Create 3D Packaging Mockups in Minutes - Adobe Dimension CC

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Thanks to Adobe Dimension CC is now easier than it's ever been to create stunning, photo realistic mock-ups for your brand identity or packaging projects. Is possible now to create these in just minutes, not hours. The advantage of a mockup is what you get to avoid the high cost of a physical sample. You can easily explore options and share examples with your clients in the early stages of the design process, removing any guesswork. Now, something that may have held you back in the past is the seeming complexity of freely modeling. But I promise you, Adobe Dimension is so easy to use, but even with no prior experience, you'll be creating incredible mockups very soon. [MUSIC] Hey, my name is Jason Miller and I'm a freelance graphic designer based in London. Although, I'm London based I have had the privilege of working for clients all across the globe. Specializes in brand identity design, and I've been doing this successfully as a freelancer for over 12 years now. This class is designed to get you up and running with Adobe Dimension as quickly as possible. We'll cover the essentials you will need to navigate through the software and start bringing your packaging and branding artwork to life. We'll look at just enough that you know exactly what you're doing. But we won't bog you down with any unnecessary details. Towards the end of the class, I'll cover some slightly more advanced techniques that you can use if you wish to create something with even greater complexity. I'm ready for this. When you are ready, let's get started. 2. Class Project: [MUSIC] The class project, create your own 3D packaging mockup using the techniques that you'll learn in this class. Actively learning and following along with the class is the best way to to this information. I highly recommend creating your own project and following along as we go through the lessons. To do that, pick something online as a point of reference. It could be a coffee bag, luxury packaging box, cosmetics container, alcohol bottle, or can, and this will serve as your point of reference. Then as we complete the class, you're going to create and customize your own version of this. This will give you something unique to show off in portfolio, or if you like, you can even follow along with a real-life project or client and use this to showcase your next packaging mockups. 3. Overview of the UI: Let's begin with a virtual tour of a software and via user-interface just to get yourself familiar. This is the screen you should see when you first fire up adobe Dimension. And if you click Create New, you can click for free pips to kind of customize your defaults here vis-a-vis the defaults for I use for a new project. So 2 thousand by 1400 pixels for the Canvas, 150 pixels per inch resolution. And click Create. And that will take you into this screen, which is a blank canvas, and various sections and toolbars around the outside. So I'll give you a quick overview of this now where to look for the different panels. But in future lessons we'll dive into a bit more detail and actually show you how and where to use each of these. But if you're used to software like Photoshop or Illustrator InDesign, and then you will find this is really simple. They've kept it streamlines. And compared to real hardcore 3D software like Cinema 4D, this is extremely simple. It's very easy to get up and running and start creating things. Over to the very left, we have some tools. And as you hover over each of these, you can see what for hotkeys are. We'll come to these in a later lesson. Next we have this Assets panel by default, which shows starter assets which are all built-in to the software. You have some basic shapes as you scroll down models. There's quite a generous selection here when you have a material section. So these are materials you can apply to models. And don't worry, I'll be showing you how this all works step-by-step later. This is just an overview. Then some more dynamic materials, substance materials that's labeled. Then the lighting section, which is separated into directional and environmental lights. And then finally images that you can apply either to objects or backgrounds. So it may seem like that's quite a lot to take in. That's all various. That's just one panel. And you've even got filters at the top. If you just want to look at objects or materials, lighting pitches, That's it. And really this Assets panel is the main panel where you refer to for adding anything new to your creation. Along the top you have your zoom level and various camera controls. Again, we'll have a lesson teaching you all about the camera. And over to the right, this is quite an important panel. So you have your scene, and this will list everything you place in this virtual 3D scene. We'll come to this in a future lesson. If I just place an object here, you'll see appears in this scene section. You've also got your environment. Any lighting will appear on the here. You've also got cameras Settings below that you have the actions and properties. Panels, which are dynamic and v's will display various options depending on which object you have highlighted. There, contextual, by clicking sphere, but I've placed on my canvas, you get all of these options on their properties, the size, and various actions. But you could apply to the selected object. If you click on the background, then the contextual Properties menu, it changes to show you the background options by clicking the background of a canvas, you can see the contextual menu. It now changes to show you options for the background, which again, we'll dive into a bit later if you hit the Escape key, but it will deselect the background canvas. And you'll see contextual properties for the canvas. So it's here. You could adjust your canvas size. If you're not happy with, it will be overrule resolution. The resolution really comes into play when you try to export and render. And that's something you do from the panel up in the top-left here, this Render tab. And that gives you various options for rendering. High-definition output. Stills of your freebie mock-up. If you're like me, you probably like to first be given a very high level overview and then dive in a little deeper once you know what you're working with. Now that we've done that, let's take a closer look at beginning with our models and finding a good starting point in the next lesson. 