Click the far-too-subtle dropdown arrow to open its material list.īecause this object was created in Photoshop, it comes with a list of “materials” with names that refer to where they are in the model. The Scene panel lists the objects in the document, immediately below Environment and Camera. There’s another, more exact method that is useful for imported Photoshop extrusions: using the Scene and Properties panels. You can drag and drop from the Starter Assets panel onto the surface you want to change, or select the surface and click on the material you want to add. Textures (“materials” in Dimension) are easy. Dimension doesn’t import textures with the object, so the map is as plain as it could be. The model doesn’t appear on the canvas after you’ve imported it, so press F on the keyboard to put it in the center of the field of view. Just select the file you want-in this case, “3D World Map.obj”-and click open. Open a new document in Dimension and change the size to whatever you need for your final graphic.įrom the File menu, Import > 3D Model opens a navigation window filtered for 3D file formats that Dimension can handle. As we did in Part 1, choose the Wavefront|OBJ format. With the 3D layer targeted, choosing 3D > Export 3D Layer… from the menu opens the export dialog. The newly-created shape is targeted by default, so Extrusion Depth is already showing in the Properties panel, so a careful shift of the slider fixes the problem. The first step, then, is to change the extrusion depth to something a bit more sensible. With either of these as the new starting point, it’s time to try the outlines in Photoshop again, and this time we get our 3D Extrusion layer, complete with Photoshop’s usual over-enthusiastic extrusion depth. Just be aware that it is a raster image, so that if you ever want to edit it you’ll probably have to go back to the vector original and repeat the entire creation process. Photoshop will happily extrude a raster image as complex as you like. In this case, you’ll want to use a high resolution, such as 300 ppi or more. Setting the Angle Threshold to 56% helps to keep the knobby bits of Canada and Greenland suitably knobby.Īnother approach is to open the vector file directly in Photoshop as a raster image. The default of 50% produces a set of unrecognizable blobs, but 92% works well in this case. The lower the value, the simpler the shapes will be. Curve Precision controls how much the simplified paths can deviate from the original.
We aren’t looking for scientific accuracy, but the shapes of the major continents and land masses should at least be recognizable. One is to make the outline simpler in Illustrator using the handy-dandy Simplify command (Object > Path > Simplify). There are a couple of ways to work around this. Photoshop gets mildly indignant and won’t cooperate. In this case, though, the map has too much detail. Normally, creating a 3D extrusion in Photoshop is as simple as targeting the vector layer and choosing 3D > New 3D Extrusion from Selected Layer from the menu. That creates a perfect vector layer to create our extrusion. More after the jump! Continue reading below↓įree and Premium members see fewer ads! Sign up and log-in today. Open the file in Illustrator, select the outlines, copy, then paste into Photoshop as a Shape Layer. (Although I’m using the map as an example, everything here applies to any vector shape you might need to work with.) Problem: Sometimes you can’t get there from here The bright idea is to grab any old vector World Map™, make it a 3D extrusion in Photoshop, export this new 3D object like we did with the text in Part 1, and use Dimension to get the effect we want. Maybe you could find a suitable stock image, but searching the web or stock image sites for just the right image could take hours.
Let’s say you have a client who wants you to incorporate a 3D-looking world map into the layout you’re creating for them: something that looks cut from a thin sheet of material.
“Well,” was the reply, “I certainly wouldn’t start from here.” Sometimes design projects can be that way. Irish comedian Dave Allen relates that a tourist visiting Ireland asked for directions from one of the locals. You can use the same approach to make a 3D shape out of a vector shape, like a logo or other graphic, but you can run into a problem if the shape is too complex. In Part 1, we looked at how easy it is to create 3D text by making a minimal model in Photoshop and using Adobe Dimension to do the rest.