes that leverage soft color palettes, a minimalist design aesthetic, and a final work that encapsulates the serenity of the semi-surreal trend. Join us on this creative exploration and see what is possible.

(Free Semi-Surreal 3D collection on Adobe Stock.)

Leaves on Water Tutorial: Placement and Composition (Part 1)

Step 1: Position the main walls

• Start by making your canvas 3,600px x 2,880px. Select Fit Canvas to view your entire working space in Dimension.

• From the Dimension Starter Assets Panel, under Basic Shapes, drag and drop the Cube. Change the size to 313, 335, 0 cm (x, y, z) and rotate y to –90 degrees. In the Scene Panel, rename Cube to Left Wall.

• Press “F” to reposition your scene.

• Add the Arched Wall from Adobe Stock (ID 348972037). Change the size to 365, 335, 30.48 cm.

• Select both assets from the Scene Panel, and under the Action Panel, choose Align and Distribute. Then click Align Min Z and Align Min X from the canvas controls.

• Change the position of Left Wall to -179.6, -0.3, 172.8 cm and Arched Wall to 0, -0.3, 1.9 cm. You now have the main walls lined up for the start of your semi-surreal scene.

Step 2: Add the staircase, floor and back wall

• You now need to position your scene. Select Camera from the Scene Panel and change the Field of View to 45 degrees and the Camera Position to 349.8, 117.3, 410.1 cm. Be sure the Rotation is -1, 55, 0 cm.

• Add the Stairs from Adobe Stock (ID 348972381). Be sure Size is unlocked and scale the asset to 113.32, 138.51, 154.47 cm. Rotate y to 90 degrees.

• Select the Stairs from the Scene Panel and open the folder. Select and delete wall_L and wall_R.

• Position the Stairs to -214, -0.3, -57 cm to nestle these behind the Arched Wall.

• From the Assets Panel, add the Plane from Basic Shapes. Change the Size to 2,400, 0, 2,400 cm and Position at -124.5, 0, 260.5 cm. Rename Plane to Floor in the Scene Panel.

• With Floor selected, press Duplicate from the Action Panel to create Floor 2.

• For the second floor, change Rotation z to 90 cm and Position to -479.1, 250, -555.3 cm. Rename Floor 2 to Back Wall. You now have the entire interior space of your scene.

Step 3: Bring in the leaves

• Add the Narrow Palm Leaf (ID 348974187) and Wide Palm Leaf (ID 348973236) from Adobe Stock. If you would like to create your own version of this scene, be sure the Size is unlocked on both these assets, and then scale, position, duplicate and move the leaves around the scene until to your liking.

• If you would like to follow the same design as Mue Studio, duplicate the Narrow Palm Leaf two times and the Wide Palm Leaf three times. You can then use the chart below to position and scale each asset accordingly.

Step 4: Render the Leaves on Water scene (scene 1)

• You have now completed the first part of the Semi-Surreal tutorial for Leaves on Water. In order to see your final work, select Render from the Task Bar, select the quality and file type, and then click Render.

• You can choose to move onto the next part of the tutorial now or come back later and discover how to use 3D lighting techniques to enhance your scene.

Leaves on Water Tutorial: Camera and Lighting (Part 2)

Step 1: Use a camera bookmark

• It is now time to add a Camera Bookmark. Select Camera from the Scene Panel. Be sure Field of View is 45 degrees and Camera Position is 349.8, 117.3, 410.1 cm. Also check that the Rotation is still at -1, 55, 0 cm.

• Select the Camera icon, add a bookmark, and add a name for the view.

Step 2: Add natural lighting

• It is often best to work with lighting in Preview Render mode to better visualize the changes. In order to do so, select Show Render Preview.

• To achieve the beautiful effect of light streaming through the open doorway, select Sunrise Campsite from Environment Lights in the Assets Panel.

• Set the Intensity to 103% and the Rotation to 9 degrees.

• Next, to intensify the light, select Environment from the Scene Panel and set the Global Intensity at 200% with Rotation at 7 degrees.

Step 3: Enhance the lighting

• As a last step, to create an overall warm, welcoming light, add Sun from the Directional Lights in the Assets Panel.

• Set the Intensity at 16%, the Rotation at 0 degrees, the Height at 7 degrees and the Cloudiness at 52%.

Step 4: Render the Leaves on Water scene (scene 2)

• You have now completed the second part of the Semi-Surreal tutorial for Leaves on Water. In order to see your work, you can create an in-progress render at this time.

• You can choose to move on to the final part of the tutorial now or come back later and discover how to add and enhance both materials and colors.

Leaves on Water Tutorial: Materials and Colors (Part 3)

Step 1: Enhance the interior elements

• Add the Cement Material from the Adobe Standard Materials section of the Assets Panel to the Left Wall and the Arched Wall. This can be done by dragging/dropping the material onto the asset or by selecting the asset from the Scene Panel and clicking on the material itself.

• Navigate to the material for the Left Wall in the Scene Panel, and under Properties, change the color to RGB 255, 204, 204. Change Repeat for x and y to 10, 10. Complete the same step for the Arched Wall but change Repeat to 5, 5.

• For the Stairs, change the material Base Color to RGB 217, 182, 182.

• Finally, for the Back Wall, change the Base Color to RGB 209, 167, 167. You now have your soft, pastel environment in place.

Step 2: Add a water effect

• To give a rippled water effect, add Glossy Paper from the Substance Materials section of the Assets Panel. Under the Material Properties, change the Color to RGB 197, 210, 214.

Step 3: Adjust the leaves

• Finally, update the Material Properties for each of the leaves to give them a rich, pastel tone. Change the Base Color on each leaf to RGB 237, 142, 142.

Step 4: Render Leaves on Water scene (final scene)

• You have now completed the third part of the Semi-Surreal Leaves on Water tutorial. To see the results, you can now make this final render.

• As a finishing touch, you can take your layered PSD file from Dimension into Photoshop and add a little post-processing polish.

