Available from Andromeda, 3 D-Luxe plugin really expands the possibilities in Photoshop for creating 3D environments. You can work with the basic shapes of cylinder, sphere, cube and flat plane. Using the built in textures, and there are plenty of them, you can assign these to your shapes, or use your existing image and apply that instead. The shape, position, rotation, lighting, scale of texture, size of object, and more, can all be controlled and changed.
3 D-Luxe comes with a wide assortment of textures that have a great amount of detail in them (see one of them below). These textures are somewhat unique in that I haven't seen them anyplace else. And I love real world textures, which this plugin has a lot of. You can combine images with textures, choose transparency mode to have images, other textures, etc. show through yet other textures.
While I was playing with 3 D-Luxe to create this page, my impressions of the product were very good. It seems the possibilities are limitless in what one can do with this plugin. The textures are very good, you can change many of the parameters of the object you're working on (lighting, size, placement, rotation, interaction with other images, etc) and it truly has brought 3D capability to Photoshop. Even though Photoshop is only 2D, 3 D-Luxe is actually a 3D product within itself, allowing you to view all sides of the object you've chosen. You can have text in Photoshop, wrap it around an object (as I have in the above image) or wrap your photo around an object instead.
Examples:
|
|
Here I've used an existing image, applied it onto a flat plane, added the brick bump map, and then rotated it away from the viewer for added perspective. |
|
|
The image is applied to a sphere. The sphere, while in 3 D-Luxe mode, can be spun to show other parts of the image. This can be useful for creating animated GIF's. You can incrementally rotate the sphere for precise alignment of the image in the view. The sphere's size can be changed, also. |
|
|
The image is applied to a cylinder. Same properties as sphere for location, rotation, size etc. You can also change the diameter of one end of the sphere, thereby making a cone. |
|
|
The image applied to a cube. You can change the lengths of the X, Y or Z axis, thereby creating rectangles of different sizes. Lighting can be controlled to illuminate certain sides or corners. Rotation, location and size can all be changed. |
|
|
A sphere with a built-in texuture applied. There are many great textures with 3D-Luxe. |
|
|
A built in texture applied to the cylinder, but with the ends and back side "turned off" to create an arc effect. Some textures can be selected for transparency in their dark areas. |
|
|
Cylinder again, but with a steel plate texture. Very handy for making Mech Warrior type objects. Other metal textures are available. |
|
|
Sphere with some very cool ornamental metal like texture applied. |
|
|
A close up of one of the textures on a flat plane. All the textures have this amount of detail, and implement a wise choice of color schemes. |
|
|
This is probably one of the cooler effects. A sphere made up of stars, set to be transparent between them. See the main image at the top of this page for a better view. |
|
|---|