Create Bold 3D Letterforms with Adobe Dimension | Riya Mahajan | Skillshare
Drawer
Search

Playback Speed


  • 0.5x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 2x

Create Bold 3D Letterforms with Adobe Dimension

teacher avatar Riya Mahajan, 3D Artist

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:52

    • 2.

      Class Orientation

      1:16

    • 3.

      Dimension Interface

      6:38

    • 4.

      Studying & Sketching the Letterform

      5:51

    • 5.

      3D Composition

      11:56

    • 6.

      Materials

      6:41

    • 7.

      Lighting & Environment

      8:07

    • 8.

      Camera

      3:32

    • 9.

      Render & Post Processing

      6:47

    • 10.

      Conclusion

      1:09

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

1,873

Students

30

Projects

About This Class

If you love 3D or want to start learning, join 3D Artist Riya Mahajan, in this class where she will show you how to create stunning, bold 3D letterforms using simple shapes. From ideating to learning the basics of Adobe Dimension, you will get a complete insight into her process.

You don't need any prior skills for this class! Dimension is an easy-to-use 3D software that offers ready-made assets like 3D shapes, materials and lights. Forget modeling and sculpting, you can create amazing artworks with just the starter assets. 

Throughout the class, you will learn how to:

  • Study letters and break them down into simpler forms
  • Creat 3D compositions using the simple forms in Dimension
  • Work with materials
  • Set the 3D scene using lights, camera and environment settings
  • Render the 3D artwork
  • Edit the final artwork in Photoshop

Take the leap to create stunning 3D letterforms and master the art of working on Dimension.

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Riya Mahajan

3D Artist

Teacher

Riya Mahajan is a Graphic Designer turned 3D artist, designer, illustrator.

Her 3D work has been recognised by global platforms and she currently works with international brands on multiple projects. Adobe featured her 3D artwork on the Adobe Dimension Splash screen. She is the winner of the 2021 '36 Days of Type' challenge, an annual global challenge where designers and artists come together to interpret letters and numbers their own way. 