Mue Studio will be joining us again soon to give more insights into their creative history and to take us all through another amazing Semi-Surreal 3D tutorial. Until then, don’t hesitate to take this work in a new direction and find your own sense of peace through the creative exploration.

For a clothing company like Pink Shirtmaker, there’s a lot to be gained by going digital. Unlike a traditional physical prototype, a 3D model of a shirt can be created quickly, consumes no raw materials to produce, and can be used anywhere in production, from initial design iterations to final marketing imagery. Additionally this 3D workflow is seen as an essential contribution to supporting Pink’s sustainability responsibilities. 3D images can also be used to generate a rendered image of a virtual product on a website — something becoming increasingly important during the COVID-19 restrictions as more people begin to buy online.

But for a digital representation of a shirt to work as a sales tool, it has to be realistic — and that means re-creating real-world materials accurately. How can a 3D render convey the heft of cotton twill, the subtle softness of chambray, or the iridescence of a mother of pearl button?

Enter INDG. For the past year, the product visualization specialist agency has been working with Pink to digitize its entire product portfolio. Thanks to its know-how — and with the help of the Substance suite, Adobe’s powerful set of material-authoring tools — the firm has been creating accurate digital representations of all of Pink’s products, perfect down to the last microfiber.

INDG’s company showreel. The visualization agency creates accurate digital representations of physical products, including those from some of the world’s biggest brands.

Images so real you could touch them

Founded in 1999 by Frans Vriesendorp and Bas Gal, then both students at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, INDG has grown to become one of the world’s leading product digitization agencies, now employing over 90 people across its offices in Amsterdam, New York, and Bucharest.

The firm describes its goal to make “every product playable,” helping manufacturers to create virtual versions of their products “so lifelike it feels like you could reach out and touch them.”

INDG recently launched their Fashion vertical, aligned with the firm’s focus to digitize complete brand portfolios and derive all visual marketing content from that. Whether it is creating virtual samples at high speed or interactive, consumer-facing, photorealistic content for a marketing initiative, INDG services brands with deep expertise in CGI, automation, software development, and, of course, a solid know-how in fashion to do this all successfully.

This is a rare combination that INDG possesses and has managed to effectively utilize in helping our clients make this transition. Within fashion, they generally divide their focus between the fashion markets of sportswear, luxury, and fast fashion, and the majority of projects revolve around the product types of footwear, apparel, and accessories.

INDG works with international brands like Yamaha, Electrolux, and Philips, across industries ranging from medical technology to home furnishings. In the fashion industry, its clients include international brands like Adidas, Tommy Hilfiger, and Ralph Lauren — and recently, Pink itself.

Conveying quality digitally

“From the standpoint of a brand, 3D technology is fundamentally disruptive,” says Sacha Djorkaeff, Pink Shirtmaker’s head of client experience, who works directly with INDG. “It shakes the current design and production processes to their core, presenting dramatic cost and time efficiencies, trimming down the process of visualizing a product from weeks or months to a matter of hours.”

Part of the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy group, Pink is a modern British shirtmaker. As well as shirts for men and women, the firm sells a range of other luxury products, including ties, knitwear, and accessories, through physical shops like its flagship stores in London’s Jermyn Street and New York’s Madison Avenue — but also, increasingly, through the 3D images on its website.

“Over the past year, we have been working closely with INDG to completely shift our approach to product visualization,” Sacha says. “We are creating a digital library of visuals for our products and leveraging that to create engaging experiences.”

In order for INDG to create images that engage the viewer, it had to re-create a range of complex properties of real-world materials in 3D: from folds and weave structures right down to the “peach fuzz” of microscopic fibers that give fabric surfaces their subtle sheen.

As Sacha puts it, “One exciting challenge for the project was, how do we reach a level of photorealism that conveys the depth of quality of a Pink fabric?”

A 3D version of one of Pink’s shirts, shown inside Substance Designer. INDG uses the Substance tools to re-create real-world materials, from the base fabric to stitching and detailing, and even creases and folds.

A complete suite of tools for creating digital materials

Although INDG uses a range of techniques to create digital cloth, including scanning physical fabric swatches and re-creating them from photographs, its primary material-creation tool is Substance’s 3D texturing suite.

The suite of tools includes Substance Source, a library of ready made photorealistic materials, including more than 400 textiles, from cotton and wool to high-tech sports fabrics. Each is fully procedural, meaning that they can be customized in 3D applications like Substance Alchemist, Adobe’s material-editing software. Artists can also hand-paint custom details in Substance Painter or create entire new materials in Substance Designer, a powerful procedural authoring tool.

“We started using Substance in our fashion business about a year ago,” says INDG Art Director Thomas Makryniotis. “Prior to that, quite a few of our artists were using it for their own work, or for company experiments. Once we realized the benefits, we adopted it in production.”

INDG uses both Substance Designer and Substance Painter in its workflow, the software re-creating not only the fabric of a garment but its stitching and detailing, and 3D forms like folds and wrinkles. The completed digital materials are then exported to 3ds Max, Autodesk’s 3D visualization software, where they are applied to 3D models created in specialist clothing design tools like Clo3D. To generate final imagery, INDG uses Chaos Group’s V-Ray renderer, fine-tuning its output in compositing applications like Adobe After Effects or Foundry’s Nuke.

Substance Painter enables artists to create complex 3D materials from scratch. Being fully procedural, the results can be reused across a range of projects.

Speed, accuracy, and reusability

For INDG, the key benefit of the Substance 3D texturing suite is the speed at which artists can create accurate digital representations of real materials. “The Substance Source library helps to get you on the right track very quickly, and having a real-time 3D preview while working on shading is a huge speed gain compared to a traditional 2D texturing process,” Thomas says. “Having a one-to-one match between the Substance viewport and a V-Ray render is also important. The texture artists see exactly the same image as the rendering and compositing artists.”

