Integrate 3D with Photoshop Using the Substance 3D Viewer Beta App

[music] [Jeanette Chow] Hi, everyone. Welcome to Adobe MAX. My name is Jeanette Chow, and I'm a Senior Product Manager here at Adobe. And I am thrilled to be here to talk about the latest innovations in 3D for our Creative Cloud and graphic design communities. We'll be talking about how you can Integrate 3D into Photoshop using the Substance 3D Viewer Beta Application.

What is Substance 3D? Adobe has a long history of working with 3D and that includes Substance 3D which is our collection of 3D tools, services, and content. Substance 3D has been around for a long time with over a decade of history in the game, film, and VFX industries in particular, and it has built a really long-lasting legacy around visual quality and technical excellence. There's multiple awards won by the Substance 3D tools and applications, including technical Oscars and Emmys. So Substance is known for letting artists create the impossible. It is very powerful toolset that lets you do anything you can imagine. It's also rapidly growing in the manufacturing industries including fashion, apparel, packaging, and industrial design. And why is that? It's because 3D is extremely powerful but these tools can be complicated to learn. So we're really excited to introduce Substance 3D Viewer. Now this is a new beta desktop application which is streamlined, powerful, and performant. It's a workspace based UI that focuses on tasks without as much complexity. It allows you to open and view 3D files with ease, capture snapshots with true-to-life shadows, reflections, and transparency so you get high-quality photorealistic results. And it's integrated with Photoshop so you can create smart object layers for composing, compositing, and designing with an iterative connection. This is extremely powerful. It's bringing all of that quality and rich 3D content into an easy-to-use experience directly integrated with your Creative Cloud apps like Photoshop. Let's go ahead and start taking a look. So in this session, we'll take a deeper look. We're going to go ahead and create a Photoshop design here for some headphones and a little bit of a space advertisement. We'll be using-- Sorry, I have to say space like that. Substance 3D Viewer desktop application and the Photoshop plugin. So we'll learn how to add a model into our Photoshop design, how to work with those smart objects to create edits in Viewer, how to adjust the composition of both the 3D and 2D elements together, how to adjust appearances of objects with material changes, how to adjust the lighting, shadows, and reflections, and then we'll explore a couple of generative features that are also available inside of Viewer. Let's go ahead and get started. The first thing that you'll need is the actual application. So come over to the Creative Cloud desktop application and look for the beta category of tools. You'll need to be on the latest version of Photoshop Beta, and you'll need to get Substance 3D Viewer Beta, which will be available at Adobe MAX. Once you have those, we can go ahead and launch Photoshop Beta. Now for this session, I have a design document ready. You can see some fairly standard photoshopping here. We've got a smart object, some vector designs, couple of text layers, some adjustment layers, and various icons. And what's missing is my 3D component, so that's what we're going to learn how to bring in. So to start, I'm going to go ahead and open up this file worth of content-- Sorry, folder full of content I have on my desktop here. So I have this file called headphone.glb. GLB is just a file format. It's a standard 3D file format. And again, you can load dozens of formats here. OBJ, FBX, GLTF, GLB, USD, CAD formats like STEP or IGES dozens of them. Go ahead and just find your 3D file and then just drag and drop it right into your Photoshop document. Now behind the scenes, Photoshop has a plugin integration now that's calling the Viewer, Substance 3D Viewer desktop application. Viewer is opening that 3D file and providing a render, so here it is. It says here's that 3D file. It's also embedding that 3D file directly into my Photoshop document. So now I have a smart object with a 3D file that's rendered here in Photoshop. Now this is just a layer. I can go ahead and adjust it like any other layer. I can resize, rescale. And again, it's a smart object, so when I'm ready, I can edit this. So it's at the default view. So whenever you load a file, it's just going to give you a generic standard near straight view. But the whole point of 3D is that I can change the view. I can change the materials. So let's jump into the Viewer where we can do that. To edit your file, you can do it in a couple of ways. You can go to the Properties panel and click on the Edit Contents button. Or down here in the Layers panel, we can just double-click on the icon or right-click on the layer and choose Edit Contents. So lots of ways to do this. I like to just double-click on the icon if I find that very convenient, so I'll just double-click. And here we go. We've got our smart object opened up. Now it's dropped us into the composition workspace. So real quick, let's take a look at the workspaces just so you know how to align and orient yourself. Over here on the left-hand side, you'll see our navigation. Here's where all of our work spaces are. So there's Appearance where you can edit the look of objects. There's the Composition workspace where you can control the arrangement of things relative to each other. And the Environment workspace where we can change lighting, reflections, and shadows. And then Generate, which, again, we'll talk a little bit more about later. There's some cool stuff there. All right, so we're in the composition workspace. You can see here is you can set your canvas size and add background images. But because I came from a Photoshop document in this case rather than starting from Viewer or make a new document. I've actually brought all of that context from Photoshop over. So I can actually work on my 3D file completely with all of my design, which is really helpful. All right, the first thing I want to do is just select this object, and you're going to see this blue box. This is called the render frame. So this is where the 3D object is placed and what's rendered relative to my canvas. Now there's a couple of things that you can do. You can resize, again change that relative sizing here of the overall frame. And in the composition panel here, you can hit this action called Fit frame to canvas, and that's just going to resize my 3D content, so it directly matches my Photoshop 2D content. The other thing important to note is down here at the bottom of the canvas, there's this really cool navigation helper. If you don't see it, you can click on this little info button to open and close that. Now these controls are how you're going to actually manipulate the 3D object itself. So we're going to learn three very important words for 3D navigation, orbit, pan, and dolly. Orbit, this is how you move around things. You're going to rotate to get different viewing angles. Pan, hopefully, everyone's fairly familiar with this. You're moving up, down, left, right...

