I took these templates for a spin & came away impressed with their ability to map one’s artwork onto fabric, into 3D-extruded wood, and more. Ten bucks from Creative Market.
Category Archives: 3D
Freeform: 3D sculpting in space
I can’t wait for this to be featured in a super-unsexy remake of Ghost:
Some rather brilliant imaging tech from Microsoft
The company’s Photosynth technology has been public since 2006, and while it’s been cool (placing photos into 3D space), I haven’t seen it gain traction in its original form or as a free panorama maker. That could now change.
The new version stitches photos into smooth fly-throughs. Per TechCrunch:
[U]sers upload a set of photos to Microsoft’s cloud service then the technology begins to looking for points (“features”) in the successive photos that appear to the be same object. It then determines where each photo was taken from, where in 3D space each of these objects were, and how the camera was oriented. Next, it generates the 3D shapes on a per-photo basis. And finally, the technology calculates a smooth path – like a Steadicam – through the locations for each photo, and then slices the images into multi-resolution pyramids for efficiency.
Check this out:
Once you’ve clicked it, try hitting “C” to reveal & interact with the 3D camera path. Here’s an example from photographer David Brashears, who captured Mt. Everest during one of the highest-elevation helicopter flights ever attempted:
So, will we see this become more common? It’s the first presentation I’ve seen that makes me want to don a wearable, lifelogging camera on vacation.
Rendering real-world 3D content in real time
MIT is making pure magic:
Check out some below-the-table stills on Colossal.
inFORM is a Dynamic Shape Display that can render 3D content physically, so users can interact with digital information in a tangible way. inFORM can also interact with the physical world around it, for example moving objects on the table’s surface. Remote participants in a video conference can be displayed physically, allowing for a strong sense of presence and the ability to interact physically at a distance. inFORM is a step toward our vision of Radical Atoms.
[Vimeo]
How Disney Animation simulates snow
I really hope they have 40 subtly different words for this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9H1gRQ6S7gg&feature=youtube_gdata_player
[YouTube]
Only theoretically related: “There really are 50 Eskimo words for ‘snow’”
RetroLift: Simple 3D extrusion for Photoshop
I’m digging RetroLift, an easy way to give any font this kind of 3D appearance:
The action set costs $8 $12 and doesn’t require use of Photoshop’s 3D features.
Seene: a "3D instagram"?
It’s easier seen (heh) than described, so just check it out. The Verge writes,
With less than 30 seconds of setup after installing the app, you can record and manipulate an object in real-time, and in 3D. It’s like iOS 7 parallax gone wild…
Even with poorly done Seenes, the app’s 3D effect is breathtaking since it uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to alter the perspective of the image accordingly when you move your hand. On the web, moving your mouse on an image alters its perspective.
[Via Tomas Krcha]
Behind the scenes: AE on "Star Trek Into Darkness"
Andrew Kramer & company used After Effects, Premiere Pro, and more to create titles & HUDs for the most recent Star Trek installment. Check out their detailed notes, as well as the video below. And yes, they talk about how they made the lens flares. 🙂
[YouTube]
Insanely fast-spinning televisions
Book covers, re-imagined in 3D paper
Check out how Kelli Anderson made 40 big paper books for the NY Public Library, via the quick vid below & her more detailed blog post.
[Vimeo]
World War II From Space
“A stunning 90-minute documentary visualizing key events from World War II from the vantage point of space,” World War II From Space just won an Emmy for Outstanding Graphic Design and Art Direction. Featuring 300 animations and 79 VFX shots, it made heavy use of an Adobe workflow (script writing in Adobe Story, 3D integration with After Effects & Cinema 4D, editing in Premiere Pro). Check out an in-depth interview on how the team made it happen.
I can’t wait for the sequel, World War II In Space. [Vimeo]
See Barcelona's "finished" Sagrada Familia
I had no idea that Gaudi’s masterwork might actually get finished (hey, it’s only been 120 years) in 2026. Check out this nicely rendered 3D visualization:
Margot, hearing the slightly cheestastic music just now without context, said, “Oh boy—what are we getting motivated about this morning?” [Via]
Projection mapping + robots
Oh God that’s cool. Just stick with it for a minute:
According to The Creators Project,
The team has pioneered the use of robots that are normally used for manufacturing vehicles, and instead developed software to interface the robots in 3D system Maya.[…] Designed to control camera movement, activate lights, and shift set pieces with ever-repeatable motion, this precision allows the virtual and physical worlds to unite and CG elements to match in real time.