According to Peter Kolus, one of INDG’s senior 3D artists, taking the guesswork out of creating materials enables Substance users to work more creatively. “It’s a more intuitive way of doing things,” he says. “Once you’re familiar with the new way of working, you can be much more flexible, efficient, and experimental.”

And since Substance materials are procedural, they are easily re-usable. Once created, a base material can be used in other projects, simply by modifying a few key properties. “Procedural methods provide a more iterative approach to 3D content development,” Thomas says.

Digital marketing imagery with substance

Thanks to this combination of speed, accuracy, and flexibility, the tools in Adobe’s Substance suite help INDG to re-create entire ranges of real-world products in 3D. In turn, its beautiful, photorealistic images help clients like Pink Shirtmaker to create engaging new online experiences for potential buyers of those products.

“The Substance suite enables us to be more creative and experimental, while cutting down on our production times,” says Peter Kolus. “In our view, there is no other texturing tool out there at the moment that comes close to Substance Designer and Substance Painter in terms of ease of use or range of capabilities, and our recent results confirm this.”

For more information, check out this interview with INDG featured on Substance Magazine.

Although Dimension is not a modeling tool, it continues to release features that empower designers to create their own 3D compositions – without any 3D experience. The latest update includes a feature I personally couldn't be more thrilled about: customizable basic shapes.

The shapes feature opens up a whole new way to play with geometric 3D designs and tailor them to your needs. No longer bound to the simple pre-made shapes that previously came with Dimension, you can now create and tweak your own shapes to your heart's content.

But enough talk. Let's jump into this tutorial!

What we'll be creating

For this tutorial, we'll be creating a geometric sculpture using the new customizable basic shapes feature. Here is what we'll create:

Getting started

As with any creative endeavor, it's helpful to get a rough idea of what you'll be creating so you aren't wandering around aimlessly. Sketching out your idea beforehand is a great way to get a starting point. Even if your end result is wildly different, it's always helpful to have a vision at the beginning.

I've recently been inspired by the Suprematism art movement, and particularly the Arkhitekton works by Kazimir Malevich. I wanted to use the new shapes feature to create similar sculptures using simple geometric shapes.

For colors, I was also inspired by the works of Piet Mondrian.

An easy way to "sketch" out your own scene is to block out your sculpture with simple shapes such as squares or spheres. You can also use tried and true pen and paper as well, of course.

I'm going to start by simply dragging shapes into my scene to block out the basic structure of my composition. Yours doesn't have to be exactly like mine if you want to do your own thing here. Have fun with it.

We will then modify the height, width and depth values of our shapes to get a nice variation in geometry.

Here is the result of placing some cubes, spheres and cylinders into a simple composition:

Setting our scene and camera

Now that we've laid out the basic sketch of our structure and blocked things out, let's quickly set up our scene and camera.

First, go to the Environment tab and turn "Ground Floor" off, since we will be using our own ground floor. Using our own floor will allow us to assign a custom material to it later for a more realistic final result. To add your ground floor, simply place a plane object onto your scene and resize as needed.

For this example, I've placed a plane object to create my ground floor. I then would like to create a nice aerial, isometric camera angle for my scene. To get an isometric view, just slide the Field of View value all the way to the left to 1 in the Camera Perspective properties.

Using custom shapes

Now that I've got my simple scene blocked out, it's time to start refining the shapes and working in the finer details. You can then start adding some more intricate shapes to fill in around the larger blocks. This will help our composition feel more intricate and visually interesting.

You can choose from a variety of shapes to manipulate and play with in Dimension. For right now, I'm using mostly spheres, cylinders and square objects with a few torus shapes.

Shapes also have a set amount of sides by default. Increasing the number of sides will increase the edge geometry of our shapes, but at the cost of slowing down our scene. It's best to limit the number of sides as much as you can, especially if you have a lot of objects in your scene. The smaller the object, the fewer sides you'll need.

Beveling our edges

An exciting new feature with the latest Dimension update is the ability to bevel the edges of your shapes. Since no real-world objects have truly sharp edges without some sort of rounded edge, the ability to even slightly round the edges of your shapes will greatly increase the realism of your objects.

Let's go ahead and add some beveling to our shapes.

Slicing shapes

In addition to adding a beveled edge, we can also slice our shapes to reduce geometry. Here, I'll create a half-cylinder shape by slicing this cylinder. Let's reduce it to 180 degrees.

Filling in the details

I've now added bevels to all my shapes, as well as half cylinders to make the scene more interesting. I've also added more shapes from the provided shape options, as well as a ladder I created myself from multiple custom cylinder shapes.

For some added visual interest, I'm also going to add some text extrusion shapes. If you haven't already, check out our previous tutorial for creating 3D typography to see how easily you can make these letters.

Setting up our lighting

Now that we've created our geometric structure, it's time to light our scene. Lighting is key to achieving great and realistic 3D results, so it's crucial we get this right.

If you have any experience with photography, you may have heard of a 3-point lighting system.

3-point lighting consists of three key elements: key, rim (backlight) and fill. Key is your main light source. Rim light serves to outline the back of your subject and create depth, and fill light serves to reduce harsh shadowing.

An example of this type of lighting system below:

Luckily, Dimension comes with a way to light your scene exactly this way, and this is what we'll be using.

To get started, go to the lighting area and create a new 3-point lighting setup. You can turn off the environment lighting now if you'd like. I also recommend keeping your materials to the defaults so you won't be distracted with the materials you have set.

The key light will illuminate the front of our object, with the backlight illuminating the outer edges. The fill light will help break up any harsh shadows and provide a nice, soft light to our scene.

PRO TIP: A good trick is to only keep one light on at a time, so you can see how each light is interacting with your scene.

You may need to play around with your lighting values and positions to get the results you want. I will often look at real-world photography as a reference and compare this to my own scene.

Here is the result once I'm happy with my light positioning:

Applying materials

Now that we're happy with the lighting, we can start applying materials to our structure.