4. Find a Good Starting Template: [MUSIC] Before we even come to placing and manipulating the various models and assets, I want to show you how to unlock the full power of Adobe Dimension. That really is by taking advantage of this huge, almost hidden library of professionally created assets. Now if you're following along with a class project, this is a really good chance to get something that's is close to your starting reference object as you possibly can. So as we look in a moment at some premium assets, try to find something that comes as close as reasonably possible to your reference objects and that's going to make life a lot easier. It may be that there's a close match to your reference objects already included. I can see here there's a coffee bag, there is a food pouch in the included starter assets. That may be the case for you. But let's take a little tour at the additional assets that are available and see if that helps you. To find this, I think the easiest way is to click the Filter by models. Scroll right down to the bottom, and you'll see a little hyperlink browse Adobe Stock. Assuming you've got your Adobe Dimension license from having a CC account. This should already be linked up to your banking details. You may have some plan where you have assets included. Even if you don't, they're really not very expensive to license, you can see there are 15.3 thousand results for 3D objects. There's a huge library to take advantage of here in comparison to maybe 100 or so if that were included in dimension. Don't be afraid to start off a search quite specific, I'm going to search for a whiskey bottle. You can see there's really beautiful designs here to start with. If you find your searches too specific, you can try to broaden it a little. [NOISE] They tend to be quite good at tagging. So you can see Oliver whiskey bottles I searched for and found that first. I've also come up when I've searched for alcohol bottle. Have fun looking through the assets. There are some brilliant templates here. To start using them, you just need to click License that will add it to your library. You'll see it pop-up. If you change from starter assets to libraries and you'll be able to drag those license objects in. This isn't a compulsory step by any means. But I've found given V time, you may spend trying to perfect something is well-worth, very small cost of licensing the asset if it does just what you need. When you've got the asset you intend to use, whether that's a premium asset from Adobe Stock or one I've included starter assets, join me in the next lesson and we'll look at how we can place and start manipulating your model. 5. Placing & Manipulating Models: [MUSIC] Now we get to the fun part. If you followed the last lesson, hopefully, you've picked either a premium or regular asset model that you wish to use. If you're following along the class project, then make sure you've picked something that is close as possible to your reference objects. I'm going to use this twist jar and you can add that by just clicking it and it will appear on your canvas here. We'll go through some of the tools to move your camera and adjust your view but a tool we can start using straight away is the dolly tool, which appears just here in your toolbar. The shortcut I like to use is the mouse wheel. You can just use the mouse wheel to zoom in and zoom out so that you place your model in a position you're happy with. You'll notice there are these different colored axes and at the moment you might be wondering what this does but it's really simple and quite easy to use. You have a different color for each of the axes, for the y, the x, and the z, and the arrows that appear on this outer edge, they allow you to move your model along that axis. You could actually just click and drag the objects around but using one axis at a time is a little more precise so I like to use that. You've then got this little circle on each of the axis, which allows you to rotate the object. So if you click hold the circle and start to move your mouse, you can rotate on these various axes. Then finally this little square, which again appears on each of the axes, this allows you to scale. As you'd expect with an Adobe product, if you hold the shift key, that will constrain proportions and you can then scale proportionately. Another very useful shortcut is the undo key, so Control Z or Command Z will let you take this back and you can undo the changes you made. That covers how you're able to move and manipulate the selected object. Let's cover some of the camera tools that you really need to move around the canvas. Now, all of these do appear in the toolbar to the left but I prefer to use the shortcuts because they're really easy and intuitive. This tool here, if we hover over it, that's the orbit tool. An easier way to use this is simply hold down the right mouse button or if you're on a Mac, hopefully, you've got a magic mouse and you're able to do that. Right-click and drag and this will orbit you around the object you're targeting or around the center of the canvas. Next, we have the pen tool, which is here in your toolbar but I like to hold down space, right-click and drag, and this will actually move you around the canvas. This is different from moving the object and if you look at the grid marks, if I click and drag the object, the object has moved but if I space right-click and drag, I'm actually moving the camera around the canvas. There's a difference between the two. When you have multiple objects in a scene, you will definitely you need to use one rather than the other. I should also mention the orbit tool. Right-clicking and dragging, you can actually come down below the baseline. You could work if you wanted on the underside of an object. You can really, just by using those few shortcuts, you can position your camera wherever you need it to be. There's a little more to the camera but we'll come to that in a future lesson. This should be plenty just for us to get started for now. A few other little tricks that I find I use quite regularly and when I'm putting things together. If I move this up in the air and let's say I want it to snap to the ground you will see a little snapping indication there. But another way you could achieve that is by clicking under actions, this move to ground action. Sometimes that's quite useful especially if you have multiple objects selected. Also, you may be placing more than one of the same object on the canvas. I'll click to add another jar, so we now have two of them. You can alt-click and drag to duplicate as many times as you like. If you hit the delete key, that will delete an object. Nice and intuitive. Something that's really useful that I've started to use quite a bit if I create a few of these, is dragging over a number of objects to select a few of them. Or you could just hold shift and click to select them all. Under actions, this option appears contextually as long as you have more than one object or asset selected and that's align and distribute. Once you click on that, you see again, we've got the different colors corresponding to different axes. You can click on this broad flat section here to distribute the objects along that axis and it will distribute them an equal distance or you can click on the little pip to align them. If I do this, to put some space between them, select them all again, click on align and distribute and I'll distribute evenly along this axis. That puts them in an even space and then I can align them along that axis. That's a really easy way if you've got multiple objects and you want to show them in sequence, you want them to be centered and lined up nicely and of course, you want them in equal distance from each other. That's a really useful little shortcut I'm using more and more often. In our next lesson, we're going to look at changing materials. But there's one last change I'm going to make, just going to delete two of these jars and I'll work with this one. I actually want the body of the jar to be a little larger and the lid to be a little smaller. With this particular object, I can see that if I look on the scene, you can see there's a folder for the object and it's actually split into two portions. This is the case for many of the assets, and I've got the lid separate to the jar. If I click to select just the lid, you can see the blue outline is now just around that top portion. I can actually manipulate this, I'm going to just scale it down, separate to the jar and then the jar, I could also manipulate if I wanted although the problem here would be the one object might bleed into the other. You can see the problem that would cause there. Rather than do that, we're going to hit "Undo", I'm going to select the entire object, scale the whole thing to give it a little more height. Then if I wanted I control that folder open, select the lid, and just make the lid a little smaller again. That's it. I think that's the kind of proportions I'm looking for. Useful to know that you can manipulate different portions of an object, just take care if there's some interaction between them, you don't cause problems by manipulating it too much. You can also choose to show or hide the different portions. If I hide the lid by clicking that little eye symbol, you can see then we've just got the jar which is nicely rendered for us. We could always make that lid reappear in future. I think that's plenty to show you, for now, to get you to manipulate your base model. Now we'll look at really customizing it in the next lesson by changing the materials. 