See full profile

Level: Beginner

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: If you've been wanting to learn 3D and did not know how to begin, this class is the right starting point for you. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to create simple 3D letterforms using Adobe Dimension. 3D can be quite intimidating in the beginning. So we'll be starting with something as small as a letter form. Once you know the basics you can go ahead and create much bigger and complex compositions on your own. Hey, I'm Riya, and welcome to my Skillshare class. I'm a graphic designer turned 3D artist. I'm from India and I've been working on my own since 2021. I've been using Dimension for almost two years now. It's a very simple 3D software which does not let you sculpt or model on it. Those constraints actually pushed me to explore it more and I found many interesting ways of incorporating it into my workflow. It gave my career the boost that I wanted and now I work with many of my dream clients. I worked with Adobe on multiple projects. You might have seen my work if you have opened Dimension before and seen the splash screen or if you follow the 36 days of type challenge. In this class, I'll be teaching you how to create simple 3D letterforms using Adobe Dimension. Whether you're a complete beginner with no prior experience in 3D or whether you're a 3D designer who just wants to learn a new software, I think this class can still can help you. You can incorporate it into your workflow for logo design. icon design, product and packaging. The applications are endless, the more you explore, the more you'll realize how much you can use the software. I'll be sharing my process of creating these 3D letterforms, starting from sketching to creating it on the software and post-processing. So I'll see you in the next lesson! 2. Class Orientation: In this video, I'll tell you what the class project is, so you can have it at the back of your mind while you're going through the class and seeing what my process of creating those letterforms is. I want you to choose any letter from A-Z or any number from 0-9. It could be your initial, your lucky number, or just a letter that you really like, and try to identify the characteristics of that letter or number. We won't be using any fonts or typefaces to make the 3D letterform on Dimension, so when we break it down into simpler forms, it's good to know which forms and what areas of the letter you can play with. It's also good to know what your inspirations are or what inspires you. I generally lean towards clean and softer forms and pastel colors, and that's something I try to bring into all of my artworks. To start, you just need your computer or a desktop. If you're using a MacBook, I suggest you keep it on charge, as 3D softwares are quite heavy and this can lead to overheating or crashing of the software. You can also have some pencils and paper ready if you want to sketch something out before you make it on Dimension. Once you have everything set up, you can just jump into Dimension and we can have a look at how the software works. 3. Dimension Interface: In this video, we'll have a quick look at the Dimension interface. Before we jump into that, I just want to show you how a photography setup works because the elements used here are very similar to that of a 3D setup. There are five main elements that we'll be working with in 3D, and you can see those here as well. First, we have the main subject or the 3D object. Then we have the material on top of the object, which will determine the color and the texture of the object. Then we have the lights. It could be artificial lights that are set up or natural light, like the sunlight that's coming in from the windows. Fourth is the background or the backdrop. This gives the object more context by adding shadows and reflections at the bottom, as well as determining the background color. Lastly, we have the camera, which is the most important thing because the camera angle and the distance of the camera from the subject can dramatically change how we see the composition. Once we know all these elements, we can see how to work with these on Dimension. Let's just open Dimension and have a quick look at the software. The interface is divided into three parts. We have the left panel, we have the space in the center, and we have the right side panel. On the left panel, we have all the Starter Assets or the pre-made assets. We can toggle between our 3D models, materials, light settings, and images. In the center is our workspace. This is where we will be adding all the Starter Assets to create our 3D compositions. You can always resize your canvas by clicking here on the top left and by changing the values in the Properties panel on the right. I generally keep it at 1080 px as I add a lot of my artworks on social media. If you see now, it's bleeding out. you can't actually see what's happening in the other part of the workspace. You can go to the drop-down arrow, and say 'fit canvas'. Now, you can see the entire workspace. To add a Starter Asset to your canvas, you can either just click on one of the objects, or drag and drop it into the canvas. When you're dragging and dropping it, you can use the blue square as your guide because it lets you place the asset anywhere you want. Once you place your asset in the canvas, you can see it pops up here under the Scene drop-down. Here, you can see all the things that you've added to your workspace already. Environment and camera are defaults because you can't really have a 3D scene without that. That is always going to be a part of your composition. At the bottom here, you can see the properties of our Starter Assets, which includes the position, the angle of rotation, scale. This is something you can either change manually, or you can use shortcuts