For the base, I've applied a polished chrome material I downloaded from Adobe Stock 3D. For the most realistic results, I recommend using materials from either Adobe Stock or Substance Source. Substance Source materials include additional texturing effects that heighten the realism of your objects. Dimension also comes ready with some rich materials, including Substance Materials, in the Starter Assets panel.

To add the material, select all of our objects at once (or the group, if grouped) and apply the material from our Adobe CC material library or by going to File > Import > Place Material on Selection.

I've now also applied multi-colored plastic materials to my objects that I found on Adobe Stock. This red plastic material is a nice base material for my original vision for this scene. I've also added a similar blue plastic material to my ground floor.

If you want to take it even further, you can add additional light reflections to your scene by adding glowing plane objects to your scene. This increases the realism as it allows you to control the size of the light source and create diffused light effects.

Render time!

Now that we've applied our materials, let's get rendering. Rendering means turning your 3D information into a finalized image. Just hit the render button under the Render tab and go!

The result of our render:

As with any of our tutorials, we encourage you to take things further and have fun creating your own designs based on what you've learned. Here are some other examples of what you can do just by playing around with various materials and lighting effects in the same scene:

Don't forget: If you do create something with Dimension, be sure to share your designs to Behance, selecting Adobe Dimension under “Tools Used” in the Basic Info tab. On Instagram, tag #AdobeDimension and #CreatewithDimension. This allows the Dimension team to find and promote your work.

And be sure to tag DESK on Twitter as well, if you create something cool using this tutorial. We'd love to see it!

Jon Vio is a freelance designer, illustrator and Arnold Schwarzenegger fanboy based in Nashville. He also makes a mean hot sauce.

You may have been browsing some of your favorite designers or artists on Instagram or Twitter, or perhaps you jumped online to find some inspiration and noticed a new trend in the design world: 3D text.

It seems that 3D design is taking the design world by storm. Designers are wishing to use the power of 3D design to complement their traditional design work, and 3D typefaces are a fun place to start.

I've seen these kinds of 3D text effects most often in the portfolios of some talented designers I admire, in most cases purely for play and experimentation.

Until recently, such effects have been limited to costly and difficult-to-use 3D programs, or the occasional Photoshop tutorial. For the average designer, including myself, this style seemed to be reserved for "the experts," those who specialized in 3D.

Not so anymore. If you weren't already aware, Dimension is Adobe's 3D design tool. We've written previous Dimension tutorials for creating 3D visuals, and today we'll be bringing you a new use of Dimension: creating 3D text.

What you need

Everything we're doing today, you can do with Adobe tools:

• The latest version of Adobe Dimension (free with your Adobe Creative Cloud subscription, depending on your plan). This latest version will now include a variety of new features, Text Extrusion.

• Photoshop

• Adobe Illustrator, or your preferred 2d design tool

What we'll be doing

In this tutorial, we will be using Dimension to create a poster with 3D typography. Using the new text extrusion feature in Dimension, you'll be able to create your own 3D text and customize it with bevel effects, materials and most importantly: lighting.

For our final effect, we'll be rendering 3D text to create typographic posters like the ones below:

We will then use Dimension to render out layered PSD files of our 3D text that we can then effortlessly apply to our design concepts. Let's do it!

Step 1: Design your layout in 2D

I recommend designing in 2D first, so you can cement your idea and have a reference when you're designing the 3D text in Dimension. I've first created my design as a 2D typographic poster in Adobe Illustrator.

Step 3: Create your scene in Dimension

With the latest version of Dimension installed, go ahead and create a new scene. In the project settings, input your document dimensions. I've opted to set mine at 3000 x 2250px to get a nice, high-res image.

With your scene created, select Environment from the scene area in the top right corner and set a black background color (or whatever your artwork background color is).

In the same environment area, uncheck "Ground Plane" so we don't get any unwanted reflections or shadows from the simulated ground floor.

Step 4: Extruding the text

Now that our scene is set, we are ready to begin creating our 3D text extrusion. From the objects tab, drag a new Text Extrusion object onto your scene. You can now see with the default settings that our text object already has 3D dimensionality to it.

We can now select our Text object and adjust the default settings. You'll see options to input your own text, change the font, adjust the extrusion depth, set font sizings and kerning, as well as a bevel effect for added realism. In my example, I'm using a wider sans-serif typeface (Dimension's 3D Text feature will work with any font installed on your systems operating system). I've set the depth value to 2cm.

Now that we have our basic properties, we can start experimenting with the bevel options to achieve a realistic result. There are several options for the shape of your bevel. For our purposes, I will use the Round option.

Now let's adjust the bevel width and angle. You can have fun and experiment with this part more on your own later, after we've adjusted our camera and lighting.

Step 5: Adjusting the camera

Now that we've got a nice 3D text effect (see how easy that was?), let's adjust the camera and place it in a way that will give us the front-facing angle we need for our poster. Of course, you don't have to create this flat effect, but it will work well with the poster we're designing today.

Next, let's set the camera field of view to 1. This will give us a very flat, isometric feel to the text. Now rotate the camera so that your text is completely front-facing with the camera. You can use Dimension's grid lines to ensure alignment.

Now that we've got the camera setup, let's go to the bookmark tab to bookmark our camera position. This will allow us to adjust and rotate our camera, but come back to our front-facing view at any time later.

Step 6: Adding materials

Now we can apply real-world, photorealistic materials to our 3D text. In the example below, I've added a Clean Gold material to the text object.

You can of course apply different materials for different effects – play around with this to see what you personally prefer. Adobe includes a variety of options here and you can download additional materials from Adobe Stock, if needed.

For our poster, I will use Silver Gold from the Substance Materials list for a nice chrome-like effect. Since this is also a Substance Material, we have additional options to adjust the reflection amount or increase scratches for added realism.