6. Changing Materials: [MUSIC] If you're joining me having watched the previous lesson, this is the object I've chosen to work on as a demonstration. If you're following along with the class project, perhaps you have a different asset. I'd encourage you to place that where you want it on the Canvas. Maybe manipulate the different portions of it to your needs until you're happy with the way it's looking. Now we're going to look at my favorite part of this software, which is the ability to change the materials, and you're able to do that so easily and effectively. To begin with, on your Starter Assets tab, change the filter to Materials. I'd say initially just have a play with this. Play with it by dragging and dropping different materials onto different portions of your chosen object. You can create some really beautiful combinations here. Or you could go for the same material, top and bottom. It's completely up to you. But the best way to get used to this is to have a little play, explore, and experiment. If I select my twist jar, and within the folder I'm going to make sure I'm selecting just the base of it here. You can see that under actions, an option will come to seen, which is place graphical model. In fact, let me quickly digress by showing you. I'm going to just place a standard object onto the Canvas here. It's huge, let's scale it down. You'll notice that that icon isn't present for this object I've just placed under actions. Instead it has converted to standard model. That's because this has some advanced properties that prevent it initially from having a graphic placed on it. You need to, in that situation, just click this button, then it becomes a standard model, and again, you could place a graphic on it. Sorry to digress there, but that's something you might need to know. Again, I'm going to select my jar, select the base of it. Under Actions, this time we select "Material", which is at the end. I'm going to click that. That takes you to this section here where you have these contextual options for the material. Because I dragged on I believe it was the brass, some of these are locked in and grayed out. Depending on the material you use, you may see different options here. But at times you can alter the base color. If I click on that, this is the kind of preset to achieve a brass finish. You can see that the metallic is locked in all the way to 100, but I can change the color. I could either use an image as a reference if I click on the Color tab. They started off with something like this in their reference to achieve a brass. But let's say I wanted it to be a little more saturated or I wanted it to actually be copper. I could start to move the hue over here. It's visits using a starting point and making quick tweaks and customizations. But really lets you unlock the power of this software and create really precise finishes very, very quickly. Brass is a starting point. Some changes to the color allows you to create different kinds of metallic finishes. Just to give you a better overview of the contextual properties for a material, I'm going to drop on just a standard matte. You can see now none of these options are locked. I can run through these with you. The base color that we just looked at, I could change that to something like a red. The opacity, you can actually have something that's semitransparent. I don't see what the point of completely transparent would be. Roughness, when it's at a 100 percent, that means it's completely non-reflective. As it comes down, it gets more shiny, more reflective. We'll have a quick peek at another little shortcut, which is in your top right here. It's this button, show or hide render preview. Render preview gives you just a taste of what the object will look like when it's rendered in high definition. That gives you some of the more advanced lighting effects, which you don't see in this standard default quick preview. If I click on that button, as it begins to render, you can see you're getting a little more of the effect the lighting would have on the shiny metallic lid, and on this material for the base that we've just changed and lowered the roughness on. If I put the roughness up to a 100 percent, you'll see that there's then much less reflection coming off of that. The same with metallic. If I increase this kind of replicated metallic finish, it seems as if metallic finishes done nothing. But the problem is our roughness is too high and so you're not getting the metallic sheen. As soon as I lower a roughness, you can see even in a quick preview, it now starts to look very metallic. When I release, and we've got this toggle activated, you can see that it looks like a much more metallic red finish. Next we have glow. Glow can actually give your material a light source of its own. If I put this right up to 100 percent, you can see it's now actually emanating a glow of its own. If there are other objects nearby, [NOISE] let's just double-click to select this, and we'll have that rough, we'll have it non-metallic and we won't give it a glow. When this preview loads, you should see that the glow from our glowing objects, well actually, that light will bounce off and it will interact with the object next to it. Some pretty cool effects you can create by using the glow. Just delete that object for now. We'll turn off the render preview. [NOISE] Let's double-click again to select the base of the jar. Translucence. Now, this is similar to opacity and it allows you to replicate things, with a little more advance, like if you had a bottle of champagne and you wanted the lighting to actually shine through that and refract at a certain angle. I'm not going to cover that in this class. That's a slightly more advanced option, but you do have options for translucence here. Now that we're familiar with the Properties panel, perhaps you realize that a lot of these presets that we can drag onto an object, they are actually just applying certain parameters to this panel and then locking some of them in. You can completely tweak and customize these yourself. Some of the presets, and I know there's one in particular. Let's take this laser cut material here. You get these additional options. Because this has a laser cut pattern, you can change the pattern itself, you could change the thickness, you can change the way it's tiled. You've got all kinds of extra options for pop-up, for certain materials. I'm definitely not going to run through all of these with you. But just be aware sometimes you get an increased degree of control for some of these options. One last tip I'll share with you