to do that as well. There are three shortcuts that you need to know of, which are E, R and S. When I press E, I get these arrows. With these arrows, I can move the object in my workspace along the three axes. If I press R, I can rotate the object along the three axes. I'm just going to undo it right now using Command + Z. To scale, I can press down S, drag the handles. The object is not scaling proportionately. You can do that by just pressing Shift, and then dragging this. This is very similar to Adobe softwares like Illustrator and Photoshop, if you've used them before. You can also hide or lock your objects using the invisibility and the lock toggle in the right panel, right next to the object under the 'Scene'. In order to place a material on your object, you can go to the material toggle on the left-hand side panel. You can either just click on the material with the object selected, or you can drag and drop the material on top of the object. As the materials can't really work in isolation and have to be used with the object, you can't actually see them under the 'Scene' panel as it is. You need to go inside the object properties to see what material has been applied, and then further change the properties there. You can change the color, the opacity levels, the roughness. This differs for every material based on what all you can change in that particular material. I find matte to be one of the most flexible materials, which is why I use it very often. On the top right, you also have some camera angle settings like undo camera angle, redo camera angle, or bookmark angles. On Dimension, when you do undo or Command Z, it does not really change the camera settings. These undo and redo camera options are really helpful. You might be needing them very often. This button to the right is to get a realistic view of your 3D scene. By clicking here, you can actually see how a render might come out. You also see how dark the shadows and the highlights are, and whether you need to change something before you actually render it out. This render preview option is something we'll be using very often because it's important to keep checking your render preview before you actually render out the final artwork. There are also some ways in which you can move around your workspace. What we saw earlier was moving and editing the object, but you can also change the camera angles using the keys 1, 2, and 3. When I press 1, I can rotate around the workspace. When I press 2, I can pan along the workspace. With 3, I can zoom in and zoom out. You can just press 3 and scroll on your mouse as well. So this lesson will give you a basic sense of the overall interface. From the next video on, we'll see how to start creating the actual letterforms. 4. Studying & Sketching the Letterform: Before we sketch out our letters or ideate on how to go about it, it's very important to study how the letter is built and how the skeleton of the letter can be broken down into simpler shapes. What I usually do is I go to Google fonts or Adobe fonts and I look up the letter that I'm going to design. Let's check A or B. Let's go ahead with the A. This way you can see the various ways in which the same letter can be represented. We can see the multiple variations that have come up. Here we have parallel stems of the 'A' with a rounded apex at the top. This one has slanted stems with a very sharp and pointed apex. This one is flourished. This one has serifs at the bottom. SO once we have the skeleton of the A, which is this angle on the top and this bar in the middle, we can further break it down into simpler forms. On 3D, we don't only work with outlines. It's very important to understand how a skeleton can be converted into solid simple shapes. For example, an A can be broken down into a triangle into a triangle or it could just be a triangle with a trapezium at the bottom. We can also look at ways to play with the bar in the middle, it need not be a straight line. For example, if we have this angle, the thing in the middle could be a circle. As long as we maintain this peak and the division in the center, we are still going to get a form that looks somewhat like the A. We can also try to replicate the negative space over here. As you can see, it's not completely flat and you can do that by retaining the angle at the top but creating a form at the bottom that goes in slightly. You can just go crazy at this point because this process is only for you. Just try to find the perfect form which you can then replicate in 3D. You can also try to analyze what shapes from the 3D software can be used here and see how we can fill the gaps in-between. Here I could use a cylinder on top of a cylinder on top of a cylinder. Here it could be like a teardrop shape that is really condensed and then stacked together or aligned together. You can go through a similar process for any letter. For example, if this is the skeleton of B, what I see here are two circles on this side and two squares on the other. It could even be a longer rectangle with two circles on the right-hand side. Let's have a look at how we can break down the W because that is the letter I'll be demonstrating in our lessons. The skeleton of W is two downward facing peaks or two valleys. We can have an option where this is way below the legs here or there can be an option where they're the same height. You can have two angles that also intersect. So if you look at different typefaces, you can find all these different kinds of W's. Now how we can make it into solid shapes using simpler forms is having two triangles next to each other, we can intersect the two triangles. We can try variations and we'll find a form that is more interesting. So what is happening here is because we filled up this space, it looks more like a V. That is because the negative space that we get in a W is going away. In order to reform those kinds of forms what we can do is have a triangle but then give it a curve on top. What this will do is create a negative space over here. Then you can add another one and two at the bottom. Now we have a W over here. I'm going to keep exploring till I have two or three options that I can work with. Whenever you work on dimension, you'll realize that 2D forms and 3D forms are slightly different. So it's better to have options from the beginning in case one or two don't work out. I can even make this form rounded. So once we have our sketches ready and you have two or three options that you can go ahead with, you can then go to dimension, see what all basic shapes or forms are available and then you can try and replicate this on 3D. 5. 