Photoshop CC: The Missing Manual, 2nd Edition

Editing 3D Objects

Once you’ve created an object, you can do all kinds of things with it: apply materials to its surfaces, shine various kinds of lights on it, paint on it, run filters on it, adjust its opacity and blend mode, and even animate it over time. This section explains all these creative options.

Working with Materials

In Photoshop, a material is just what it sounds like: a flat image that gets applied to one or all sides of a 3D object. To get started working with materials, activate a 3D object in the Layers panel and then, in the 3D panel, look for a material nested under that object—every 3D object has one. Click the material item to activate it and Photoshop displays the Materials settings in the Properties panel (they’re shown in Figure 21-11).

Tip

You can activate multiple materials in the 3D panel and then adjust their properties all at once.

Materials can appear in lots of places on an object, so filtering what the 3D panel displays can really help when you want to adjust materials. Here’s an effective approach:

1. In the Layers panel, activate the object you want to work with.

2. At the top of the 3D panel, click the Materials icon (it’s third from left at the top of the panel, and labeled way back in Figure 21-2).

   This limits the panel to showing only the materials in the active object(s).

3. Still in the 3D panel, activate the material(s) you want to edit.

   To activate all of ’em, click the top one and then Shift-click the bottom one; to activate only some of them, click one and ...