Now, in the material options, you can tweak your material's appearance. For my example, I've set my Silver Gold material settings to the following:

The roughness value determines how reflective your material will be, with a lower value resulting in a more reflective object. The rest of the material settings I've left at the default.

Step 7: Adjusting the lighting

Now that we have our camera adjusted, we can now work with the lighting in Dimension.

Lighting is one of the most nuanced and important aspects of believable and realistic results in 3D design. Thankfully, Dimension takes the headache out of this and includes several lighting presets we can use.

For our purposes, I will use image-based environment lighting. Environment lighting generates real-world lighting systems based on the light and dark values in an image. It's an incredibly easy way to achieve photorealistic results, since you are using a real photo to generate light and reflections. Adobe includes several environment lighting presets with Dimension, as well as additional ones for download from Adobe Stock.

In addition to the presets that come with Dimension, you can also use an image file of your own to generate light for your 3D scene. For this tutorial, I'm using an HDRI image from the Neon Dreams HDRI pack from TFM.

I first downloaded the image into the Environment Light option in Dimension. I can now adjust things such as lighting intensity or rotational values. Rotational values will change the position of the lights in accordance with our scene, and is crucial in some cases to achieving realistic lighting.

Sometimes it's a matter of adjusting and playing with different rotational values to get the desired result.

Now is a good time to go back to your 3D text options and experiment further. You may want to adjust the bevel amount or bevel settings to get it just how you like it. Have fun with it!

Step 8: Rendering our image

In 3D, rendering your image means taking your 3D design information and turning it into an image.

PROTIP: You can preview your final render result in the Dimension viewport with the Render Preview option:

With our camera set and our lighting adjusted perfectly, we can hit the render tab to bring our 3D artwork to life and into layer-separated PSD files. In the render options, choose Medium for your render preset ("Low" present means it is quicker but lower quality; "High" means higher quality but the rendering will take longer.) You then have the option to set the final result as a PSD file or png. I've set mine to PSD.

Then, all you have to do is hit the render button. Your 3D render may take a while depending on your machine's particular setup, but for a simple composition like this, it should be relatively quick.

Keep in mind, if you have a slower machine this will use a lot of system resources and you may experience a significant slowdown until the render is finished. If you'd rather work on other projects while your render is being processed, you can use the Cloud Rendering (Beta) option to have Adobe render the images for you.

The final result

With our render complete, here is the final result:

You can now open up this render in Photoshop for any post-processing work you'd like to do, and your 3D text will already be on a transparent background. Dimension includes 3D information as hidden layers when you render, and you can make post-processing adjustments as needed after your render has completed.

Experiment further

Now you've seen how simple it is to create 3D text effects that you've always wanted. Now you can go wild with it using the exact same process.

Have fun and play around with different fonts, materials, camera angles or lighting effects to create a variety of results. Here are some different designs and experiments I've made using the same process:

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! If you do create something with Dimension, be sure to share your designs to Behance, selecting Adobe Dimension under “Tools Used” in the Basic Info tab. On Instagram, tag #AdobeDimension and #CreatewithDimension. This allows the Dimension team to find and promote your work.

Jon Vio is a freelance designer, illustrator and Arnold Schwarzenegger fanboy based in Nashville. He also makes a mean hot sauce.

We know it’s the fundamentals that are the most important for your creative workflows, so we’re excited to reveal that the latest release of Dimension brings both text and customizable 3D geometric shapes into your toolkit. From graphic design, typography, and art to signage and wayfinding, text and shapes can be used in a thousand ways to enhance your creation capabilities in building scenes or complex forms.

Dimension has always been a natural extension of your other Creative Cloud tools, enabling you to easily visualize 2D imagery, made in Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, in spectacular 3D. With the ability to create text and customize basic shapes right in Dimension, you can take your designs further with the power of 3D: adding rich lighting, materials, reflections, depth, background scenes, and variations in camera views, and more.

Trends in graphic design: 3D typography and creative geometric compositions

Type and shapes (along with line, color, texture, and composition) are essential elements of graphic design, regardless of whether it is 2D or 3D. With 3D text, we started by taking a close look at what designers are doing now; we poured through Behance galleries, talked to designers from lots of backgrounds, and investigated text systems in other tools.

Examples of 3D Text trend used by the team for research – artwork not created in Dimension. From left to right: Wes L Cock, Sascha Tcherniakow, David McLeod.

When looking at the use of text in both 2D and 3D design, we found some consistent themes throughout our research: effects like bevels, outlines, and edge treatments are frequently used techniques by designers, as is layering the text in alongside more complex 3D assets.

Meanwhile, to see some of the interesting things designers are creating with shapes, just look at the relatively new trend of 3D design,. sometimes called “abstract 3D,” “3D illustration,” or “primitive art.” This is a form of 3D design that focuses on combining simple shapes, more complex 3D models, and the rich materials and lighting you get when working in 3D to create graphics.

Examples of the “abstract 3D” trend: left image created in Dimension by Khati Trehan, middle image made with Dimension and Blender by Matti Tauslahti, right image made with Cinema4D by Peter Tarka.

This trend is really taking off, with even big brands getting on board. Check out the inspirational brand identity piece above (right) for Lenovo, by Peter Tarka, which shows the Lenovo brand highlighted in a different way than traditional technology design.

A dynamic 3D text system: Add text to designs or create 3D typography that stands alone in Dimension

When we first started talking about introducing text into Dimension we knew we wanted to build it as a component within a system that could be expanded to be even more expressive over time. We built these new text features to extrude glyphs from 2D fonts, customize their properties such as spacing and depth, and apply further details such as bevels and materials.

Initial prototype (right) around the multi-layer system: the team looked at existing 3D text artwork (left) and investigated how to simulate it and validate the prototype design. Left image: “Do What You Want To Do” – 3D Typographic Artwork by Peter Tarka.