Project creator Gmunk offers more behind-the-scenes perspective on his site. [Vimeo] [Via Nicholas Felton]
"The world's first 3D sensor for mobile devices"
Occipital is Kickstarting a way to “capture models of rooms, 3D scan objects, play augmented reality games, and develop mobile applications with 3D sensing.” Check it out:
Maybe stuff I wrote about five years ago will finally become broadly possible. [Via]
Animation: "What's inside Play-Doh"
"3-Sweep: Extracting Editable Objects from a Single Photo"
Yes, this is damn cool. Thanks to the approximately 300k people who mailed me the link. 🙂
Somewhere Canoma is spinning on its grave’s Z-axis.
An artist's trippy 3D painting technique
I’ve heard Photoshop layers referred to as “sheets of acetate,” but Juan Miguel Palacios’s work takes that literally:
A recent transplant to Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood, Spanish artist Juan Miguel Palacios is making a splash in the New York art scene with a series of work focusing on the human form. Palacios uses a unique technique which involves layering a series of paintings on top of each other to create stunning three-dimensional pieces. We spent some time with Palacios in his studio to discuss his influences, his background and the complexities of his creative process.
[Vimeo] [Via Bryan O’Neil Hughes]
"The Centrifuge Brain Project"
What a droll, understated little piece of 3D animation; stick with it:
Here’s more info, including a set of terribly ill-advised blueprints. Evidently it comes from Till Nowak.
[YouTube] [Via Jerry Harris]
Damn cool 3D animation from Honda
What a great little tour of their product history:
[YouTube] [Via Mel Brown]
Animated infographics: "Stranger Than Fiction"
I just (re)stumbled across the great work that MK12 for Stranger Than Fiction a few years ago & thought them worth a re-look:
3D animation: "Tumbleweed Tango"
Poppy: "Turn Your iPhone into a 3D Camera"
This Kickstarter-funded project like some good high-low tech fun:
[Via]
AIREAL: Disney's prototype for haptic feedback in thin air
An augmented-reality coloring book
ColAR (iOS/Android) is “the coloring book of the future.” As TechCrunch explains,
First, you go to colAR’s web site and print out your coloring page of choice (the free app usually comes with one option included and a few others available for in-app purchase, but their full catalog is free until July 28th)… Once you’re done [coloring], pop open the app, and hit the “Play” button to bring up a camera view. Hold your drawing up to the camera, and bam! It takes your work of art and wraps it around an animated 3D model.
If only one could draw a Centrifugal Bumblepuppy in this thing, it would be perfect. (Or my head would explode. Or both.)
Bruce Lee gets unearthed through CGI
For real?
Creator Joseph Kahn writes,
My good friend BBH Creative Executive Johnny Tan and I first talked about doing this concept a year ago. We shot it in Hong Kong, and then we worked with vfx company The Mill in London to create a completely CGI Bruce Lee over nine months. EVERY shot of his head and every detail in there is completely cgi. We got Shannon Lee, Bruce Lee’s daughter, to come aboard and we really picked her brain to make sure that everything was accurate from look to soul. We wanted to be as respectful to the man and legend as we could.
Be like water, my friend, so that someday you may bend when they dig up & puppet you, too. [Vimeo] [Via Fran Roig]
"Anti-Gravity Object Modeling"
I can’t tell you quite what’s happening here, and (spoiler alert) there’s no real punchline—but boy, it’s still kinda neat:
3D Glass Cows
People who live in them… Ah, never mind. Enjoy your good-looking non sequitur of the day:
And see also the finished ad in which these cows appear. [Via]
New 3D features coming to Photoshop
The Photoshop Extended product is gone, meaning that as of Photoshop CC, all PS users get 3D functionality. Here Zorana Gee gives a 1-minute tour of what’s new:
What's coming next in After Effects?
Steve Forde gives a quick tour of the forthcoming Warp Stabilizer, Refine Edge, and 3D integration with Cinema 4D.
Map Illustrator artwork to 3D via LiveSurface Context
You might already know LiveSurface, a stock-image library that featured preset grids optimized to work with Photoshop’s Vanishing Point feature. Now the crew behind it has announced the beta of LiveSurface Context, a unique 2.5D app with a built-in artwork store.
