Thursday 20 Sep 2007
- platform PC, Mac
- price £79 (Design 3D[in]) ;£79 (Live 3D[in]) ;£79 (Foto 3D[in]) ;£189 (3D[in] bundle)
- company Strata
- contact XChange International , 020 7490 4455
- pros Straightforward, full-featured workflow to complement Photoshop Extended; advanced rendering and HDRI support; wizards in Foto 3D; simple 3D export to Web and PDF.
- cons Requires Photoshop Extended CS3; some controls could be streamlined; modelling tools on the basic side.
- rating
With version CS3, Photoshop offers support for 3D content for the first time, but it’s still a rather limited form compared to most 3D applications. Strata, on the other hand, is well known for 3D content creation and three of the latest plug-ins dovetail neatly with the new Photoshop Extended 3D capability.
Here we’re looking at the Design 3D[in] suite, the imaging tool Foto 3D[in] and Strata Live 3D[in].
Foto 3D[in] builds 3D models from a series of related 2D images, and it does it rather well. Taking multiple shots of a clay figurine and then a shoe from every angle, the software wizard was able to piece together the images and produce a texture map of the entire surface, and also generate an underlying 3D mesh. Controls are on hand to subdivide the mesh or lower its resolution, and there are a number of useful tools on hand such as Automask. Foto 3D[in] works as
a filter or as standalone.
Strata suggests you mask each image in Photoshop Extended CS3 for greater control, and supplies a script to load all the images into a layered stack for this purpose. Apart from the task of masking each layer, it’s a quick and painless way to bring 3D objects into Photoshop.
Design 3D[in] is the most full featured of the packages and is accessed from within the Photoshop Filter menu. It can also be used as a standalone application. Although you can use the filters in any way you want, Strata suggests the following workflow.
First, the Model[in] New filter is used to create a new 3D object from a selected 2D image within Photoshop file. Model[in] Edit can be used to change or fine tune the existing 3D object, Match[in] is used to correctly place and scale the 3D object in a 2D document and Render[in] generates photo-real images of the object for integration into a Photoshop project. In practice, it all works rather well.
Like Vanishing Point, the Design 3D[in] plug-ins use grids to help position 3D objects – and the first stage of using Match[in] is the creation of planes in the Vanishing Point filter itself.
You then switch to the main work area of the plug-in to match 3D objects to the perspective of your 2D image. This is presented as a three-window layout, offering the standard 3D view selections (top, front, isometric), a choice of preview rendering options (OpenGL or Toon-based) and a slider that offers orthographic, wide-angle and 50mm lens settings. You can adjust the orientation and rotation of the imported object in a copy of the master image, or along one of the grid views.
We had difficulty transferring an accurately-placed grid across to the plug-in and things at this manipulation stage certainly become more difficult if the original grid is not true to the angles in the scene. It’s essential to make sure the planes in Vanishing Point are aligned correctly in the first place, but will probably need tweaking once imported into the plug-in.
The close integration with Photoshop is evident when applying textures. As in other 3D packages, image textures are projected images that wrap around the surface of 3D objects – here this is controlled via image maps loaded into the channels of the Image Texture dialog. A key factor in the software’s favour is that the texture can be linked to the Photoshop file so that future changes made in Photoshop will be updated in the Design 3D[in] model.
This roundtrip editing applies across the board – while you’re working with any of the Design 3D[in] plug-ins, you return to Photoshop by clicking the Return to Photoshop button. You can click the Un-Plug button at any time when working within Design 3D[in] to break this connection, if you need to work with Photoshop while extensive rendering is taking place. Otherwise it works like most other filters and reserves Photoshop system time for itself.
When working with the Render[in] plug-in, it’s best to work within the automatically created Ps Camera Window (above) as this gives a good preview for positioning. The environment tab is used to add or adjust lighting in the scene – including options for the lightdome (below) , which can make use of HDRI-based images.
Lightdome illumination is not displayed in the Modeling window or any of the OpenGL preview renderers, so any changes you make aren’t updated until you render the image using either Raytrace or ‘Raydiosity’ methods. Comprehensive settings are available for these renderers, accessed via the Render Image dialog.
When you’ve finished rendering and finally click Return to Photoshop, a multi-layered group named Rendering Result is sent to the image-editing package. This folder contains a fully flattened version of the image, a layer group folder (colour compositing) containing the elemental images used to create the final image, and a layer group folder (masks and selection).
Splitting the render into these sets makes it a simple process to manipulate parts of the image in Photoshop and, by modifying the individual colour compositing layers we were able to tweak the appearance of the objects without re-rendering.
Design 3D[in] has the ability to be a powerful complement to Photoshop – we’d like some of the controls to be larger in the Render filter however and found the Object rotation controls a bit fiddly in Match[in].
We saved Live 3D[in] (below) for last as it’s a tool for converting Photoshop files with 3D layers into Web pages and PDF documents with interactive content. There are three parts to the plug-in: 3D PDF[in], 3D Web[in] and 3D For Scripting. The latter generates an .xmm file, which can be opened with the standalone Live 3D[in] application for further editing.
Using the first two from within Photoshop, you select the 3D content by the area, layer or document where it is situated in and set an image quality for the output. A navigation bar can be added that can be used to control the embedded 3D object. Simple, but very effective.
Michael Burns
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