3D Composition: With the sketches and the basic idea in place, I'm going to start exploring the forms on dimension. Under the starter assets on the left-hand side panel, we have basic shapes and models. Models are actual objects like cans or boxes. More figurative ones that we can use in compositions. The basic shapes, on the other hand, are more fundamental, like the sphere, or a cube, or a cone. There are also some basic shapes under the models like a capsule and a drop. However, the difference between these and the basic shapes on top, is that the basic shapes are much more customizable. I'll just show you a quick comparison between the two so that it's easier for you to understand what I'm trying to explain. I'm going to take a cylinder from the basic shapes and a capsulate from the models. I'll just add them to the canvas and just separate these two out. Let's just have a look at it from the front angle so it's easier to see the comparison. With the capsule selected, you can see that the only things we can change in the properties are the position, rotation, scale, or the size. However, in a cylinder, there are much more options. We can even add a bevel. We can increase or decrease the size of the bevel radius and make it much more rounded. We can also increase or decrease the height of the shape itself. And that does not distort the bevel. We can even slice it, which means we can cut the cylinder at any angle we like, and we can just use this slider to choose the angle or we can add a value manually. Having these customizable options will definitely offer more flexibility. It's not necessary that you will need to change the structure so much for every composition. But if you want to, you will have to come back to the basic shapes. I will just delete this for now. While creating a composition, it's also very crucial to use the right form because each form has a very different character or personality. A sphere, for example, is quite rounded, which is why it seems very friendly and cute. A cube seems very stable and it is something that can be used as a nice base for your compositions. Something like a cone, which has a pointed tip, can be used to convey direction because however you orient or rotate your cone the eye will always go to the pointed tip. It's quite important to know these things because it can dramatically change how your composition looks. When I create the letterforms, I usually just use one kind of a shape and then repeat it in different orientations and angles. If I want to use multiple shapes, I generally use shapes that look similar. For example, a sphere and a capsule or a sphere and a drop because all of them have this roundedness that make them look cohesive when used together. And it's overall more pleasing to the eye as well. It's good to know which forms go well together. You would want to pair sharper forms with sharper forms, rounded forms with rounded forms. You can also convert sharper forms like a cube into a rounded form by giving it a bevel. You can increase the bevel as much as you want to make it more and more rounded. For now, let's create a few options for the W, which is the letter I'm going to demonstrate throughout this class. First, let's try creating two downward-facing peaks or valleys because that is the basic structure of the W. What I did right now was move the cone to the ground, using the 'move to ground' option here. Once a form or a part of it goes below the ground, you can't actually see it after rendering. It's important to be aware of these things. I'm going to zoom in a little bit, and by pressing the Alt key, once I get these double arrows, I'm going to click on the move tool and just drag it. This will duplicate it and... it's looking quite odd right now because of the weird intersection that's happening here, and that is going to happen because these shapes are quite wide and not overlapping properly. We'll try selecting these two. Press S and I'll try to make them slightly narrower. If we go to the undo camera angle on top, we can go back to the previous angle to see how it would look from the front, because that was the angle we had earlier. Then press E to get our move tool and move it a little bit forward to give it slightly more depth. Adding this depth will make sure there are shadows falling on the cone behind because they're not on the same plane anymore. You can always go to the toggle here to see how it might render out eventually. I suggest you keep doing this every now and then to check where you're at in terms of the composition. Let's leave this exploration as it is for now and see if we can try something more. I'm going to go ahead and drag and drop a capsule into the scene. I'm going to press R and tilt it at an angle of 30. If you see, having sketched earlier made the process much easier because I don't have to think of the next steps. Right now, if you see, the capsule's gone below the ground, so I'm going to go and say 'move to ground', so it comes up and touches the surface. Using the same Alt key, I'm going to duplicate