Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

3D Basics

If you’re new to 3D, all the parts and pieces can be baffling. Here’s the gist: A 3D object starts with a mesh, which has one or more surfaces, each of which can have a texture applied to it. You can envision the mesh as chicken wire molded into a 3D shape, like one of those animal-shaped wire structures that you sometimes see in gardens (normally, they’re covered by ivy to create topiary critters). A texture can be made from one of your own images, or you can choose a material preset that resembles a real-world material such as fabric, stone, wood, glass, or plastic, or something fanciful like a checkerboard pattern. To customize the material, you can apply a color to it, or apply separate textures to its reflective areas.

This 3D object lives in a scene that has one or more lights illuminating it, and one or more cameras providing different views. The scene may have more than one 3D object in it, and the entire scene lives in an environment that has its own global lighting for all the objects in the scene, as well as a ground plane on which shadows may fall, and an optional background image or panorama.

And of course, everything is customizable!