The new text engine lets you easily express 3D text from your operating system’s fonts library and control the overall look and feel with a host of styling properties. You can add simple chiseled, square, or rounded edges, as well as more complex convex curves and outlines. In addition to the stylistic flexibility, expressive edge beveling of 3D objects allows you to further control how they catch the light, improving the legibility (and nuances) of the image.

The front, back, sides, and edges of your 3D text, are all independent regions, so you can apply rich, realistic materials, or your own graphics, to each piece. Dimension’s new text functionality also utilizes a geometry engine to generate clean UVs for the text, so materials and images are always applied without stretching or distortions. (UVs define a two-dimensional texture coordinate system that determines how an image gets mapped to a 3D surface).

Text is an incredibly exciting addition to Dimension, and there’s a lot yet planned for this system! In the future we can imagine things like stackable text layers, randomized text, offsetting position per-glyph, and the ability to add effects like bend, all in a non-destructive system, meaning you can edit the text properties while preserving the style, bevel settings and materials.

Customizable basic shapes: Create entire creative compositions, or add essential elements to your designs

In 3D design, basic shapes are often refe
rred to as geometric primitives (or “primitives” for short) and are used as the building blocks for many other more complex forms. The new basic shape assets we’ve added to Dimension (cube, plane, sphere, cone, torus, and cylinder) are parametric. This means that, when you add it to a scene, it will have properties you can use to easily adjust the shape, such as giving a cube a rounded corner or setting the diameter of a torus. Just like text, shapes are essential design elements in both 2D and 3D, and these new customizable primitives will get you in great shape to execute your vision (pun intended!). Also, you can use the customizable basic shapes to experiment with their own forms, creating more complex objects that might inform your design decisions or artistic explorations.

A sample of the shape customizations in Dimension. Adjust properties such as adding sides, adjusting bevels, making slices, and modifying the radiuses.

Basic shapes can also be incorporated into just about any workflow for creating physical objects or spaces. From packaging design to architecture, sometimes you just need a cube to make a specific box, wall, or stand that can be customized precisely and quickly for your scene. Changing the number of sides, adjusting bevels, making slices, and modifying the radiuses can make even more bespoke geometries. For example, take the torus from the Basic Shapes assets library and quickly change the number of sides to make a more triangular shape or make a slice to create a three-quarter “doughnut” (see a sample of customizations in the image above). Meanwhile, materials and textures will look perfect with no stretching when you adjust and customize the basic shape assets.

Examples designed with Dimension; shapes are a staple for many product visualization compositions. From left to right: Repina Branding, Victor Weiss Studio, and Sebastian Bednarek.

Looking towards the future: Connect with our team and help build the future of 3D

Dimension is the perfect tool for pushing the limits of your creativity and imagination. For a full look at everything new in this 3.2 release of Adobe Dimension, check out our full release notes.

To get a sense of what’s coming up next, take a look at and vote on your favorite suggested Dimension features, or post your own ideas for features you’d like to see in Dimension and get updates on our product roadmap.

Join a growing community of 3D designers

We love seeing and sharing your incredible 3D creations, whether they’re packaging designs, product mockups, brand visualizations, or 3D art. When you’re sharing your designs on Instagram and Twitter, don’t forget to tag them with #AdobeDimension and #CreatewithDimension, and on Behance be sure to select Adobe Dimension under ‘Tools Used.’ Follow us on Instagram on @Adobe3DAR and @AdobeDesigners, and our in-house art team on Behance.

Special thanks to David Lloyd for his contributions to this article.

When creating the interface for a new product, 2D is only the first stage of the design process. It’s also important to consider how UI designs will look in the real world by generating accurate 3D visualizations of the product itself.

Enter Adobe Dimension. The easy-to-use 3D scene design tool for compositing, staging and rendering compelling synthetic photos, even for designers with no previous 3D experience. Dimension makes it simple to import UI mockups created in tools like Adobe XD and Adobe Illustrator and applying them to 3D models (as textures). Regardless of how many UI designers and 3D designers you have working on a project, you can also collaborate and create photorealistic assets and scenes quickly. These applications are designed to work together, making it possible to iterate on designs inside Illustrator, checking the results in Dimension as you go.

In the walkthrough below, we are going to look at this process. We’ll explore how synthetic photos visualizations of a new smartwatch could be created by taking UI designs, created in XD and Illustrator, and then combining them in Dimension with custom 3D materials authored in Substance Painter.

The end results are photorealistic rendered images for use in design validation, client reviews, marketing, or even the website prototypes you make in XD.

Prototype the UI/UX for the watch face in Adobe XD

XD, Adobe’s vector-based user experience design tool, streamlines the process of creating and iterating designs for the watch’s interface. It combines familiar features like vector drawing tools, color swatches, grids and guides with a smart content-aware layout system, helping to maintain relative placement and scale for UI elements when creating designs for different screen sizes.

Prototyping interface screens inside Adobe XD. Prototype courtesy of Erin Kim.

Interface elements can also be saved as Components to be reused across multiple designs. In the case of the smartwatch, the message and calendar icons have been created as Components that can be dragged and dropped from the Assets panel and positioned on the artboard.

Refine the designs for the UI in Adobe Illustrator

Once the layouts for the different states of the smartwatch’s interface have been created in XD, they can be refined in Illustrator. Adobe’s industry-standard vector graphics software contains all of the design, typography, and shading features necessary to create beautifully realized designs.

These tools make it easy to create custom fills for the buttons for answering and ending phone calls. This is done by sampling colors from the icons on the interface’s daily schedule screen, then adjusting the direction of the gradient. The finished UI designs can be saved as a standard Illustrator file.

Use the Illustrator artboards as textures within Dimension

Illustrator files can be mapped onto the surfaces of 3D models within Dimension. This makes it possible to accurately visualize how interface designs will look when a smart device is in use. In the GIF above, the Illustrator file has been assigned to four separate 3D models of the watch within Dimension. The interface is displayed realistically behind the glass of the watch face.