the capsule and take the copied one to the side. I'm now going to select both of these. Click on Duplicate and grab it a bit to the top. Now we have two sets of these. I want to tilt these to 30 degrees over to the opposite side. As these have already been tilted to 30 degrees on the left side, what I can do is select them separately and tilt them at an angle of 60 degrees to the opposite side, or I can select both of these and rotate them horizontally at 180 degrees. There's no one way of doing something. You just have to choose the process that's easier for you. Now, I'll move these to the ground and just slide them to the side. And we have another exploration ready. Do make sure that it intersects properly because that will really change how it eventually renders. I'm still finding this form to be a bit too clean and not very interesting. I'm just going to try a few different things. I'll make the sides narrower like we did for the earlier one. That looks fine. Right now we don't have enough depth or even overlap happening because all the shapes are in one plane and there aren't enough shadows and highlights that will make the form pop out. I'm going to choose the alternate capsules and move them slightly to the front. I think this looks much better. We could even put them to the back, but I think I prefer the front. So now, this becomes another exploration for W, and we can again keep it on a hold for now. You can keep iterating till you crack it and are really happy with something. I'm not as happy with these explorations, so I'm going to go ahead and try more. I'm going to take a drop shape now. I feel it's much more versatile because it has a pointed side as well as a rounded one and it might lead to compositions that are less plain. I'll now duplicate this and rotate it upside down. I'm also pressing Shift while I rotate so that it can rotate at intervals of 15 degrees. Take it up and then to the side. And again, duplicate the one on top. This gives us one of the valleys of the W. I'll now select the one at the top and one at the bottom. Press Alt and duplicate that bit. Now we have a form that looks like W, and I think am quite happy with it. It's not very flat. It has nice intersections, good shadows and highlights that's happening. Whenever we have multiple shapes, sometimes the distribution can be a bit uneven. What we can do is select all of them. Press E, and we'll get the 'align and distribution' tool. In order to make sure the spacing between all of these is even, I'm just going to single-click on this axis here. If you notice it, has adjusted a little bit to make it evenly distributed. To make it more evident, I'll just spread it out slightly so you can have a better look at what actually happened here. For example, I can select the three at top, press A, and then click on this point on top of the green or the y axis. This means it will align all of them at the top. Now, because we want to distribute them evenly across this axis, I'll click on this bar once. Now, we don't want these to be spaced out so much. We can click on the handle towards the left or the right, and then slide it to manually increase or decrease the space between them. I think this looks fine. I'll just take it to the bottom so that it touches other shapes at the bottom. And this seems fine. We now have two explorations that we can go ahead with. I think I'm quite happy with the last two. I'll just resize this one slightly so that they're of equal height. When I select the form, we can see the pivot of the form is in the center. So I can go to the properties panel and move the pivot to the bottom. What this means is it will now resize and rotate with the bottom as the axis. Cool. In the next video, we'll now see how to add materials on these forms and create different kinds of textures and colors. 6. Materials: Now that we have nice forms to work with, we can see how to work with the materials. We can go to the material toggle on the left-hand side panel. You can see the wide range of options that we have. Similar to the forms, you can either just drag and drop a material on top of a shape or you can select the shape or shapes that you want and then click on the material. As I had selected two shapes here, it applies on both simultaneously. We can further go into the properties of the material and change the color, the roughness, the opacities. If you want to replicate the changes done on one shape, you can select the form that you want to change, press I and you will get the Eyedropper tool or you can just go to the toolbar and select it from there as well. You can then click on the changed material and extract that new material. What this will allow me to do is link all the materials together, which means if I change the properties of one material, it will change it for all the other shapes as well because we have linked it using the Eyedropper tool. This also happens if we apply one material on two objects simultaneously, so they automatically get linked. It's very convenient when you have a lot of forms and you can't keep selecting each and every one individually. However, there's also an option to delink the materials by clicking on the option here. Another interesting thing that you can do is put custom images or gradients on top of the material. Right now we're just playing with the color. If we go to the image option, here towards the right, you can select any file either from your desktop or from the default images on Dimension. I'm just going to drag and drop this gradient onto this and now it has applied itself seamlessly over the entire form. You can see it better by going to the preview toggle. What we can also do is select a file from the computer if we don't want to use something that is already there on Dimension. You can also add more images to the Dimension library as