Best Choice ? Export Photoshop to Maya, lightwave, 3dstudio, Poser, Vue, etc..

"BlueSky_TheMan" wrote in message

Howdy all !

I’m interested in feedback from folks that have some experience using photoshop in connection with other digital art apps.

I’m relatively new to photoshop but having self proclaimed success at a workflow involving making detail sketches by hand scanning, adding to photoshop and rendering textures and shading as needed. A recent project has been proposed to me that would benefit from being able to do the following:

1)
Moving 2D photoshop human figures to a 3D app to build models. This doesn’t have to be full modeling for animation, I just basically want to have more freedom in adding clothing/texture, depth, and/or realistic shading to these images.

2)
Moving 2D photoshop inanimate objects to a 3D app.
I would like to build objects from my 2d sketches/renderings that can be given dimension and facilitate placing in a scene with mutliple perspectives (profile, top, side, far away, close up)

I have NO experience with any of these other apps. I’ve read all the web sites selling this software but it’s hard to get a handle on what’s easiest to use, what’s overkill, and/or what’s insufficient for my needs.

Does anyone have words of wisdom regarding this need to build models from 2 dimensional photoshop images?

Thanks ahead of Time for your responses.

Tony,

You will get more feedback if you ask the people over in the Adobeforum. We can see them here, but they do not see our posts.

http://www.adobeforums.com scroll down to the PS for Windows forum, a free registration and ask away.

HTH
Mike H

Does anyone have words of wisdom regarding this need to build models from 2 dimensional photoshop images?

Thanks ahead of Time for your responses.

Tony,

You will get more feedback if you ask the people over in the Adobeforum. We can see them here, but they do not see our posts.

http://www.adobeforums.com scroll down to the PS for Windows forum, a free registration and ask away.

HTH
Mike H

Thanks for the heads up.

Tony

I use Photoshop CS2 and have used Photoshop for many versions. In the past few months my job has pushed me into CAD and 3D modeling. Since no one has volunteered to pay the sky high costs of Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, or others, I use Art of Illusion. It is a free, Java based 3D modeling app that works very well on many systems.

Art of Illusion is MUCH easier to learn than any of the others. That doesn’t mean that it is easy to learn. 3D software of any kinds is vastly different than Photoshop. They don’t work the same AT ALL. The mental shifts that are needed to learn and work in 3D software are profound. In short, there is almost no crossover between the two.

Yes, Photoshop has a pretty high learning curve. These 3D apps have an even higher one with no relation to what you learned in Photoshop.

I am no expert with Art of Illusion (AoI) or any of the others, but I can and do create lots of things in AoI. So far I have had no connection between AoI and Photoshop. There are only a couple of places that I see as possible connections.

1. You could create image textures in Photoshop that will get applied to the skin of the objects you create in AoI. However, these are 2D images laid over a 3D object. Sometimes that works very well. Sometimes is it pretty obvious that they don’t fit right.

I decided that if I’m going to use AoI, I’m going to take the time to learn how to do the Procedural Textures and Materials. So, I’ve created my textures that way and haven’t uses 2D images. All objects in these 3D apps are defined by math. It’s much more like Adobe Illustrator, but in 3D. Procedural Textures are also math formulas linked together like a program or script to define the texture. This doesn’t really mean anything until the scene is rendered. Then a good procedural texture looks good and looks 3D.

You don’t have to know that much math to run them. I certainly don’t. The points, edges, faces, textures, materials, etc. all look like points, edges, faces, etc. However, they are defined by math in the saved file. The rendering engine simulate rays of light bouncing around the scene to convert all this to bitmap images. BTW, that rendering will take more CPU power than anything you do in Photoshop.

2. You could edit the rendered picture in Photoshop after. However, I’ve never seen a reason to do so. I create it to look like I want it to and don’t need to fix anything in Photoshop. There are some rendering methods that can create a lot of digital noise, if you don’t adjust the settings right. The built in noise reduction is more like Gaussian Blur that real noise reduction. I suppose I could bring it into CS2 and run Noise Ninja on it. It’s better to do it right inside AoI.

Forget building almost anything from a 2D template brought in from Photoshop. There is almost no good way to convert it to 3D. It is better and faster to redraw it in 3D.

I would recommend downloading and learning on Art of Illusion:

http://www.artofillusion.org

Another free 3D modeling package is Blender. Its interface is VERY non-standard. So, its learning curve is significantly higher. However, it is also a very powerful free tool.

If you get good at AoI and want to move on, then go buy Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, or others of these very good and powerful 3D apps. You might want to look at their prices first; they cost THOUSANDS of dollars. Photoshop will look really cheap beside these. Of course, there are other 3D modeling apps that ONLY cost hundreds of dollars that you might want to look at. Still there isn’t anything wrong with starting with free, particularly when it is so powerful.

Thanks,
Clyde

BlueSky_TheMan wrote:

Howdy all !

I’m interested in feedback from folks that have some experience using photoshop in connection with other digital art apps.

I’m relatively new to photoshop but having self proclaimed success at a workflow involving making detail sketches by hand scanning, adding to photoshop and rendering textures and shading as needed. A recent project has been proposed to me that would benefit from being able to do the following:

1)
Moving 2D photoshop human figures to a 3D app to build models. This doesn’t have to be full modeling for animation, I just basically want to have more freedom in adding clothing/texture, depth, and/or realistic shading to these images.

