Tom Arah explores the 3D handling in Adobe’s recent CS3 releases and wonders if it is a sign of things to come.

With its current blitz of CS3 software launches, it might seem that Adobe has the entire creative arena well covered. However there’s one surprising omission from the list – 3D.

It’s especially surprising on two fronts: firstly because 3D is now such an integral part of so many designers’ lives and secondly because Adobe has long been interested in the field. In fact one of Adobe’s earliest design applications was a dedicated 3D program called Adobe Dimensions. It wasn’t just early; it was groundbreaking. In particular Dimensions pioneered features such as the creation of objects derived from path-based surfaces rather than from polygonal meshes and the ability to render models not only as bitmaps but also as fully scalable, resolution-independent vectors. Nowadays all the major professional 3D packages boast of their path-based NURBs and N-gon handling and offer vector rendering solutions – but even today none of them matches Dimensions’ ability to map resolution-independent vector artwork to object surfaces.

Adobe’s dedicated 3D modeller, Dimensions, was pioneering but fatally flawed

Dimensions undoubtedly had serious potential – but sadly, despite three full releases, Adobe never even began to scratch it. To begin with, with no path-based lofting or hulling and no real ability to arrange and combine elements, Dimensions was essentially limited to producing simple extrusions, bevels and lathe effects – ideal for logos and the like but little else. Most unforgivably, despite its complete reliance on paths, Dimensions’ direct handling of these was rudimentary, effectively requiring paths to be imported from Illustrator. The result was that Dimensions could never aspire to be more than a support program for Illustrator and eventually it was a relief to all concerned when in 2004 Adobe finally put it out to pasture and stopped development. Especially so as Adobe managed to incorporate the vast majority of Dimensions’ 3D handling where it made most sense: directly within Illustrator.
Moreover, while the 3D power Dimensions offered proved embarrassing for a dedicated application, it’s extraordinary to find it hosted within a 2D application. Not that most users are likely to find it as all of Illustrator’s Dimensions-derived 3D functionality is hidden away in three unassuming dialogs under the Effects menu. Select any shape or path and the Effects > 3D > Rotate command and you can quickly rotate it in three dimensions and apply an accurate perspective effect. If it’s a filled shape you can also apply flat Diffuse Shading complete with control over the position and intensity of lights – an effect which can then be automatically be picked up by other rotated objects.
3D rotation is a very handy trick for, say, creating angled logo text that leaps out at the viewer, but the object itself still remains flat and clearly two-dimensional. Far more powerful are Illustrator’s other two 3D live effects starting with Extrude and Bevel. This dialog offers the same 3D rotational capabilities but also lets you set an extrusion depth to create a true three-dimensional object, for example converting a rectangle into a cube or a circle into a cylinder. It also lets you control end caps, choose from a range of preset bevel effects (you can even load your own bevel path) and offers a surprisingly realistic gradient-based Plastic Shading lighting effect as well as a Wireframe display option. Even more impressive is the final Revolve effect which rotates the selected object around its vertical axis to turn a circle into a sphere, say, or a filled path into a candlestick or vase. With both Extrude and Bevel and Revolve effects you can also use a sub-dialog to map symbols to each of the object surfaces meaning that Dimensions’ unique ability to use resolution-independent vector artwork as textures lives on.

3D handling is now integrated directly into Illustrator

Put it all together and you really have some extraordinary power – for example you can quickly create accurate perspective effects, say of a room with paintings hanging on a wall and a realistic table at its centre and all with a few 3D-rotated and extruded rectangles. Using artwork mapping you can even create your own bottle complete with wine label to put on the table. It’s astonishing functionality to find within a vector drawing program and leaves Illustrator’s rivals standing - but it really shouldn’t be that surprising. Adobe is absolutely right to integrate Dimensions’ 3D capabilities directly into Illustrator - after all, that’s what an illustration is: a 2D representation of the 3D world.
The same definition is equally true of a photo and again Adobe has also long been interested in integrating 3D handling power directly into its market leading bitmap editor. For many years this capability was hidden away in the form of Photoshop’s 3D Transform filter which enabled a bitmap to be projected onto cubic, spherical and cylindrical primitives. Such 3D handling is now much better left to the artwork mapping in Illustrator and so with Photoshop CS, Adobe quietly dropped the 3D Transform filter. In its place Adobe added another 3D-based effect much better suited to photo editing: the Vanishing Point filter. In fact “filter” doesn’t do this dialog justice as in many ways it’s a standalone environment dedicated to 3D handling – you can even close down an image, reopen it and return to the filter with all 3D information retained.
Key to the Vanishing Point dialog is the ability to add perspective planes to an image simply by clicking on their four defining corners. Once Photoshop knows about the planes that an image contains, it can then take them into account when you come to edit. Copy and paste a flat window onto an angled wall for example and the necessary perspective is automatically applied and as you move the copy over the surface it automatically resizes in real time. Even more impressive is the ability to use the Vanishing Point dialog’s hands-on Brush and Stamp tools to paint directly on the image with the planar information regarding perspective being taken into account in the size and angle of the tool – very handy for example if you want to clone out an unwanted object lying on some floorboards or paint a pattern on a rug.