is how to use the eyedropper tool to good effect to link or sink materials. If I select by double-clicking the bottom section here of the jar, and I either click from the toolbar or I use the shortcut I, and I click on this material that's used at the top here, it's going to straightaway copy that with all of the parameters, including any fine tuning I've made to the preset. What's great about this is that the two materials are now linked. If I double-click on the top and let's say I make some changes, let's say I go to the base color and I start changing this, you can see it's changing it to both the top and the bottom because I've used the eyedropper and there is a link. If I want to break that link, you can see that in the contextual actions there's now this icon that's popped up, and the tool tip says break link to materials. If I click on that, and I now proceed to make changes to the color, it's only making those changes to one part and not the other. The great thing is if you duplicate the object or just have multiple objects, you can sync up a large number of this and it would save you having to make painstaking changes every time. So really that's, I think, enough of an overview and my favorite tips for materials and objects. In the next lesson, let's now look at really customizing this and placing graphics on the objects. 7. Placing Graphics: In this lesson, we're going to really kick things up a gear and start customizing and making these look like real professional packaging mock-ups. As you can see here. These are a few I've created from a starting point I had in the last lesson that base jar, and these are looking really sharp, there's just a little graphic added, a logo asset I've created, and on some of these, there's a subtle background image I've used on the material and it looks really, really stunning. I'm going to guide you through my process for creating these and enable you to do the same. I'm actually going to share these assets with you in case you want to create this exactly as it looks and learn by reverse engineering it. It's up to you, you can either work on your own unique item as part of a class project or you can use the assets I've included in the class resources, and you'll be able to replicate creating exactly these that you're seeing here now. But let me guide you through the process and then you will understand how to get here and you can do the same yourself and you can do that with your own unique objects. Here's my starting point, and the first thing I want to do is change the background color. Just click the "Canvas." You will get the background properties. I'm going to change this to black. I think that creates quite a moody atmosphere and I quite like to show my mockups on black when I can. Next we want to take care of the materials, so for this one I'm going to go for a matte finish for both the top and bottom part of the jar. I'm going to change the base color to an off black, about there, double-click the top, change the base color, and it's quite useful you actually get recent colors appear at the bottom here. I'm able to match wrap, and now we're going to place our first graphic. Click, and under seen, select the part you want to place the graphic home, which for me is for base, the jar, and on the actions, we're going to click "Place Graphic Model". You should have access to the same assets. I'm sharing them with you under class resources, so you can download exactly the same just to make sure you're getting identical results, and then from there, feel free to explore and experiment with this yourself. One of these logos is placed on almost, it's replicating what a gold sticker would look like on an actual cosmetic jar. I'm going to select that version and click "Open", and you'll see it places it on the object. Something that really does annoy me about this software is that if you've made any changes to the base model, to its proportions, unfortunately, when you place graphics, it tries to replicate those adjustments and it warps the graphics. This is a little warped. It's actually a bit taller than it should be. I'm going to eyeball this and just bring it down. This is only a sample, but of course you'd want to be much more precise with this if you're doing it for an actual client. I think that looks about right proportionally, and I should explain what I'm doing. You can see because of this graphic is selected at the moment. I've got these little control handles that I can click. If I clicked without holding Shift, I can warp it either horizontally or vertically, if I hold Shift and click, I can constrain the proportions and modify that. I can also left-click and drag to move this around the material I've selected it on. You saw what happened there as it went to the bottom, it got a bit confused versus bevel on the edge and sometimes it gets a little bit complicated. You can always hit "Undo" and go back to the starting point. It's really easy to use but sometimes when it comes to fine tuning placing the graphics, you just need to be careful you don't accidentally skew things. Before I deselect this, you can see that under the properties which are contextual, you've got some options here. You've got placement, and you do have the option to fill rather than have a floating decal. We'll use that next for our background, and you've got the opacity. You might want something that looks semi-transparent. You've got roughness which we explained was how reflective it is. I'm going to drop that to make it feel very reflective and then metallic, because I want this to really shine as if it's a gold sticker and look at that. As we just orbit the camera and we let the lighting play against that, look at that. That looks beautifully realistic. Even before we played with any advanced lighting. There we are. We've got a gold sticker now, sitting on the jaw. Let's go to the back. I'm going to use the orbit tool by right-clicking to rotate around to the back. I'm going to double-click to select the base of a jar, and again, I'm going to click "Place Graphical Model". But you can see as you look above, you've actually got layers here, and you can see there's a little thumbnail showing the graphic that I've just placed and you could rename that if you want, just to keep things organized. I'm going to place another graphic, and this time I'm going to pick a label for the back and I'm going to keep things consistent. Pick this one. A nice gold outline on a white label. Again, it's warped it slightly because of the changes I made to the base model. Just bring that, eyeballing it again, so that it's roughly okay just for the purpose of this demo, and that looks pretty good for the sizing. The resolution on this is a little low, but when you go to render, that will come out looking just fine and you can always increase the overall resolution if you need to. There's our ingredients label on the back. If you're creating mockups, maybe just for a portfolio, I'd recommend not skipping that, to make it really realistic, advise little detail, just come up with a quick ingredients label if you need to. Finally, we're going to place a background pattern to really make this pop and do something different. Looking at it, I think I wanted it to be a little bit darker, so I'm going to select, first select the jar. Look at this base color, and I just want to make this a bit darker with that matte finish is not coming out quiet for where I wanted to think about here. That's looking good, and then I can just double-click on the top. I could link the two, and