Or in a circle, whatever. But you're moving on a flat plane relative to whatever you're looking at. And then dolly. Dolly is moving in and out. We're moving closer and further, which gives the effect of things being larger or smaller. 3D tends to follow mostly the physical rules of the world in a lot of cases. Not always, but this is one of them. I don't actually get bigger as I get closer to you. I'm just getting closer, which makes it look bigger. So bigger, smaller, closer, further, very related in 3D. All right, so now I've got this object, here and I've got my navigation helper up, so I'm going to start using those shortcuts. So you can also drop-down between whether you're using a three-button mouse, two-button mouse, trackpad, and get different shortcut helpers. I'm on a three-button mouse, so I'm just going to use my mouse shortcuts here. So right-click, I'm just going to click and drag. That's going to let me change the orbit. It's in space! Holding down my middle mouse button, that'll allow me to pan it. So again, just moving up, down, left, right. And if I use my scroll wheel, I can dolly to change the zoom, or I can hold down Alt+Right-click. So a couple different shortcut options there. I just want to make it big.

I want to look at it from below, like larger than life. Again, we're looking up into space. Listen as if you were in space-- I don't know. I have to say space that way. All right, pretty happy with that. Now next thing I want to do is I want to change the lighting a little bit. So let's go ahead over to the Environment workspace. And here at the top, you can see we have a couple of Light presets available. So let's click on that. We have a studio light, exterior light, atelier light. That's a warehouse or open space. So what's happening here as I click on these? These are what we call image-based lights. They're spherical, panoramic images that are, you think of it like a big ball. It's like a big ball. Or think about it like yourself. If you were looking around the world, but the world was a flat picture, you're always living in the center of this big sphere. So it's like somebody captured a picture of the world, and all of that is shining and reflecting in at you. That's exactly what an IBL is. It's an image-based light. These are lighting presets that you can use to quickly add different lighting effects. You can load any of your own EXR, IBL, lots of different images supported. So I really like this atelier one. It just has these hints of warm and cool lighting that I think really bring it out. So I'll go ahead and close that presets. I want to go ahead and adjust the brightness. Just bring that up a little bit, and then I can change the rotation.

Look at how that lighting is just playing on those different materials. And we'll talk a little bit more about materials here in a second, but I want something like that. I just want this light to really be captured here on the front of the headphones. I want some nice shadow and drama because... So drama's very important. All right, well, one more thing I want to talk about here in the environment workspace is this toggle called ground plane. So let's go ahead and turn that on for a second, and you'll see it didn't do anything. That's because we're looking up at the object, and there's really no ground to be seen. But if I just right-click and scroll, so I'm moving down, what you can see is I have these shadows being caught. So let me turn that off and on. Off and on. All right, the ground plane is this invisible, imaginary floor that's underneath your objects. And that can be really cool also for having the object sitting on a surface, casting shadows and reflections there. Now because mine's floating in space, I don't really need this. I can turn it back off, just have them floating. But that is a really, really powerful tool. Lots of times you just want to show a product showing on a background with some basic shadows on the ground. So very, very helpful. All right, last thing I want to do here is I want to start playing with some of the color. So let's go ahead over to the Appearance tab. Now here you can see all of the materials that are in your scene. So what is a material first off? Let's just take a step there. Materials. It's a weird word, but where you are? We know all the materials around us, right? I'm on a table. It's made out of wood. I'm working on a keyboard that's made out of plastic and the rubber for the wire. My clothing is fabric. My skin is skin. Skin is a material. My hair is hair. Hair is a material. So material is an appearance capsule. It's an object that captures all of the details of how a surface should look. What color is it? Is it rough or smooth? Is it metallic or non-metallic? Is it sheeny like fabric? All of those details. Does it have bumps and grooves? Is it translucent like glass or water? Does it refract light? And how does that play? So these are what we call materials in 3D world. They're so powerful and we have a ton of material presets and 3D models often come with materials so it's really easy to drag and drop and play with these things. So as an example, let's just change the effect here on this part. So we'll go ahead and click on this little middle portion here, and then just Shift+click.