Switching between artboards from the Illustrator file to display different UI screens in Adobe Dimension

It is possible to display a different interface screen on each watch by selecting the 3D object representing one of the watch faces in the Scene panel, inspecting the texture applied to it via the swatch in the Properties panel, and choosing a new artboard from the original Illustrator file.

Edit the artboards live inside Illustrator

Vector artwork used as a texture within Dimension updates automatically when the original Illustrator file is modified, making it easy to iterate on designs. Clicking on the Edit icon inside Dimension opens the file in Illustrator. When the vector design is updated and saved in Illustrator – for example, to change the color of the hands of the watch – the changes appear automatically in Dimension.

Each time an edit to the design is made in Illustrator, the texture updates near-instantly in Dimension’s 3D viewport, making it just as easy to iterate in 3D as it is in 2D.

Create custom 3D materials in Substance Painter

Adobe’s material authoring software, Substance Painter, allows you to paint physically based surface details. This includes endless variants of metals, plastics, textiles, and pretty much
everything else, both real and imagined). The process is layer based, with brushes and masks, using a similar paradigm as Photoshop. To help you get started, the online Substance Source library contains thousands of readymade materials, from wood and metal to fabrics and leather.

Each Substance material is fully procedural, so properties like the surface color and roughness of the watch strap can be customized within Substance Painter. As in Dimension, the material is shown applied to a 3D model within the 3D viewport, making it easy to check how its surface responds to light by rotating the model or changing the direction of the lighting.

Each material is composed of a set of parameters, such as surface color, roughness or metallic. Those are controlled by either intensity sliders or 2D texture maps. You are able to test variants quickly by toggling the visibility of the corresponding layer in Substance Painter’s Layers stack, much as you would in Photoshop. Once a material is complete, choosing the Adobe Dimension preset from the Export Textures window automatically formats the texture maps for use in Dimension.

Render a synthetic product photo in Dimension

Dimension streamlines a lot of the technical work involved in lighting and rendering a 3D scene, making it possible for artists with little previous 3D experience to generate photorealistic images.

It is possible to change the lighting on the watch by adjusting simple slider controls to control its direction and intensity. Dimension also includes Sunlight, a special light type designed to mimic natural light, with sliders to control the height of the sun and the cloudiness of the sky.

Adding a photographic background is as simple as dragging and dropping the image into the scene from the Libraries panel. Using Adobe Sensei, our AI and machine learning technology, you can match the perspective and lighting to the backdrop. This feature is called Match Image.

In the case of the smartwatch, the result is a series of accurate visualizations of different interface designs, prototyped in XD and refined in Illustrator. These 2D design assets can be brought together inside Dimension with 3D materials authored in Substance Painter to generate a series of compelling photorealistic images for use in design reviews or marketing material. Bring the workflow full circle with XD by using the rich images you’ve rendered in Dimension back into your XD projects, such as your app or website prototypes.

Publishing 3D scenes to augmented reality with Adobe Aero and to the web with a 3D viewer

3D assets used in Dimension can also be used in Adobe Aero, Adobe’s augmented reality authoring software. This makes for a more interactive and immersive experience, viewing the design overlaid in one’s own physical environment and from all angles easily.

Dimension also allows you to publish your scene to the web, enabling you to share the scene with 360-degree views. All of the 3D objects, their materials and your camera positions will be packaged up and made available in a real-time 3D viewer. No additional plugins are required, meaning that the scene can be viewed by people who don’t use Dimension themselves. There is also an option to leave comments, making this an intuitive and efficient collaboration tool.

Learn all of the essential concepts of working with 3D in Adobe Dimension, from what types of assets you can use to how to move your 3D camera or apply graphics to 3D models, in this Getting Started with Adobe Dimension video series.

Designing products used to take a big team of highly specialized professionals and a lot of time. They had to deal with complex workflows and expensive software, and this was often an impediment to actually being creative. Luckily, there have now been incredible innovations in improving this workflow, notably Adobe Dimension, which helps you work quicker and more efficiently. Using Adobe’s 3D compositing software, designers can take products all the way from concept to delivery, prototyping designs, creating photorealistic marketing materials, and even authoring interactive brand experiences.

In this article, we’ll explore this product design workflow, using Dimension alongside other new 3D tools in Adobe Creative Cloud to create designs for ‘Citrus Time,’ a fictional brand of fruit juice. Working in this way, a designer could download 3D models from Adobe Stock, create digital materials for them in Substance Painter, import label designs created in Adobe Illustrator, then bring all those ingredients together in Dimension, creating scenes and rendering high quality 3D visualizations. The designer could then use Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator to iterate on colors and branding.

Once packaging is approved, they could composite their 3D scenes with background photographs inside Dimension to create production-ready marketing graphics, or export the scene to the web or to Project Aero, Adobe’s upcoming augmented reality software, letting people view the designs interactively on a phone or tablet.

But first, let’s take a look at the benefits of designing in this way.

Why you should be designing in 3D

Designers working in industries such as retail, e-commerce, and consumer packaging face a constant challenge to improve the quality and efficiency of their product visualization process.

Traditionally, designers create physical prototypes of products, printing out designs for labels and sticking them to real bottles and boxes. Once the prototypes are ready, they stage photo shoots to show how the products might look in use, and circulate the results. If the designs aren’t approved, the entire process is repeated; prototypes, printing, photography and all.

Transitioning from expensive photo shoots and physical fabrication to a 3D design environment improves cost efficiency and reduces time to market. Working in 3D, using rich materials and composite imagery, designers can accurately visualize how products will look (and see them in context) much earlier in the process, and can iterate much more freely, such as creating alternative packaging designs for seasonal promotions or for use in different geographical territories.

Working in 3D also enables designers to create multi-use brand assets: the same 3D models used to iterate on product designs can then be reused to create hyper-realistic marketing images, or to generate 360-degree views and interactive augmented reality experiences, increasing customer engagement. This is a powerful tool when it comes to streamlining reviews and approval processes; you’re able to use 3D models as prototypes or proofs-of-concept to communicate your ideas to stakeholders in a highly visual, realistic way.

