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Dimension Tools and Interface

Lesson 2 from: Building Photo Realistic Environments in Adobe Dimension CC

Jesús Ramirez

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Lesson Info

2. Dimension Tools and Interface

Lesson Info

Dimension Tools and Interface

I think that we should get started. We only have one hour, and I have a whole bunch of material that I wanna show you. So I want to make sure that I have enough time to show you. But before we start, I just want to show you one project that I worked on with Adobe Dimension. And let me just scroll up to the top of the page. So this is an image that was completely generated using Adobe Dimension. Nothing in that scene, except for the buildings in the background are real. Everything was computer generated. And everything in this scene was simply dragged and dropped onto the 3D environment, and I used Photoshop to create the textures. The textures are the what gives a 3D model it's appearance. So for example the texture in this book was just the cover of a book of one of my friends that was written by Glyn Dewis, a photographer out of the UK. And for example the painting in the background and the image in the computer screen, those are all materials that I edited in Photoshop and applied t...

hem onto the 3D model. And those two things that you see there, the laptop and the painting in the background, are composites that I've done. And I'm just gonna scroll down to the bottom of the page and just quickly show you an animation of what the 3D scene looks like. That's all inside of Adobe Dimension, so you can see it's completely a 3D environment. The image is not moving in the background because that's the only real picture that was included in that scene. This is what the scene looks like without the materials. The items that give the object the look. So the materials are fully customizable. They could be any color, any texture. They could have reflections, no reflections. They could be you know, anything that you want really. You could even take a photo of for example this table and use the texture of this table as the texture for any of those 3D objects. I'm not gonna go into it in this class, but there's an application called Adobe Capture which works with your mobile device. And Adobe Capture allows you to take a photo of anything that you want, and it'll convert that texture. For example, I can take a photo of this table, and that texture will become a material that gets uploaded to your Creative Cloud, and from that Creative Cloud, you can just drag and drop it into any 3D object in Dimension. And I'm gonna show you how to do that, but we're not gonna use a capture image. We're just going to use materials that are already included in Adobe Dimension. And I'll just quickly give you some stats. The final document size for this particular project was 2.6 gigabytes, and this is the one downside about 3D. It can take a long time to render. Render simply means that Dimension will calculate the lighting, the shadows, and everything in the scene to create the final image. Each of the images that you're looking at in this particular project, took about eight and a half hours of rendering time. Usually, the wait is not that long, but this is a really complex scene, as you can tell, which is why it took so long. So, Dimension needs to calculate all the reflections, all the lighting, shadows, everything in the scene. And just to point out, I have a whole bunch of Easter eggs in this image. And if you want to see that image, you can go to my Behance page, behance.net/jrfromptc and you can see all the details on all different renders that I made in that scene. Those are the logos for a lot of my friends some of you might recognize people like Matt Kloskowski. That's his logo there, he's a creative live instructor, he's got a whole bunch of great classes here at creative live. So I highly recommend checking him out. And yeah so a whole bunch of detail in a lot of the images. This is the image graphic for this class which we're gonna work with at the very end of the class. We're gonna go into Photoshop and then try to make it look like this because this is not exactly how it looks like when you bring it out of dimension. You do have to take your three D objects out of dimension, and into Photoshop to further enhance them. So we're gonna talk about all of that. Now, I'm going to go into, Adobe Dimension. When you first open the App, this is what Dimension looks like. And I just want to point out a couple, oh first I want to bring in, import a three D model. And I actually want to point out one thing, we have the toolbar right here on the left hand side and one of the most important buttons. Or tools in the toolbar is the plus button here. So when you click on this plus button you can bring in different types of content. If you're bringing in you're own content you can click on import your content and bring in three D models, any photographs that you might have taken, lights, and I'll explain what that is in a moment, materials and decals or just the graphic. And again I'll explain what that is. I'm gonna use only three D models that come with Dimension in this class. But if you have some experience with three D or you purchased three D models from a website, you can use them in Dimension. And this is where you need to click on. You can click on three D model. And import three D models that are known as O-B-Js and just bring those in and you can work with those. But in this class we're just gonna work with the three D models that come included with Dimension. I also wanted to mention that if you click on the plus icon, and then click on browse Adobe Stock, that will bring up a page on Adobe Stock which is Adobe's stock photography, it's not just photography they have images, videos and templates, and three D content. This is the stock asset website, and all the three D models on here are free as you can see. You can see that all these are free, so you have more three D models that you can download for free if you want add to the list of free three D models already included with Adobe Dimension. So let me go back into Dimension, and oh by the way something that I should have mentioned is that when you click on a three D model you need to click on the save to library button, so that you can download that particular three D model into your Creative Cloud library. From there you can simply drag and drop it into Dimension, and I'll show you how that works once it's already here. So that's how you would import a three D model into Dimension, from Adobe stock. And then I'll show you how to import one from the starter assets. So from this dropdown make sure that you're always on starter assets. Unless of course you downloaded something from Adobe Stock, then you want to click on libraries, and this is where you would see the assets that were downloaded from the Creative Cloud. So for now I'll just stick with these starter assets that everybody has access to. As long as you're a member of the Creative Cloud of course. So the way that you will bring in a three D object into dimension is simply by clicking and dragging it onto the scene. So I can click and drag this can onto the scene. You notice that when I click and drag the can, there's a blue box that appears directly over the ground plane. Wherever I drop, release my mouse button, that's where the can drops. And there is it. That's my can, simple as that. So that's how you would import a three D object that you downloaded into the Creative Cloud, but you would do it through the libraries tab and if you were bringing a three D model from an external source, you would go through it through the import your content and three D model button. So we're gonna move on to just a few important things on the Dimension interface. There's really three sections that you need to look at. The toolbar, on the left hand side, I'm gonna go through what that each category you'll notice that there's lines between different tools, I'll explain the categories in a moment. You've already seen the content panel here. Obviously the workspace, and then we have the scene and properties. So these three areas are really important. And we're gonna work with those throughout the class. The tools panel or tools bar rather is divided into tool categories. So you'll notice these lines here. So these three tools control objects, so three D models. So if I click on the move tool, you can of course click and drag the three D model. If you click on the scale tool, you can scale the three D model in the axes that you click on. But if you want to constraint that transforms so that you scale it proportionally, all you need to do is hold the shift key and click and drag to scale it proportionally. And then we have the rotation tool, that allows you to of course rotate the three D model. So the first three tools control the model. We're not gonna talk too much about the selection tools. But the selection tools allow you to make a selection around a three D object, and then apply material to the selection that you selected. So for example here I clicked on the top of the can, so I have the top of the can selected and if I wanted to, I could click on a material and apply a material just to that part of the can. But we're not gonna work too much with these tools in this class. Next we have the camera tools, that allow me to rotate and move the camera. So right now, I'm moving the camera. So the can is not moving, your viewpoint is moving. So you can sort of think as you walking around the three D scene with the tools here at the bottom so you can move around the can. So you see a different side of the can. And you can pan the can. And you can zoom in and out. So those are the important tools to remember in Dimension. There's more tools, but again we don't have time to go into each individual one, but those are the most important ones to get started.

Ratings and Reviews

JennMercille
 

This class blew my mind! Before watching, I probably wouldn't have even attempted incorporating 3D into my composite work. Now, it is WAY less intimidating. I can't wait to try it out!

Gloria Hooks
 

Student Work

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