in fact I will, so I'll use the eyedropper, and I'll link for two, so that the materials match on this occasion. Lastly, I'm ready to now add a background pattern, so I'll double-click to select for base, and you can see it accidentally because I double-clicked on this dical. This graphic here is selected that so I don't have my base selected. Actually I can add a new layer, I think even if I do have one of those graphics selected, but useful to show you what can happen when you double-click anyway. I want to add another graphic, and I've included a few backgrounds that so some are subtle flowers on a black background, so it all ties in quite nicely. One is quite a generic luxury pattern. For this, I'm going to use flowers too, which you'll have access to in the class resources. At the moment there are two problems. One, it's placed right above my offer graphics, and I want this to serve as a background. I'm going to just drag it down and place it below those other graphics. Secondly, it's appearing as a decal, and I need to change placement to Fill. You'll see that now tries to fill the object. I'm going to just drag. When this looks roughly circular, I figured that that's when the proportions are non-warped. Unfortunately there's nothing here. There's no option under properties that lets you make sure there's no warping happen, which is quite annoying. When this circle with the control handles looks like a perfect circle, that's when it's not being warped in any way. I'm going to just drag, now holding Shift, and scale this down. You can see I've got the option repeat it. I can scale this right all the way down and actually have it repeat many times. But that's not the effect I'm going for. I'm going to place it I think about here, and then drag. Let's make it a little smaller. Change that to mirror. I want something like that. That kind of effect. Where you can see the flowers just peeking in below the label, and then decorating the back of the jar as well. I think that's looking quite good. That's quite effective. I might change the top now. I'll double-click on the lid, unlink it. I'm just noticing it looks quite different in color. I don't really want to place the same artwork on the top, but I'm going to darken that base color. I might just make this a little more shiny just so it doesn't clash. With the finish we've got now by adding that background to the object. I think that's pretty good. I'm going to jump across now to the classic. Here's one I made earlier. Here it is. This is the one I've just demonstrated to you. In fact I've placed a little bit of a background from this one here, which I really love. I think that works so well with, that's replicating, just printing in gold, the logo one without a sticker. I think that looks really premium. We've used that background actually on the lid, which ties the two together nicely. All of these have been created using the same techniques, just different 2D objects to create these different options. This has, I think it's a warm-up finish, and just a basic black logo, but that also looks quite effective. It's got the same sticker as this other one. Then over here we have one that's again quite simple. Just white ink used to print both the logo and the ingredients on the back. I don't think it's a damask pattern, but something similar that's subtly printed in the background. Of course with these two we've got the lid layer turned off. If I select that, you can see lid is hidden. Because for this we're just showing what the exposed jar looks like. Two things you can do before moving on to the next lesson. Using the assets I've included in the class resources, see if you're able to show your mastery of the techniques we've used so far. See if you are able to replicate these examples. Feel free to pause the video as long as you need to, see if you can replicate these. Or even better, create something better than I have using the assets and then share that in the class projects. It'll be really cool to see what you're able to come up with. You can do that. I think that's quite a good exercise to really cement what we've learned so far. The next, if you're doing the class project and you're creating a unique product for yourself, try to use these techniques to create your product and tweak and customize it to your liking. Now to do that you may need to create the 2D assets that I've been placing. I'm going to jump over to Illustrator. These are the artboards I've created for the class assets I shared with you. I just created a very simple wordmark logo with a tagline included, and it's positioned so that the whole canvas forms the size of a sticker that you might place on a cosmetic jar. The same for the ingredients, I've just used placeholder text under the actual ingredients. We've got this organic certified logo here to make it seem more realistic. They're just a simple border around the outside. If you use Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop, you just want to create these assets one-by-one as you would for any branding project. The difference being you're actually going to be able to mock this up and show your clients what this will look like on the intended product. The artboards that seem to be blank are actually hiding white text or objects. That's why they appear to have nothing on them. You'll just need to export these as PNGs if you want the transparency, which Adobe Dimension will honor. If you look at the results, it does indeed let you place the PNGs with that transparency working beautifully. It takes a little bit of planning. If you need some help maybe sharpening up your logo creation skills, I've actually got some courses here on Skillshare that will help you to do just that. But see if you can create at least a logo, maybe some ingredients, labels, or warnings, something to make it look realistic, and have fun creating your very own packaging mock-up. Or if you're happy just creating the samples that I've shared with you here, then that's also absolutely fine. Either way, you've learned to put this together using the software. I always think it's helpful to look at existing examples to reverse engineer things. For that reason, in the next lesson I'm going to share with you some real-world examples from projects I've worked on with various clients. 8. Real World Examples: [MUSIC] As promised, some real-world examples, and for each of these, I'm going to share with you what I've created in Adobe Dimension. We finished mockup, and I'm also going to share with you the assets I created in Illustrator to achieve the effect. Hopefully, looking between the two of them, you can reverse engineer the process as I've used it in these different projects. This is a very makeshift dieline. A dieline is essentially the way a box looks when it's deconstructed. As you can see in the illustration here, it's going to be shipped out to the client completely flat. When it's folded and glued together, it's going to look something like this. That's what we have here. This is a very rough version of the flat dieline that would be needed. Unfortunately, you can't go straight from a dieline into the finished result that we're hoping for in dimensions. In a real life project, usually you have to put that dieline together for the client, but you then got to slice apart the individual assets you're going to need to create this realistic mock-up. In this case, I've done that by laying out what I need as it needs to appear on the dieline. I've got some notes here, so a spot UV varnish was going to be used for one