In the past, 3D was associated with complexity and cost. This has created an artificial barrier, preventing its uptake within teams who would directly benefit from adopting 3D design as a standard process. To help solve this problem, Adobe is building sophisticated but familiar tools such as Adobe Dimension, enabling users to make an intuitive transition from 2D to the new world of 3D. By letting artists use their existing skill sets, Adobe Creative Cloud is helping designers across all disciplines to embrace this powerful new technology.

Making use of existing 3D resources

Consumer products and packaging are often engineered in specialist CAD applications. These software packages are robust and designed for maximum precision, so often, 3D assets created using them go straight to to 3D printers, machining tools, and other fabrication devices. If you work on a team or for a client doing product design, there’s a good chance your or their engineers will have a CAD model they can share with your design team.

However, the same 3D assets can be used for digital prototyping and marketing work, providing that you export them in a file format suitable for visualization, such as OBJ or FBX. Most CAD applications can do this natively. But even if you don’t have a CAD model, online libraries like Adobe Stock will get you most of the way there, providing a range of readymade 3D bottles, cans, and boxes to choose from. In this example, we’re going to be using the juice jug shown above, which came from Adobe Stock.

Substance Painter makes it easy to create photorealistic materials for your 3D assets. The first step is to mask out the different parts of the model.

Creating materials using Substance Painter

The 3D model doesn’t come with materials, but we can create them using Substance Painter, Adobe’s professional texturing software. The first step is to create placeholder material layers for each different part of the asset, in the same way that you might create masks for a 2D image.

The placeholders can then be replaced with the final, photorealistic materials. In this case, we’ve used existing materials from Substance Painter’s built-in library and from Substance Source, Adobe’s online library of physically based (PBR) materials.

Substance Painter can also be used to generate 3D effects, like this raised logo. It is created by importing a 2D image and ‘stamping’ it onto the appropriate material layer as an alpha mask. The Displacement Scale setting controls how far the logo seems to be raised from or embossed into the surface of the model, as shown in the real-time 3D preview.

Once the materials are complete, you can export them from Substance Painter using the Adobe Dimension preset. This provides a full set of Physically Based Rendering (PBR) textures to work with inside Dimension.

Assembling the scene inside Dimension

Now let’s use Adobe Dimension to create a stylized render, suitable for a marketing illustration. When you import a model you textured in Substance Painter, the PBR textures for it should load automatically. You can populate the scene further by importing other 3D objects. For this image, we used readymade models from Adobe Stock and the starter assets included with Dimension, positioning them in 3D space around the jug and scaling them appropriately. When you drag a 3D model into Dimension, it will be placed on the object you drag it to automatically.

You can drag in an image created in Adobe Illustrator to use in the background in the same way. Dimension automatically processes complex interaction of all the objects, materials, and lights in the scene and generates photorealistic shadows and reflections.

The label for the jug was also designed in Illustrator. Again, the Illustrator file can be dragged and dropped onto the 3D model inside Dimension, then adjusted to position the label correctly.

Iterating on colors and designs with Illustrator and Photoshop

Dimension can be used to explore different color options. In this case, the Illustrator file for the label has four different artboards, which you can switch between inside Dimension. This function is incredibly useful, as it allows you to store multiple design variations within the same file.

Once you import your graphic to Dimension it is saved as a copy, or as a linked graphic if you’re using CC Libraries. You can use the Edit command to launch Photoshop or Illustrator to edit the graphic and make changes quickly. Once you save, the edits will be instantly reflected back in Dimension.

This workflow isn’t just for color variants, either. It can be used for any kind of rapid design iteration: for example, creating versions of the label with different art directions, or with text in different languages.

Compositing a 3D scene into a photograph inside Dimension

You can also use Dimension to automatically integrate your 3D design into a background image to see it in life-like context and mimic a photoshoot. In a matter of seconds with Dimension doing all the tedious work for you, you can easily create production-quality marketing content. As before, the process begins by dragging and dropping the image into the background of the scene.

Integrating the two is then a single-click process using Dimension’s Match Image function. This sophisticated machine-learning-trained algorithm resizes the canvas to match the aspect ratio of the photo and creates an environment light from it, so that all of the illumination, shadows and reflections on the 3D objects in the scene are derived naturally from it. If the photo shows the sun, Dimension will also create a corresponding 3D light. Match Image will also match the perspective of the virtual camera in the 3D scene to the focal length of the background photo.

You can further fine tune all the lights in the scene, but also adjust details like the field of view, focus, and even the reflection and the roughness of the ground. All of these features work together to seamlessly match your 3D elements with your photo.

Publishing 3D scenes to the web or to augmented reality

Dimension can publish your scene to the web. All of the 3D objects, their materials and your camera positions will be packaged up and made available in a real-time 3D viewer. No additional plugins are required, meaning that the scene can be viewed by people who don’t use Dimension themselves.

Sharing the entire scene with 360-degree views in this way makes for a more interactive and immersive experience than simply presenting viewers with a static image. There is also an option to leave comments, making this an intuitive and efficient collaboration tool.

The same 3D assets used in Dimension can also be used in Adobe Aero, Adobe’s augmented reality authoring software, officially being released at MAX 2019. As of November 2019, Dimension users will be able to select a Send to Aero command to export their 3D scenes in a format that can be used to create immersive augmented reality experiences. This scene can be viewed on smartphones and other mobile devices without the need to install plugins.

Those are just some of the ways that Dimension can be integrated into consumer product design workflows. Using the software, even graphic designers with no background in 3D can take a product all the way from ideation to finished marketing materials, working on the same set of assets from start to finish. Try it for yourself to see how easy it is!

To learn more about getting started in Adobe Dimension, check out our full resource page. Or visit the Dimension homepage.