Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

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. You can envision the mesh as chicken wire molded into a 3D shape, like one of those animal-shaped wire structures you sometimes see in gardens (normally, they’re covered with ivy to create topiary critters). A mesh has one or more surfaces, each of which can have a texture applied to it. The whole kit-and-caboodle is referred to as a 3D object (or a 3D model), though Photoshop uses the term meshes to describe objects, too, which can be a bit confusing.

You can create a texture from one of your own images, or you can choose a texture 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 open it in a separate document and change it any way you want.

Your 3D object lives in a scene that has one or more lights illuminating it, and one or more cameras providing different views. (To move the object around in 3D space, you move the camera’s view angle.) The scene can contain more than one 3D object, and the scene lives in an environment that has 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.

That’s a lot to take in, but it’ll start to make sense once you begin playing with 3D objects.