Photoshop 3D Resources

3d resources

The time and energy i’m spending travelling around the world that is photoshop 3D is finally starting to pay off. Yesterday’s ‘college‘ design was evidence of that. Not perfect, but it makes a change from my 2D designs and spices things up a bit. Another skill in an ever expanding photoshop arsenal of skills…

So how do i do it? How have i taught myself 3D? What tools do i use? What books have i read? Where do i go for tutorials? What are my credit card details? I’ll spill *almost* everything below…

3DVIA

This is the ‘clip art’ of 3D designs in photoshop. It’s a free plugin. Sign up, download, install, finitio. Once installed and working, search, import, render. Bang – you’ve just ‘created’ a 3D design.

Of course in reality you’ve just legally stolen other peoples work and claimed it as your own, so if you’re the type of person that does that without thought, you’re not really a designer, are you?

3dvia

I haven’t actually used any 3DVIA models yet but it is a pretty cool plugin… the only problem i have is actually rendering the 3D models they have… some of them are huge and requires hours of processing time which i don’t have the patience for. If you’re on a laptop, give up now trying to render these sport of images in 3D.

Photoshop 3D materials

CS5 comes with about a dozen materials. Materials are just like colours or styles in 2D – they help us paint over objects. In 3D, things like bricks, tiles or grass look well, because we’re used to seeing them in 3D in real life. For more materials, download the set listed here.

materials

Photoshop on Facebook

If you’re just getting started, ‘like’ photoshop’s facebook page. They often have easy to follow video tutorials and offer tips on using CS5. In fact i think this was how i first learned to create 3D text in CS5.

facebook photoshop

Graphicriver.net

Want quality styles and plugins? Go to graphicriver.net & pay for them. Whether 2D or 3D is your thing, believe me sometimes it’s just worth paying a few dollars for 1000 styles or 1 million fonts. You won’t get corrupt files or fonts or have to manually add them all… i’ll often pay $2 for actions or styles that i like. Sure, it costs money but it saves me time and gives me peace of mind that i’m not installing a virus or adware. To manually create the same effects or source tutorials on how to come up with them, it would take me hours or days.

graphic river

Tutorials & Inspiration

CS5 makes doing things easier and more fun, so a lot of the older 3D tutorials will seem pretty complicated and manual. Still, it’s always nice to see examples of great 3D design and you might just pick up some ideas and tips by looking at this lot;

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