Founder Joshua Distler writes,
The app makes design exploration & visualization (for both designer and client) much faster and more fluid by acting as a kind of next-generation WYSIWYG tool. Designers can work naturally inside Illustrator and visualize their concepts rendered photographically with a click. With it you can:
- Work inside Illustrator and preview ideas rendered in photographic realism with just a click.
- Simulate a variety of inks and materials (such as foil, emboss, fluorescent) by simply choosing swatches in Illustrator.
- Download surfaces by drag and drop; surfaces are automatically re-rendered at hi-res when the download completes.
- Resize and/or rotate Plus Surfaces with a few clicks.
- Output very hi-res renderings in the background, without interruption to workflow.
The app drew a nice write-up in Fast Company. Here’s a quick demo of browsing for photographic templates, then applying artwork:
More info is in 9to5Mac’s write-up.
CGI: The evolution of the human face
Kottke writes, “Here’s a video that shows how scientists believe the human face has changed over the past 7 million years:”
Adobe & Maxon announce an alliance
“Today,” writes After Effects PM Steve Forde, “Adobe announced it is entering into a strategic alliance with MAXON, the makers of CINEMA 4D.” He goes on to hint at future integration:
“Do what you know, and be the best at it.” Hand in hand with this idea means that you DON’T do a whole lot of stuff you don’t know. With this relationship announcement you have two companies who focus on being the very best at what they do…
I wish could go into more detail right now – but stay tuned. This area is about to get very exciting.
See also the Maxon announcement which says, “As part of the alliance, both companies are expected to collaborate and engineer a pipeline between Adobe® After Effects® software and CINEMA 4D to give users a seamless 2D/3D foundation.”
An animated 3D chalk art snake
Chris Carlson is a madman.
[Via]
Illustration: "Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant"
This one time, at math camp…
[Via Marc Pawliger]
Theoretically related: “a fully-articulated, 3D-printed gown with nearly 3,000 joints” that “follows the Fibonacci Sequence in the way it curves around a woman’s body, in order to maximize its theoretical beauty.”
[Via]
Foldify: 3D printing you might actually do
This app looks incredibly charming:
[Via Mark Kawano]
Photoshop CS6 Extended gains new 3D features
The CS6 update (13.1) posted yesterday gives Creative Cloud members new features in Photoshop Extended. The team writes,
- Improved 3D effects: Save time and steps with improved live (OpenGL) previews of shadow effects as well as reflection roughness and refraction. Also, get more control over illumination by using a 32-bit color picker to create amazing glow effects.
- Image-based lighting enhancements: Get enhanced lighting when you illuminate your scenes using 32-bit HDR images as light sources or create other image-based lights (IBLs).
- Enhanced details for textures: Improve the lighting of bumps and textures on 3D objects by automatically generating a normal map.
Here’s a 2-minute tour from PM Zorana Gee:
MoGraph: Musselman's Pop-Up Book
I like the straightforward charm of these animated illustrations. This kind of thing wins my heart over the disposably trendy every time.
3D Puppetry: A Kinect-based Interface for 3D Animation
Our system allows puppeteers to directly perform animations using physical toys in front of a Kinect depth sensor. Our system tracks the puppets in real time and re-renders them in a virtual scene using stored 3D models. We combine the ease-of-use of a physical puppet show with the 3D camera and lighting controls afforded by animation software.
Painting a McLaren with lasers
They kinda had me at “Marshmallow Laser Feast,” but boy this is beautiful:
Working with McLaren we were able to process their wind tunnel airflow data and score out paths for individual trails of light. Each frame was then sliced into 650 frames that represent depths of 3D space and a plasma screen, mounted on a motion control rig, was used as a 3D light printer to play back the 650 slices as it moved through the space. We then repeated the move a thousand times for each frame of the animation and with each frame the camera, mounted on another motion control rig, moved a few millimeters so that over the course of the shoot we were able to create the effect of a moving camera.
[Via Adam Pratt & Gizmodo]
Tutorial: Create 3D Anaglyph Images with an iPad & Photoshop Touch
I’m endlessly surprised & pleased by the creative (mis)uses of Adobe tools—things never envisioned by the people developing them. In this case Chris Stevens captures a pair of images with his iPad, then uses layering & adjustments in Photoshop Touch to create a 3D image:
[Via Stephen Nielson]
A 3D print of your head, delivered by flying drone
Really? Really:
[I]t’s all part of an interactive art experience by ReAllocate called Project: Blue Sky.
