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.