portion, regular ink printing for another, and if I zoom out, in this case, I did create other options for the client, but I won't show you mockups of that. Here on these art boards, I've saved out the individual graphics that I would need to place over in Adobe Dimension. You can see I've simply placed these here. These boxes were premium assets. I found those on the Adobe Stock, and they were just perfect, they match closely enough what we were hoping to achieve. Using those as a starting point, and thankfully they had in this model a version that's shown with a lid open, a version with a lid closed. It was just perfect. I could just double-click and you can see I've got my layers here and just start placing those different graphics in place. Then under the properties, just playing with the finishes to replicate what I was going for. This is something I came up with to replicate the way spot UV varnishing would look if it was printed on that portion of a box. This is quite a straightforward example. I'll share another one with you. This is a project I'm quite proud of. I actually did this almost as soon as the software was released, and these are luxury candles. I jumped into using this software because the client didn't have a massive budget, but we needed to create some concepts where we really illustrated what the full range would look like. You can see you've got these different boxes and candles corresponding to each range, which would have a different fragrance. This is a bit busier than the thing I tend to design now. But it was appropriate to the audience. It was I think a UAE audience and it was to look very detailed and opulent and the software really let me do a nice job showing this concept off. The objects themselves are really simple. We've just got cylinders and boxes, but the layering and the artwork had to be carefully organized before it could be placed correctly. If I jump across the Illustrator, you can see we've got a dieline here for each of the box types. This is the base used for the candle and then the logo itself was placed in the space separately. Then we've got a PNG created for the logo here. Nothing too complicated. But when you need to prepare that for eight different objects, and they all need to, when they're lined up like this, they need to look identical. You can't have one that's warped or looking different to the other. You've got to have a nice precise workflow to get the results you're looking for, and dimensions let's you do exactly that. Something else which is quite nice is you can create just one scene for all of your objects and you're able to toggle and hide them. If I wanted to hide all of a range except for this one, I'm then free to use these objects. You can always line something up for a specific shoot and just save it. I could save this now or undo these changes just to get a particular shot. But I generally find it's quite useful to have all of my objects included in a single project. That's the way I like to work, at least. I'll show you one more real-life example, and that is this one, which was a concept created for the brand, Billionaire, to do a range of champagne and also prosecco. Here's a really nice mockup of the champagne bottle, and you'll notice without the full render, it looks quite fake. There's no transparency showing to the bottle here. But if you turn the quick render on, and I'll show you also the final render I output for the project, then it starts to take the lighting into account, and refraction, and it looks far more realistic. Here is the final render that was presented to the client. You can see all the lighting details you'd expect. Even this reflection here of a gold foil in the logo being shown on the base of a canvas. Really nice touches. Let me show you how this looked in Illustrator. These are the range of assets I created. Some of these are for the prosecco bottle, which I'll show you secondly, but we have a wraparound that I could use on the champagne bottle, an emblem that we placed, I think, on a little bit of a foil paper for the top, then the same again for the prosecco bottle. As long as you plan carefully, you figure out which assets you're going to need, you can just take it a piece at a time and it's possible to put together something that looks quite complex without it being too much trouble at all. If I double-click on the bottle, in fact, if I go back one there, you can see this particular asset, it gave you a liquid separate to the glass, which was really useful so that I could get the lighting just right. I won't cover all the ins and outs of this in this course. But suffice to say, if on this glass layer, you play with the, this is a translucent, so I alluded to earlier, and a little bit of a metallic reflection showing you can create something that is very, very realistic indeed. Next, I'll just show you the prosecco bottle. Here it is. It's very similar to the champagne, different types of bottle. Something unique about this was what the client wanted there to be edible gold inside. When you moved or shook the bottle, you'd see that floating through the liquid and they wanted that replicated in a mock-up. I wasn't sure Dimension would be able to do this. But actually, by placing, you can see here these gold freckles. By placing that in the liquid layer, it was possible to do this. If I twirl open the liquid, you can see here I've got two graphics, which are essentially, I took stars, I just took some images of galaxies, I deleted the black out of it, change the color to give it a gold tint and used that as a PNG by placing that in the liquid with a little bit of a metallic sheen to it. When you look at the final render, it really sparkles and looks very realistic indeed. I'm really happy with the way this came to life. I think that nicely illustrates that. Although this software is quite simple, it's easy to use. You can dive straight into it. When you plan carefully and you take advantage of its features, you can do some things that are very advanced indeed in 3D and get professional results. 9. Changing the Background: [MUSIC] Although we touched on backgrounds in an earlier lesson, I just want to focus specifically on some of the presets and the options that you have for your background because it can really make or break the mockup. If I click on the canvas to bring up the background and the properties, first of all, you can see that you have this option here on the ground plane that can be turned off or on. But if it's turned on, you can actually use this to create a reflection. This can give a really nice showroom effect. If I turn on the render preview. You have to play with this to make sure it's not too strong and distracting or not to faint. But you get this really nice effect here where it's as if it's on a glossy car showroom floor, which looks really nice for certain mockups you might want to put together. The roughness, as always, that controls how shiny, how reflective or non-reflective that looks. You can see that where I'm using something like gold as I start to put that roughness up, is actually diffusing and it's almost blurring the gold. The more detail I'm adding here is actually going to take longer to render and to put this preview together for us. But there's much more to backgrounds than that. If you click to filter by images, you'll see that some of these images are labeled as backdrops. If for example, I click on this, this one with the table, it's designed to make it look as if your item or your object were placed on a table in a certain