well. It's similar to how you do it on Photoshop and other Adobe softwares. We can further edit the images that we have added here by clicking on the material, going to the Edit option. When you select that it will open the image on Photoshop automatically. Go to the opened Photoshop file and you can play around with a lot of options. You can change the hue and saturation or just put a new image altogether on top of this image. You can change the colors. You can add any other effect that you want. I'll just go to the layers, unlock this and maybe click on the Hue and Saturation filter. By just working with the hue, you can create many different kinds of options. I can increase the saturation a bit and when I'm happy with something, I'll just click Command S or Control S for Windows and that's automatically going to change the file on Dimension as well. Because I've used a material that's so shiny, I'm getting these really harsh highlights. There is something you can either tweak when we're working with the light settings or we can go to the material and see if we can manipulate any of the properties here itself. However, this material, for example, does not allow me to change anything apart from the glow. So I'm going to select this and choose a material that allows me to add more roughness, for example, a silver. I can go inside the properties and increase the roughness, make it slightly softer, but not too soft that we lose the metallic effect of it. We can also make it gold by making it slightly yellow, but right now I would like to keep it slightly neutral. For our other W that we have, I'm going to use matte because the form is already quite rounded and has a lot of depth. Using a softer matte finish will ensure that we don't get very harsh shadows and highlights. We'll go inside the material and slightly reduce the roughness, not too much. We don't want much highlights on this, so I just want it to have shadows formed by the shape itself. Let's see how we can work with the base color. I think I'll just go ahead and add an image from my desktop. This is something I picked from the Internet and I'm just going to place it on my object. It looks pretty good. I can also change the direction of the gradient by changing the angle of rotation. So if I make it, say, 90 degrees, I can now see this part of the gradient instead of this. You can just keep sliding this to see how it changes. We don't want the part where we can see the intersection happening. I think I'm just going to take it back to zero. We can slightly tweak it on Photoshop. Again, go to the Layers and just reduce the yellow part so that we get more of the blue. I'm going to take it slightly to the right and I'll just save it. Let's see how it looks on Dimension. Now we have slightly more red tones and I think this is something we can work with. Now that we have our materials ready for both the compositions, in the next video, we'll see how to work with the light settings and make the composition look more realistic. 7. Lighting & Environment: Light settings on dimension are actually very simple. If you go to the lights toggle on the left panel, you can see there are two different kinds of lights, directional lights and environment lights. Directional lights can either be natural sources of light like the sun or artificial sources of light that we see in a studio kind of a setup. Environment lights on the other hand are much more complex. They are 360 degree panoramic images of different environment settings. It could either be a simulation of an indoor space, an outdoor space. This here in particular looks like a party space. If I choose one of these lights, it's going to look as if the object is actually staged in one of those environments. Considering every object can only be in one environment at a time, we can only use one of these lights at any particular time. In terms of the directional lights, we can only use the sunlight once, for obvious reasons, but the circle and the square lights are something that we can use as many number of times as we want. That's because these are artificial sources of light and you can position them the way you want as well. Very similar to that of a studio setup. As my visual style is quite soft, I like to use multiple sources of light. This ensures that there are no harsh highlights or shadows. I generally use one directional light, and usually it's the sunlight. I'm going to manipulate the properties of the sunlight. I'll put it on highest cloudiness, this means it will diffuse the light and it won't be direct or harsh sunlight. I'll increase the height so that we don't get these long shadows that we get around evening or morning times. So if I increase the height that means the sun is right on top like we have around noon. And I'll keep the intensity as it is for now. In terms of the environment light, I'm going to go for something whiter, right now it's too yellow. I think the 'studio soft box' is something we could try because it's a softer light, as the name suggests. I'm going to rotate it so that the light comes from a direction that ensures that the shadows and highlights are nicer. And let's see how that looks. Right now, this area here is getting slightly overexposed. We can reduce the height of the sun to fix that. This will ensure that the light won't come directly from top. We can also change the rotation slightly and this should fix it. Working with lights is always a lot of trial and error. There's no one formula that you can use every time. It depends a lot on your object, your composition that you have created. I think right now it looks quite balanced, at least when you check the render preview. I think I'm just going to reduce the overall global lighting slightly. So I can go to environment, and then I'm going to reduce the global intensity, which means it