The brand new Adobe Photoshop CS4 gives you more chance to innovate more. Now you can open and work with 3D files created by 3D programs like Adobe Acrobat 3D version 8, Alias, Google Earth, Maya, and 3D Studio Max. Photoshop CS4 supports few 3D file formats. It supports U3D, KMZ, 3DS, OBJ, and DAE. This Photoshop CS4 tutorial will give you an overview about 3D files on Adobe Photoshop CS4. Here are components that the 3D files can contain in Photoshop CS4.

1.    Meshes.
It gives you the underlying structure of a 3D model. Mesh visualized as a wire frame. It is a skeletal structure from thousands of polygons. The 3D models always have a mesh, and it may combine a lot of meshes. Then, what can Adobe Photoshop CS4 do for you? You can view meshes in so many render modes. You can even manipulate meshes independently of each other. If you cannot change the actual polygons in a mesh, you can still change the orientation or transform it with scaling along different axis. With Adobe Photoshop CS4, you can create 3D meshes from pre-supplied shapes or using existing 2D layers. 

2.    Materials.
Mesh can have materials associated with it. It is controlling the appearance of the mesh. It relies on subcomponents called texture maps. The cumulative of texture maps will create the appearance of the material. The texture map is a 2D image file that is able to create color, shininess, bumpiness, and pattern. Photoshop material can use up to nine texture maps to define its appearance. 

3.    Lights.
The light types are infinite, spot, and point. You can simply move and adjust color as well as the intensity of existing lights. You can even add new lights to your 3D scene. With brand new Adobe Photoshop CS4, you can move and animate 3D models. You can also change the render models, edit lights, and combined few 3D models into one 3D scene. With the Adobe Photoshop CS4, now you can wrap 2D layers around variety of shape presets (cubes, cylinders, cones, spheres, pyramids) as well as create cool 3D postcard and 3D meshes from grayscale or text layer. The other things that Photoshop CS4 can do are adding multiple 3D layers to an image, convert a 3D layer into a 2D layer or smart object, and combine a 3D layer with 2D layers to create a good backdrop for your content.

There are more capabilities that cannot be explained in this Photoshop CS4 tutorial. Go and try for yourself. Feel the differences when creating 3D with Adobe Photoshop CS4.

M.A.H.

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