3D Photoshop: Imagine • Model • Create

11. Placing materials

So far, we’ve looked at creating and lighting 3D models. But all our models look as if they’re made of plastic; they may be the right shape, but they have no texture to them. The exception is the Boccioni sculpture we worked with in Chapter 8, which came with a basic marble texture.

There’s a lot more to texture than just placing a pattern on top of an object: many different factors affect how the surface of a 3D object is displayed. For this reason, textures are referred to in Photoshop as materials, since they include surface properties as well as simple patterns.

To start this chapter, we’ll take an existing 3D object whose textures have gone astray on the way between 3DS Max and Photoshop, and see what happens when we ...