Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual

Rendering

While you’re working on a 3D object, Photoshop is actually only showing you a low-resolution preview. When you’re finished with your work, or when you just want a glimpse of the fabulosity of your talent, you need to tell Photoshop to render the scene. This generates a high quality version of your scene that you can use online, in print, or in an animation. Rendering uses ray tracing and a higher resolution than what you see on Photoshop’s preview to generate more realistic lighting and shadow effects. (Ray tracing follows rays of light as they emerge from their sources, pass through semi-transparent objects, and reflect off surfaces to generate realistic reflections and shadows.)

When Photoshop renders a scene, it uses the render settings in the Properties panel. (These settings only appear when you have a scene active in the 3D panel.) The Properties panel has 21 rendering presets; some are useful only to 3D pros, while others are fun for everyone (wireframe presets, for example).

You can make hundreds of choices in the Properties panel’s Cross Section, Surface, Lines, and Points sections. And there are a handful of simplification options that do things like remove shadows, hide back faces, and lines. Unless you’re a 3D pro, stick with the presets.

You can also choose to render only a portion of a scene, which saves time when you just need to see a higher-quality version of part of your object, such as a shadow. To do that, first activate the object in the Layers panel, ...