location. Now, the problem is, at the moment, it's hovering in the middle of the air, and the lighting doesn't look very consistent, but you've got this handy action over here which says, match image. If you click there and you can tell it what you allow it to change, if you've carefully position your lighting, you may not want to let it change that, but we're going to let it change everything. The canvas size, lighting, even the camera perspective. When you click "Okay" incredibly it's placed your object to look as realistic as it can placed within that environment. It's not something I use a great deal, but when you do need to create something that looks realistic in a particular environment and you don't want to spend a lot of time on it. Well, it's two clicks away. 10. Lights Setting up Your Lighting: [MUSIC] As anyone who's ever worked in a photography studio would know lighting really makes all the difference. Adobe Dimension gives you a wide range of lighting options to use and to choose from. Now I've placed two very basic options here, just to illustrate the way lighting works and to make sure you really understand what you're working with so that you can create your scenes and have that extra level of realism. The first thing you'll want to do is bring up the lighting filter under your starter assets tab. You've got directional lights and also environmental lights. Now the difference between the two, the environmental lights, as you click them, they apply a different preset to your single environmental lighting setup, and that setup uses an image that's diffused and it's projected onto your scene as if that's where the light source is coming from. If there are any reflections, is actually going to be mimicking this here that you can see when you click on it, this is the preview image. You can see this little softbox here in the center that's actually being replicated as if it were reflecting onto the right side of a ball and the same to the left here with this much warmer softbox, they've replicated. That's a single environmental light and all of the presets in this bottom section, they change, sometimes the base image that's being reflected. You can in fact change and select your own base image, which lets you really customize the results. But these options are just changing that preset. You can rotate, which makes that lighting source come from a different angle, and for something like this where we have a gold finish, I'll definitely want some lighting to play on that gold so that it really pops. That's quite useful. Sometimes you need to position and fine-tune even the environmental light. You can also colorize the light source. If you tick that box, you'll then be able to either pick a base color or what I quite like to do is click on the temperature tab and you can then adjust for color temperature freely. That's the environmental light and that appears in a scene panel up here on the environment. The directional lights are different in that they replicate the 3D setup that you would get with movable lights in a photography studio. Essentially, it's trying to replicate a setup like this and as is the case here, you've got the option to add as many of these directional lights at different heights and positions as you would like. You can either click to add a circular light or a square light individually and I'll click once, twice, three times and you can see over here on the scene, we've got three square directional lights. As I click to select each one, I could change the intensity of that light, I could click color and temperature to change the temperature, I could rotate the light that it's coming from a different position in the scene and I can even adjust for height to create just the effect I'm looking for. You can also see that, unlike the environmental light, the directional lights, I'll just turn two of these off for now and they interact between the objects, our tower we have here is actually casting a shadow onto our sphere. That's an extra layer of control you don't get with the environmental light, no matter where the environmental light is coming from, one object isn't going to cast a shadow onto the other. So that's quite an important difference. You can delete lights by simply, while they're selected, hitting the "Delete" key or you can select them and hit the trash can icon under "Actions." The sun can be quite useful. It tries to replicate the lighting effects you would expect from having the sun. You can change the rotation and the height of that. That gives you something that is quite close to a daylight effect. For certain scenes you want to create may be just what you need. I'm going to delete that. Free point light. This is an interesting one, and if we click to add this to the scene, it actually positions three different lights, a key light, and the presets here are set in such a way that it replicates the effect of a strong sharp key light, a fill light, which if I turn the others off, is intended to be much softer, to just fill in any shadows across the scene and a backlight, which by default is going to position behind your object and the direction that you're facing. So you get this backlight effect here which can be quite nice. Maybe create something similar to the scene I've created here and the best way to learn is really by experimenting until you really get the hang of what these different lights are doing. You can see it can make a big difference if you're using special finishes and you really want to bring out the shine in a gold, for example, then you're really going to want to make sure your lighting is bringing it to life. Some of the advanced options will allow you to do that. I'm using the fill light, which is quite soft but if I increase the size and the edge softness, and then I'll just bump the intensity up a little, you can see that that's really making a portion of a gold pop. Just play the intensity back a bit, but that's a very different effect. If I reduce the size and the softness, you would then get a very harsh, almost a flare appearing on the objects, which might be exactly what you're looking for. Have a play of the options and make sure that you're completely happy with your lighting and the way it's bringing your scene to life. 11. Camera Setting and Saving Key Camera Angles: [MUSIC] Camera angles and although we've learned how to manually manipulate and move the camera when you're trying to create consistent previews of products and maybe you have more than one to show off, and you're asked to go away to make changes for a client. You want to come back and you want to show the same mockups. It's really useful to use some of the inbuilt camera tools, the dimension has to offer. The area we're going to be focusing on is this little pane here. There aren't many options, but I'll run through them and what they do, ''Frame Selection'' clicking in that, as it says in the tooltip, it just fills your currently selected objects within the frame. If I was off somewhere here, I click that, it just zooms us back, so up the object is centered in view. There's actually a specific camera Undo button. If you click ''Undo,'' it won't undo changes to your camera positioning. But this specific Undo button up here, I would do just about. When you've manually positioned the camera and let's say you've got just the angle you're looking for, so that's quite nice there. That's looking good in the render preview. In fact, I would due to the lighting, probably just change the lid and that material from being a jet-black to something