won't reduce just the sunlight or just the environment light, but it will reduce the intensity of the overall lighting in the 3D setup. I think it's working for now, so let's check the other composition to see how the light is reacting with that one. It's not looking as flattering on this for two reasons. One, is that the object doesn't have a material that has a lot of character in terms of the color or the gradient. Second, that this part here is getting way over-exposed. So for materials like this, you can always go for more colored lights. If I click on this blue one, it's going to replace the environment light that we used earlier, and now, we can check the render preview. It's giving much more life and making it much more attractive. You can see that this part needs to be fixed so you can just keep tweaking it as you go through the process. This also needs to move slightly. You can actually just remove that altogether because it's not adding much to the scene. And even if we don't have that, it's still looking like a W, so that's fine. I'm going to keep it here. Whenever you are creating explorations with very different materials, try to do it on different files because you'll probably need different light settings for different materials. And you can't actually add multiple environment lights to a single scene. You will have have to delete one and then add the other which is not very convenient. Right now we need to choose one and render one out. I'm going to go with the other one. I'll just undo this so that we go to the previous light setting and so that we have the other composition ready to be rendered. We'll just take this as the final file and move ahead. Before we go to the render stage, we also need to make sure that everything else is set up properly. So just turn on the render preview and we'll see what needs to be fixed and what can stay as it is. The shadows on the ground are somewhat darker than what I want them to be. I'll go to that environment option, go to the ground plane, And you can see options here for shadow and reflection. Reflection is not something we want to use right now because it will seem as though the letterform is on a glossy surface which I don't personally want. If you do, you can always increase the reflection opacity and you'll see these reflections at the bottom. But right now I'm going to turn them off. I'm also going to reduce the shadow opacity, maybe to around 30 percent. Now it looks like it's much closer to what I was looking for, but it's also become too faint. I'm going to take it back to 40 - 45. I think that looks much better and if you don't want any shadows or reflections at all, or don't want a ground plane at all, you can also turn that off from here. But I do want it for this composition, so I'm just going to keep it as it is. I think the file is ready and don't forget to keep saving it from time to time. Now we have the composition in place. We have the light settings and the material in place. The only thing to do is to fix and finalize the camera angle, which we will cover in the next lesson. 8. Camera: Hey, guys, so we are at the last leg of the process. I'm very proud of everyone who made it this far. We are just going to make sure we are looking at the form from the best angle now and this is exactly what we do with photography as well. We'll position the camera in a way that we get the best out of the form. I'm going to keep a front angle because we are working with letterforms, this will ensure the form is more legible. And as we are already making it slightly more abstract, it's better to have it more direct in terms of the camera angle. Once we have finalized an angle, we can go to the camera bookmarks here on the top right corner and you can just say add a new bookmark and name it whatever you want. I'm just going to name it as 01. What this lets you do is bookmark multiple camera angles from any view, side view, front view, top view, and all these camera angles get saved. When you render them, you can render all of these angles simultaneously. Right now we just need one camera angle so we actually don't need to bookmark it, but if it's bookmarked, it's very easy to go back to that saved angle. There are more camera options that we can play with. If you click on the camera icon, you can see there are these two options, camera perspective and the focus. What camera perspective lets you do is increase or decrease the perspective, so when the value is more, it's going to be much more wide angle. If you go on reducing the value, the perspective will also go on reducing, and eventually, it will be completely devoid of perspective. This is something that can be used to create isometric views. We won't be using this right now, but it's good to know where the settings are. I'm just going to change our camera angle, we can undo the camera angle or I can directly go back to the bookmarked one. I can just go and click on 01. This will take me back to the camera angle that I had saved. You can keep toggling between different camera angles like this whenever you like. Right now I'm just going to slightly fix the angles, I'll just re-adjust it. When it's done, I'm going to go back to the camera bookmark and say refresh. This saves the new view as the bookmarked one. I'll again go back to the camera settings and the focus option is something we'll see now. This option lets you focus on a particular point in the composition. You can set your focus point here, anywhere on the object, and it will focus on that particular point and blur out the rest. You can also increase and decrease the level of blur that you want. I'm just going to turn off the focus because that's not something we need right now, it was again just to show you where the settings are. I think we are set now, we have the camera angle ready, everything else is in place. All we need to do now is render this into an image and then edit it further, and I'll cover that in the next video. 