Photoshop’s Vanishing Point filter offers hands-on editing that takes 3D perspective into account

Again it’s extraordinary power when you first see it in action, but it really shouldn’t be – the photo is a representation of the 3D world and so you sometimes need some 3D-based help to successfully edit it. Moreover, after the initial excitement, the limits of the Vanishing Point filter soon become very apparent. In fact in some ways it is actually less powerful than the former 3D Transform filter as you can’t render artwork onto the curved surfaces of spheres or cylinders. In other words the Vanishing Point filter might see the world in 3D but only as flat surfaces. Moreover, in its first release, it could only see flat surfaces that were perpendicular to each other like the sides of a house.
In the latest Photoshop CS3 release, this latter flaw has been resolved so that you can now add non-perpendicular planes as Adobe shows with a sample file in which you can copy and paste artwork to see what it looks like on a half-opened CD case.

It’s with the new Photoshop CS3 Extended though that Adobe makes some truly extraordinary strides into the world of advanced 3D editing. The first sign of this is the ability to export the planes that you create in the Vanishing Point filter to the common 3DS formats. I opened the resulting 3DS file into Cinema 4D and was amazed to discover that it wasn’t just the basic mesh that had been exported, but that the underlying image had been processed too, broken up into texture maps for each plane. This meant that I could rotate the fully-realized sample CD package in three dimensions which in turn meant that Photoshop CS3 Extended can be used to create 3D models from photographs!
On reflection of course this modelling capability is massively limited by the Vanishing Point filter’s restriction to flat planes – but such exporting proves to be just the beginning of Photoshop CS3 Extended’s 3D capabilities. Far more striking is the ability to import 3DS files directly into Photoshop. Originally I did this using the Place command which leads to a dialog popped up asking at what size you want to rasterize the artwork. This shows that Photoshop CS3 Extended is now capable of rendering the default view embedded in the 3DS file, not to the same photorealistic raytraced standard as the originating application, but taking into account all of its associated parameter-based materials, texture maps and lights.
This is impressive enough but pales into insignificance compared to the alternative route to importing 3D artwork. Use the Layer > 3D Layer > New 3D Layer from File command instead and you can load the 3DS file (or other 3D files including Alias/Wavefront’s OBJ format and Intel’s U3D Universal 3D format) automatically to its own smart object-based 3D layer. Double-click on the layer thumbnail in the Layers palette and a range of new 3D tools and options appear in the context-sensitive Control bar. Most significantly using these you can position, scale and, crucially, rotate the object in 3D space to see it from any angle and all in real time!

Photoshop CS3 Extended’s support for live handling of imported 3D objects opens up massive potential for creative montaging

This really is extraordinary. Photoshop has always excelled at compositing 2D photographic elements, and now its montaging capabilities also extend to 3D. Moreover because the 3D elements are live you can simply rotate or resize them into position – no more searching through stock photography for an image of a car, say, at just the right angle for you composition. Instead just load a 3D version – you’ll find hundreds of free models online - and tweak it until it fits. Photoshop CS3 Extended even lets you explore a selection of lighting and rendering options to help make the 3D object fit in, or stand out, and you can use its new smart filter technology to directly apply effects such as sharpening or motion blur. It’s a massive creative leap forward and one which has come completely out of the blue.
Even more extraordinary is Photoshop CS3 Extended’s ability to edit any of the texture maps used by the 3D model. These textures are listed as layers under the 3D smart object and, if you double click on one, it opens into its own window and any saved edits are immediately reflected back on the composited 3D model. To show off the capability at its best Adobe includes another sample image containing a placed 3DS of a cylinder with a blank texture map. Open and copy a label image then paste it over the existing texture map and you can see what your can’s packaging will look like in full 3D and from all sides, and incorporate any view of it into your promotional images. Crucially you can also overwrite the original texture map so that you can use your new packaging back in the originating 3D application and as part of other workflows.