Before looking up to see a UAV, festival-goers will have previously visited ReAllocate’s ‘dome’ to complete the first part of the art experience. At the dome, visitors can interact with a photo booth fitted with Kinect cameras, where with 3D software, their photos will be turned into 3D models. Instead of waiting for the models, attendees can leave the dome with a GPS transponder, free to enjoy other aspects of the festival.
By the way, in case you’ve ever wondered what my Twitter avatar is (and, oddly, some have), it’s a pair of 3D prints of my head. #oddJobPerks
[Via John Dowdell]
A 3D Olympics logo done in Photoshop
Even though Photoshop Extended is not (and is not promoted as being) a 3D modeling app, Corey Barker of NAPP decided to see how close he could get to NBC’s animated Olympics logo. (Non time-delayed spoiler: Pretty close!)
[Via Zorana Gee]
A little girl's 3D-printed "Magic Arms"
“You know, a lot of people in our industry spend time making a lot of useless technology,” says Margot. “And then there’s this.”
Here’s more info about the exoskeleton. [Via Matthew Richmond]
Valve Source Filmmaker
They’re just giving away this new storytelling tool?? From the site:
The Source Filmmaker (SFM) is the movie-making tool built and used by us here at Valve to make movies inside the Source game engine. Because the SFM uses the same assets as the game, anything that exists in the game can be used in the movie, and vice versa. By utilizing the hardware rendering power of a modern gaming PC, the SFM allows storytellers to work in a what-you-see-is-what-you-get environment so they can iterate in the context of what it will feel like for the final audience.
These are the days of miracles & wonder.
(T)ether: A spatially-aware system for animation & annotation
Hey, it’s the return of my (not at all) beloved Nintendo Power Glove!
Cynical take: “Oh, you were bitching that UIs requiring you to lift your hands & touch a screen would make you tired? Wait’ll you have to hold up an iPad in one hand just so you can re-create Lawnmower Man! You’ll be built like Jeff Fahey in no time, tuffy!”
Actual take: Cool!
Check out the project site for more info.
[Via Dave Simons]
"Photoshop Dimensions" magazine now available
Very cool: free*, and right from the Photoshop 3D team:
Photoshop Dimensions is the magazine of 3D in Adobe® Photoshop®. Whether you are new to 3D in Photoshop or an old hand, Photoshop Dimensions will show you new and exciting ways to add another dimension to your work. Photoshop Dimensions is written by leading authorities and experts who truly understand Photoshop’s powerful 3D features.
In this free issue of Photoshop Dimensions, we look at the many changes made to Photoshop’s 3D tools in CS 6 that will speed-up your workflow and expand your capabilities.
Grab it for iPad from the App Store. Amazon (Kindle), B&N (Nook) and PDF versions are also available; check out the site for links.
*Update: The first version is free, and the second costs $4.99.
New 3D reflections, draggable shadows in Photoshop CS6
Check out this concise demo from PM Zorana Gee:
Video: Spherikal
A trippy "Shining"
Topi Kauppinen creates a really uncanny effect, turning 2D stills from The Shining into 3D:
He explains the process on Vimeo:
“The overlapping parts must be photoshopped [*Cough* — Adobe brand cops] so that in the end everything comes together without any seams or texture repetition. The Content Aware Fill feature found in Photoshop CS5 is a godsend for this type of work.”
[Via]
New videos cover 3D in CS6
Photoshop team member Daniel Presedo has posted a series of short videos meant to make you productive quickly using Photoshop CS6’s totally revamped 3D tools. Photoshop PM Zorana Gee writes:
I’m really excited about the overhaul of the 3D features in Photoshop CS6 beta (Extended). The main focus we have is with performance (both interactivity as well as performance) and usability. You’ll notice that we added some great additions like live, re-editable 3D type; easy extrude operations; a single tool (the Move Tool) to adjust the position of all the elements in your scene; and many other great additions. Designers wanting to integrate 3D objects into their composites or create simple 3D geometries from type, paths, etc. will find that 3D in Photoshop is really powerful and fun to use.
Please let us know if you have specific tutorials you’d like to see and myself as well as some folks from the team will be happy to start sharing them.