9. Render & Post Processing: In this lesson, we'll look at some export and render settings, as well as quick tips to edit your renders on Photoshop. Exporting on dimension actually means converting it into another 3D format, for example, OBJs. OBJs are something that can be opened on other 3D softwares as well like Blender or Cinema 4D. You can either export the selected part of your scene or the entire scene or export specifically for augmented reality software like Adobe Aero. Rendering on the other hand refers to converting your 3D composition into a 2D image. It will render out what you actually see here. To do that we are going to go to the Render toggle on top. You can choose which camera angle you want to render at. Current view is what we see and we render it out as it is. Others are the bookmarked ones. Let's just go ahead with the bookmarked one. You can rename your file and then choose the quality at which you want to render. The quality of the file can be determined by where you want to actually use your final artwork. For things like Instagram it doesn't need to be too high quality, but if you want to print it out it definitely needs to be a very high quality image. There are also two formats in which you can render – photoshop file as well as PNG. I always prefer photoshop because it allows much more flexibility later on in order to edit the image, and it's much easier to fine-tune the image and make smaller tweaks. You can also select where you want to save the file, I'm just going to save it on my desktop. Once everything has been set you can click just render and depending on how heavy your file is, it will take anywhere from between two minutes to two hours to render it out. I'm going to go ahead and open an already opened file on Photoshop and this is how it looks. On the top, under the layers, we have some additional layers. This is how dimension automatically renders out a photoshop file. This really helps us in color blocking the artwork, so that we can select individual parts of the artwork and modify them separately. For example, if we are on this layer and we select one of the color range, which is either black or the green, it will only select that particular part. With that selected we can go to our rendered image and add a filter on top of it or even mask it. If I increase or decrease the brightness right now it will only modify the image and not the background because that's the only part that's selected. It's a very convenient feature to have but we won't be needing it right now, that's because the background is also quite dark and I want to edit the entire artwork altogether and not just the letterform. I'll add a brightness filter and just increase the brightness slightly along with the contrast. I'll also add a hue and saturation filter so that we can make it slightly more saturated, right now it's a little bit pale. The hue slider on top can also be used to completely change the color of the artwork. This is very useful when you actually don't know where you're going with the artwork and want to try out different things. You don't need to keep changing it on dimension. You can just render it out and try out different options on Photoshop very quickly. I don't advise you doing it all the time but if you have a time crunch and want to try out different options you can just try this out. I'm not going to change it too much right now, I'll just take it slightly to the orange-ish side so that we don't lose out the details to over exposure. This tweaking is something that can really make your artwork pop, but be careful not to overdo it. Once we are okay with the edits we can also manipulate the background separately. There's a background layer at the bottom. We can remove the background altogether or just change the background color. I'm trying to choose a color that ensures that the details of the artwork don't get lost. The value of the background color should be dependent on the letterform color. I'll again reduce the brightness slightly and I'm going to try and make this area pop out more because it's getting too lost. This is quite an important part of the process so I suggest you take your time with the editing. You don't want to overdo it at all but just slightly tweak to enhance all the elements. By making the background slightly darker this area of the artwork is actually popping out more. I'm quite happy with how it's looking. Once it's ready you can just go ahead and save it in any of these formats. I usually prefer a PNG or a JPEG, even a TIFF if I want to print it out. 10. Conclusion: Hey guys, well done and thanks for being a part of this class. I hope it's made 3D and dimension feel much approachable and that you're excited to try it on your own. Please don't get stuck in a loop of choosing what letter form to create. I find it easier to create symmetrical ones like A, M or W. If you can't choose, you can always go ahead with those and just explore all you want because you're creating these for yourself and there's no right or wrong. Don't let the variety of shapes and materials on dimension confuse you, just choose a few that you like and then go ahead with those. Remember to spend 5 or 10 minutes understanding the form before you actually create it or sketch it out because that's really going to change how well you analyze and create the letterform. If you want to see amazing interpretations of letters from people all over the world, you can only check 36daysoftype on Instagram and if you have any questions, any doubt, you can always reach out to me on Instagram or my email ID. I'm really excited to see what you all create and please don't forget to upload it on the project gallery and I'll see you.