I finally got around to trying out the 3D support built into Photoshop CS4 extended (I don't have CS5 yet), and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to use (compared to "real" rendering software such as in modo or Lightwave). It's renderer can't compete with modo, LW or Octane, but for simple illustrator type projects, it's not too bad.

So, after fiddling around with it for a bit, I decided to try importing a MoI model into PS, and was again pleasantly surprised at how straightforward it was. All of the MoI styles came in as PS materials with no problem:



After that I had a little fun doing some typical Photoshop stuff, including painting some surface textures, and ended up with the following doodle...



Overall, it seems like a fairly straightforward workflow that fits in well with MoI's catch phrase: "3D modeling for designers and artists".

Hi Dave, that's not bad! And good news that materials come through ok.

Actually sometimes for illustration work you don't even really want to have a super photorealistic render anyway.

I think that Photoshop has had some 3D support for a while now, do you happen to know if it is an area that is in active development, like have they added new things for it in recent versions since the first release with 3D support?

- Michael

> Actually sometimes for illustration work you don't even really want to have
> a super photorealistic render anyway.

Absolutely. Might be food for thought in targeting some MoI marketing and advertising dollars :-) ...

> I think that Photoshop has had some 3D support for a while now, do you happen to
> know if it is an area that is in active development, like have they added new things>
> for it in recent versions since the first release with 3D support?

I think CS3 was the first version with specific 3D support, although it was pretty lame from what I've heard (CS4 was my first upgrade after CS(1), so I don't have any personal experience with it). CS4 was a pretty major overhaul of what CS3 had, including better support for materials, full object level SRT transforms (including non-uniform scaling), and a custom rendering engine built-in (I think CS3 depended mainly on third party plug-ins for rendering). They've added some more 3D related stuff in CS5, which looks like additional refinements to what was in CS4 (shadow catcher support, image based lighting, more material types (glass, chrome)), something called Repousse for doing simple extrusions and stuff like that right in PS). So it still looks fairly lightweight in features, but again, seems more oriented toward designers needing to do some simple 3D stuff in the middle of a larger comp.

I'm sure they are not eying the pro 3D market, but more likely the web/brochure designer...

Hi Dave, well I would say that's pretty good news that it is getting overhauls and additional stuff added in each version.

It doesn't sound like an orphaned feature.

I was wondering because I couldn't remember hearing very much stuff about it after its initial release, but that's probably just because I have not been following closely.

- Michael

hehe seems that's perfect compatibility!
Bravo!

I think Adobe's having a bit of a tough time getting wide acceptance with the 2D crowd. It seems many
think 3D is more complicated than it really is.(my theory)

I use PS Extended CS4 for certain projects, and it seems to work pretty well. When using ray tracing with
final render at a high resolution it is pretty slow. The way I've found to improve this is to use Better AA settings
and use a higher resolution. The nice part is you can choose any size & DPI and it's re-sizable like vector images.

You can also animate parameters like 3D object/camera position & cross sections. Also a good texture tool for
3D PDFs.

Here's MoI file exported as .obj:

>I think Adobe's having a bit of a tough time getting wide acceptance with the 2D crowd.

OT. That may not be far off the mark; see the post entitled "Adobe Outsources 3D to Tech Soft 3D" here, http://www.deelip.com/ and a press release here, http://www.techsoft3d.com/company/press/pr_adobe2010.html

Leonard