Photoshop CS3 Extended can also be used for editing existing texture maps

Such 3D handling is undoubtedly powerful and beautifully simple in practice - but sadly it’s also misleading. Adobe has chosen its cylinder example for very good reason as, apart from flat planes, a cylinder is the only 3D surface onto which you can easily project flat artwork with no distortion. Import any other textured model and open the associated texture maps and you’ll see that they are based on complicated polygonal meshes – called UV maps – that map each polygon on the 3D model to an equivalent area of the bitmap. This means that, while you can still usefully apply global changes such as colour correcting or adding noise, for most models it’s almost impossible to make useful hands-on edits. Do so and you will find that the final appearance of a brush stroke completely changes size as it moves from one polygon to another looking unnatural and highlighting the seams of the mesh. In short: editing flat artwork – essentially a simple single quadrilateral – is nothing like editing complex, mesh-based UV maps.
Sadly the initial impression that Photoshop CS3 Extended gives that bridging the worlds of 2D and 3D is child’s play is some way off the mark – and it seriously undercuts what you can currently achieve with the program both when it comes to compositing internally (though here you can at least chose to rasterize the current view and edit that) and when producing texture maps for external use. For the full potential of Photoshop Extended’s 3D compositing and 3D texturing to be reached, what you really want to be able to do is simply to pick up any hands-on tool and begin painting or retouching directly onto the surface of the 3D object.
Well don’t give up hope. As the Brush and Stamp tools in the Vanishing Point dialog show it is possible to adjust the brush size and angle based on perspective in real time meaning that Photoshop already offers basic plane-based UV editing. More to the point there are already advanced third-party solutions such as the latest Cinema 4D 10 that do let you paint directly onto the surface of any 3D object no matter how complex. Significantly the first time I came across this capability was with Right Hemisphere’s beautifully simple Deep Paint 3D. And it just so happens that Right Hemisphere is the company that has helped Adobe provide the 3D capabilities within both Photoshop CS3 Extended and the recent high-end version of Acrobat, Acrobat 3D. Bearing all this in mind and, most importantly, the extraordinary creative power that it would unleash, I can’t help but feel that Adobe has a road-map for a future release of Photoshop Extended that will see it offer direct 3D painting and editing.

The fact that 3D handling has been integrated into the core Acrobat PDF format shows its significance for the future

But will that be the end of the road? As we’ve seen Adobe has now embedded some serious 3D capabilities directly within both of its graphical flagships – Illustrator and Photoshop. More to the point, as Acrobat 3D shows, it has quietly added 3D handling directly within the core PDF format that all of its applications can export to and import from. In other words, the support infrastructure is now there in place. And the demand for full-blown 3D handling for the CS applications is becoming increasingly urgent. In particular after its takeover of Macromedia, Adobe now owns Director whose main selling point is its ability to extend Flash’s functionality with web-efficient 3D delivery especially for games. More to the point the Flash format itself is soon to face some serious competition from Microsoft Expression Blend which offers Flash-style media handling with the added ingredient of integrated 3D.
Again put it all together and I certainly wouldn’t be surprised to discover Adobe deciding to have another go at launching a dedicated 3D modeller. With some Dimensions-style integration of vector and bitmap handling and the unique ability to map resolution-independent Illustrator artwork onto objects and to paint directly onto them with Photoshop Extended, Adobe could even seize the creative high ground. Release a dedicated 3D edition of the Creative Suite with Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, Director and Acrobat 3D and you’d certainly shake up the current status quo and fill the current hole in the CS line-up.
I might not be surprised - but I still wouldn’t bet on it. To begin with, Adobe has been burnt by 3D before and not just with Dimensions but with Adobe Atmosphere which after many years of development never even made it to commercial release. Moreover trying to compete from scratch with the well-established and all-encompassing professional packages such as 3ds max and Maya would be near-impossible – and Adobe isn’t interested in anything but best-of-breed. Buying in a third-party contender would probably make more sense and Cinema 4D with its existing creative focus and close tie-ins with Photoshop and After Effects would make it the obvious choice. On the other hand, Adobe already has plenty on its plate trying to integrate and develop the Macromedia applications. More to the point, by focusing on the interface between 3D and 2D and on the common 3DS, OBJ and U3D standards, Adobe doesn’t actually need to tie itself to any single 3D modeller, let alone its own.
Instead Adobe has positioned itself in such a way that it can help all designers add new depth to their creative work whichever 3D applications they want to use.