a bit softer so that when it's rendered, it shows up nicely like that. But let's say I was happy with this. I wanted this to be a shot that I sent to the client. We first save the position of the shots we want to render, and then in the next lesson, I'll show you how to output those. We've got our lights ready. Now we're getting the camera ready. In the next lesson, it will be action. We need to go to this icon here, Camera Bookmarks, and click to "Add a bookmark of a current view," which we'll do now. We'll name this front and that's now saved. If we mess around and rotate things, we can click on that bookmark and it will take us straight back to that exact view. Let's get another view. Let's have one showing the back of the product, perhaps be ingredients label. Let's do it from that angle there. You could do it completely centered if you want. But I always think it looks nicer to have it at a little bit of an angle. Let's save that view. It will put that as back, and so on. You get for your ID, you might want to show the top, the bottom, and you're welcome to do exactly that. Finally, when you're ready and you've got the bookmarks for the different angles you want to render from saved, join me in the next lesson and we'll look at outputting this. 12. Action Rendering: [MUSIC] Rendering, which if you followed the steps previous, this is actually the easiest step in the entire class. If you click the Render tab at the top of Adobe Dimension and if you've carefully set your camera bookmarks and labeled them you'll see under Render settings rather than just recurrent view you can take and select which of your bookmarked views you would like dimension to carefully render, which is taken into account all the lighting effects and reflections and it creates something that looks very polished and professional for your clients to see or perhaps for your portfolio. Just a few options to choose from, you can choose a filename, you've got a few quality settings. High I found isn't really necessary, a medium seems to be more than good enough. I tend to export as a PNG. I don't think a PSD is necessary unless there are things you want to tweak maybe in Photoshop in the post production. When you're ready just click to choose a safe location and hit Render. Depending on the machine you're using this could take just a minute or so or it could take 10 minutes, half an hour, even an hour if you've got something complicated, high resolution with lots of objects. It will give you once I click that button a render status and it will try to estimate the time it will take. I'm working on a bit of a beast. I've gotten Alienware PC and 64 gigabytes of RAM, a decent graphics card. My PC tends to make short work of this. If I was working on my MacBook Pro it actually takes sometimes 5-10 times as long. The power of your machine will really make a difference here. Actually I'll show you. Now that these have finished, you can see it took just under a minute for each of those. This is how the final renders came out. Absolutely flawless, no pixelation and this is with a medium quality. I'm very happy with the results you get from that setting. Sit back, relax, let it render your artwork for you. When you're ready, join me in the next lesson where we'll look at a few ways, we can just push the boundaries a little further if you want to. 13. Bonus Push the Boundaries: [MUSIC] Now, unlike a real-life photo shoot in a studio for product photography, where you have some very hard restraints. Because if this is a virtual environment, you really have some freedom to push the boundaries and to create dreamlike scenes, but you could really never do, never replicate, or at least it would be very hard to in a studio. For example, taking this product shot here, you could add a splash of a very realistic gold. It's a little bit over the top, but just to show you the thing you can create, and there's actually a designer I follow who uses something like this, even behind her branding and product mockups, and that sometimes it just adds that extra bit of flair and dimension to what you've created. Something like this, if you render it, in fact, let me just show you the end results. Because that's better than giving you a render preview. Here's is the base, and that's what it would look like if you rendered it with this gold splash. This is deliberately over the top, but you can see what's possible. Again, it looks reasonably photo-realistic. Something else you can do is actually create a virtual studio background. I'll show you what I mean by this. What a difference this is to just showing it on a plain black background. There's a few things I've done here and I'll walk you through how I did it. On the camera, you can actually change the perspective, the field of view, and even the focus to create a sense of depth for field. You've got a little set focus point button here that lets you target that on your object. That really makes a difference, when you are rendering. I think that depth of field can make or break professional-looking product shot. If I zoom out here, you can see I've created a virtual studio backdrop, floor and then a backdrop. To create that, I've simply used the plane as a basic shape. You drag that where you want it, scale it as desired. Let's just move that up. So that it's covering my marble floor underneath. You've got the option then to use any of the finishes you'd like. You could shoot against a wooden walnut floor, you could do something quite creative, you could make the floor look like it were gold, and then when you click the Render Preview, you'll see that you get a very realistic gold reflection. You might have to fine-tune that so that it's not over the top, but really the possibilities are endless. All I've done is rotate that plane into place to serve as a background that we have there behind my object. Actually for my background plane, I've literally just used this striped glossy paper, which you can customize for the width of the stripes and the number of stripes and so on to really get the effect you're looking for. That really lets you take things a step further and the results you get once you position your camera, just take care of it, none of her background is cutoff or peaking in. You can always enlarge it if you needed to scale that, or you could just zoom the camera to a point, it's not a problem. Clicking the camera in scene, you can change the perspective. I think a fairly tight field of view just keeps the focus on your object, especially if you're shooting just a single object. Turning focus on, making sure you've targeted your item correctly, when you look up a render preview, it really makes a world of difference. You can quickly see the results from these view that I've exported, one here of a gold floor, which is actually quite effective for this product. As is always the case in design, it's the little details that make the difference. Just for a few touches, if it's a single object, adding a depth of field, thinking about your background environment, that can help you to take this a step further. 14. Conclusion & Thanks for Watching: Well done for completing the class. I hope you've enjoyed it and I hope you've learned some simple new techniques along the way. Please don't forget to upload your own creations into the class projects area. I'm excited to see what you're able to come up with using these techniques. Please feel free to leave a review if you've enjoyed the class and be sure to follow my profile so that hopefully I can see you in the next one. [MUSIC]