2)
Moving 2D photoshop inanimate objects to a 3D app.
I would like to build objects from my 2d sketches/renderings that can be given dimension and facilitate placing in a scene with mutliple perspectives (profile, top, side, far away, close up)

I have NO experience with any of these other apps. I’ve read all the web sites selling this software but it’s hard to get a handle on what’s easiest to use, what’s overkill, and/or what’s insufficient for my needs.

Does anyone have words of wisdom regarding this need to build models from 2 dimensional photoshop images?

Thanks ahead of Time for your responses.
Tony

Clyde wrote:
Snipped

If you get good at AoI and want to move on, then go buy Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, or others of these very good and powerful 3D apps. You might want to look at their prices first; they cost THOUSANDS of dollars. Photoshop will look really cheap beside these. Of course, there are other 3D modeling apps that ONLY cost hundreds of dollars that you might want to look at. Still there isn’t anything wrong with starting with free, particularly when it is so powerful.

Thanks,
Clyde

Thank you for your indepth response Clyde!

I will check out AoL as you suggested.

It’s disappointing to hear about the lack of model building from a 2d image. I would think there is something that could build a 3d model from a human profile (as an example) that would use a common value for the missing dimensions. I guess kind of like a "slice" of a human figure that you could build upon for the missing dimensions.

I will add that connections thru my line of work allow me to try out just about ANY software on a temporary basis, so money concerns for learning specific software is not an issue. ( and keep my fingers crossed that the company will pay for the licensed version) Time is an issue and I was hoping to find which software is the best for my needs up front instead of trying to learn enough about all of them to make an informed decision. I was thinking about Maya since there seems to be so many tutorials on line to support it.

Again, thanks for the help!

Tony

BlueSky_TheMan wrote:

Clyde wrote:
Snipped

If you get good at AoI and want to move on, then go buy Maya, Lightwave, 3D Studio Max, or others of these very good and powerful 3D apps. You might want to look at their prices first; they cost THOUSANDS of dollars. Photoshop will look really cheap beside these. Of course, there are other 3D modeling apps that ONLY cost hundreds of dollars that you might want to look at. Still there isn’t anything wrong with starting with free, particularly when it is so powerful.

Thanks,
Clyde

Thank you for your indepth response Clyde!

I will check out AoL as you suggested.

It’s disappointing to hear about the lack of model building from a 2d image. I would think there is something that could build a 3d model from a human profile (as an example) that would use a common value for the missing dimensions. I guess kind of like a "slice" of a human figure that you could build upon for the missing dimensions.
I will add that connections thru my line of work allow me to try out just about ANY software on a temporary basis, so money concerns for learning specific software is not an issue. ( and keep my fingers crossed that the company will pay for the licensed version) Time is an issue and I was hoping to find which software is the best for my needs up front instead of trying to learn enough about all of them to make an informed decision. I was thinking about Maya since there seems to be so many tutorials on line to support it.

Again, thanks for the help!

Tony

Thanks.

There are several problems taking a 2D bitmap to 3D objects. One is that Photoshop output has no actual lines in it. They may look like lines, edges, surfaces to our brains, but they really are still collections of pixels. Somehow you would have to be able tell software how to pick out lines, edges, surfaces, etc. This is VERY hard to do.

Frankly, I’ve never seen any software that does it very well at all. Adobe has Streamline and CorelDraw has their Trace. My experience is that they do it very roughly. It never seems to be as good as you want. Then it seems to take as long or longer to edit the result than it would to create it from scratch.

The 2nd major problem is that once you have a 2D OBJECT with real lines, etc., how do you convert it to 3D. The easy solution is to extrude the object out to the 3rd dimension. This works well for cubes and the few other objects that tend to go straight back. However, very little of the world is shaped like that.

Real world things have curves, beveled edges, slants, bumps, and lots of non-straight surfaces. That is just the simple objects in the world. Once you get to human shapes, it gets REALLY complex. It doesn’t help that the human brain is specially tuned to the nuances of the human shape – particularly the face. That’s why so many 3D human figures just don’t look real. It’s very hard to do.

The problem is that you can’t tell software all those different shapes that humans come in and all the angles you could view those shapes from. Not long ago I found an academic app that kind of does this for buildings and other flat stuff. It was pretty amazing at first glance. Looking closer, you could see that it moved part of the bitmap around into 3D planes. It was much better than you would think, but not even close for human shapes.

When you get into the higher end 3D modeling tools like Maya, you get special tools to unwrap the texture off the face or body. This lets you "paint" and do other artwork on it and then wrap it back on. It takes some good artistic ability, but it looks pretty good when done well.

Maya, 3D Studio, and Lightwave seems to be the most popular big boys. AutoDesk owns both Maya and 3DS, so it might be interesting to see where they go with those. Lightwave seems to cost less and do things a tad differently. They do have pretty avid fans though.

You still might want to start with Art of Illusion because it is so much easier to learn on. When you start to get it, they you will have a better idea of what you can do. This will give you ideas of what will work best for your style of working and your type of work. Then you will have some basis for evaluating which of the big boys will be best for you.

Just because a product has lots of tutorials, doesn’t mean that is the best. Maybe it’s just the hardest to learn and needs those tutorials to be useful. They all have different strengths. Do some learning and practicing and then pick the one that will work for YOU.

Clyde