Exploring New Tools. An Interview with 3D in Photoshop's Zorana Gee.

   

After having an opportunity to do a complete review of 3D in Photoshop in this issue of MFM, I had the opportunity to interview Zoranna Gee, co-author of the book.

MM: What were your primary objectives in trying to reach out to professionals by writing this book?

ZG: Yeah, the goal of the book was to introduce 3D concepts to 2D designers and generally creative users, and then teach people how 3D works in Photoshop because its a little bit different then other 3D apps. Especially if you're familiar with them. Then, put some cool tutorials in there by known trainers in the Photoshop world who have started dabbling in 3D and have established good workflows.

MM: Photoshop has been a 2D program for the majority of its existence and is branching further into 3D. It feels like the purpose of 3D in Photoshop is to educate and entice professional 2D artists about the possibilities of using 3D in their work. Do you feel that 2D artists realize what can be done now in Photoshop CS5 Extended with 3D currently?

ZG: No, I think that's the problem. There's a lot of people that are interested in seeing how 3D could improve their 2D design workflows, [but many] people don't really know what 3D in Photoshop is capable of doing. There really haven't been many books or documentation that address this. That's partially our fault that a lot of changes that come out with each release make it kind of hard to get in-depth into a lot of the capabilities. It's a little more complex because a lot of our customers don't know a lot about 3D, so it takes more explanation and time to get what is in there.

Originally, I was thinking that I wanted to find someone that could write a very comprehensive book on how 3D works in Photoshop because there was a clear need. There are people that are not familiar with the basic stuff--the fundamental stuff--in creating 3D. From import, to lighting, to materials, to shadows and reflection and all the parameters, and then finally rendering. Like those basic steps were not familiar to a lot of our customers. But when talking it over with the team we realized that we needed to write this book because we do [3D] a little bit differently. We need to communicate and get that information out there. We being myself--the project manager--as well as the project leads, technical leads, and all the different engineers that played a different role in bringing 3D into Photoshop. By putting together the first book, we can get the information out there so that people could leapfrog off that.

MM: The .PDF of this book (which I reviewed) doesn't come with any tutorial assets to accompany the examples in the last 3rd of the book. Could that be because you just wanted to plant seeds of the possibilities and not get hung up on the step-by-step details, or is this something that has been addressed with the physical printing?

ZG: Well, we actually do have the tutorial assets that are up on the Focal Press site. People can view the book digitally online and also download assets.

MM: From reading this book, it seems like Adobe is focused on giving more tools to the 2D artist and not necessarily making another 3D package. For the 3D artist, is texture painting the extent of what they can expect from including Photoshop in their production line? Are there any plans to compete with the texture toolsets that can be found in Zbrush, Mudbox, or 3D Bodypaint?

ZG: That's an interesting question. So I think that those applications are targeted for the extremely savvy 3D users. Our customers are not that familiar with 3D capabilities, so it's really our editing in 3D, targeting for the everyday designer who might be able to leverage some flexibility from being able to interact and paint directly on the 3D model. I wouldn't say that its a goal to mimic or eventually get to that type of complexity that some of those applications have. Ours is really about democratizing 3D and making it easy for non-3D users to gain some of the flexibility that people who work with 3D know is there.

MM: Concerning the inclusion of 3D within Photoshop, what are the directives for that aspect of the feature set? What type of needs or challenges are you trying to answer without becoming a full-on 3D program?

ZG: It varies, but maybe a simple example would be someone working in advertising who is working on a car ad and they get the car model from a CAD manufacturer or from their 3D guy that works in CAD and they want to be able to directly manipulate the position of the car, the lighting of the car, and the color of the car and match that to the background of a photograph, and have the lighting match and be realistic. And further to be able to reuse that asset and put it into a different composite at a later time.

So that type of workflow if the designer actually has access to the 3D aspect of it, they can change things more readily and more easily without always having to go back to the 3D guy that was working with the 3D model in their application. So the way I see it, a typical design firm or studio or advertising company has a small set of 3D designers and then a long tail of 2D designers which eventually, with more familiarity with 3D in Photoshop, [would] be able to expand the short handful of 3D designers from the 2D designers. So more of the 2D designers will be familiar with the 3D aspect of things and be able to implement some of those basic changes that they may want to do for an ad.

Thanks so much, Zoranna!  For a sneak peak of one of the tutorials from this new book, be sure to check out "Masking 3D Shapes for Effect" in this issue!  Also check out my in-depth review of 3D in Photoshop, also in this issue.

Michael Muwanguzi is a graphic artist and web designer currently living in Los Angeles, CA. Apart from working on print ads, web-related advertising, and 3D design work, he is currently working on new film production work and is designing a 3D adventure game from scratch.

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