No. There is a bug. We'll get that fixed. Be careful Shift clicking. All right, let me try one more time. Nope. Okay. No Shift clicking in my version. That's okay. I'm fixing this by hitting the F button, which just brings my object back into a framed view. So if you ever lose yourself, hit the F button, F for frame. Or up at the top, you can click this for Fit to selection. Again, it's going to do the same thing. Fit. It's just going to bring that object back into view. So we will not be Shift clicking. That's okay. I will just go ahead and do it on one side. You guys can imagine from there. So I just want to change out the material. I'm going to click on this copper, drag and drop to apply that. There we go. We actually replace all instances. That will replace all instances so I don't have to Shift+click. Very nice feature. Thank you, development team. So what did that do? Again, it applied an entire new material to all of the objects that shared that instance of the material. And this material is a rose gold, coppery look to it. Now again, materials, very powerful, very deeply editable. So you can use material presets to quickly get a quick look, and then you can come in and customize them further. So let's go ahead and open up that copper that we just added. And here you can see it has a bunch of different options. Maybe the one of the most important ones, color. You can make that more reddish, more pinkish all the different tones. So I actually like it as it. It was a really nice color. Let's take a look at another one. So maybe we'll change the color of these actual pads on the headphones. Let's click on that, and then let's take a look here. It has base color. If I just click on that thumbnail, you can see that the color is actually an image. I'm going to replace that image by just switching to the Color tab. And, again, here I can just go ahead and start changing these. I want to bring out some more warm tones because I think we've got this nice dark blue background, so I want it to just shine a little bit. Let's go ahead. Do a light color.

Well, not too light. So I don't want to noodle it, but you have to make it at least-- Okay, there. We can also save that swatch so we can reuse it. All right, this is great. Liking this. All right, so the last thing I want to do is I want to go ahead and send all these updates to Photoshop. So let's go ahead and click the To Photoshop button up here in the corner. We're going to see this nice big green notification Sent to Photoshop. So I know it was successful. And then when I'm done, I'm just going to hit Command+Tab over, go back into Photoshop. All right, so I've got my updated smart object. Again, only a couple of minutes. What I want to do next is just bring back in my typography. This is a layer. I can work with all of the power of Photoshop. So I'm just going to bring this into this folder with this text and I want to make the space text look like it's going into the headphone. So I'm just going to click on this layer and I'm going to drag it down to the bottom onto the new layer icon and that's going to create a copy. Then I'm going to move that copy above. So now I have two layers of text. So text, model, text. Now on the top layer, I'm going to go ahead and click on the toolbar. I'm going to activate my Marquee select tool, and I'm just going to make a selection of half of the text. I just want this half to show because I want it to be masked out. To create a mask, very easy, I'm just going to again go here into my Layers panel. And at the bottom, I'm going to click this mask icon. That's going to create a mask. So now I have this masked effect where this text looks like it's inside the headphone area. I'm going to just select the 3D layer, and again, I can go ahead and rotate, adjust, rescale, all these things I need to do. And if I ever need to bounce back, again, smart object, just double-click, can relaunch the Substance Viewer anytime and continue to make those changes. So I'm pretty happy with how this is looking. Feel like, that's pretty good. Art director will approve, maybe. Hope so. I am not, in fact, a designer. I'm a product manager, so I'm sure you guys will do better. But I am really happy with this. Let's spend the last few minutes just exploring something very different inside of Substance 3D Viewer. We're going to hop over here. Up here at the top you can click Home at any time. If you were just to launch, Substance 3D Viewer, this is how you can get back to the main space. You don't have to always start from Photoshop. So what I wanted to show is that you can actually do some really cool generative workflows inside of here. We also have a sample scene with a really cool camera asset that you can get started with. So let's go ahead and click on that, take a look around. So if you don't have any 3D models of your own, I definitely encourage you just give this a spin. It's got some of the basics for you to get started with, and you can take a minute to get familiar with all of the different 3D navigation components, start exploring the workspaces, and there we go. Okay, we've got this beautiful camera asset here. Again, this is just a sample scene. Another thing that you can explore here I didn't show before is that we actually have two modes. There's canvas and the 3D mode. The Canvas mode is what allows you to view your final project with the background, and then the 3D View is a working view that you can keep working. These are different in different workspaces. So in the appearance workspace, you have access to both. In the composition workspace, you are in the Canvas view. Now the last one we're going to go to is the Generate workspace. So Generate is actually does not have the Canvas. You're always in a 3D View. So there's a couple of different features here including Text to 3D and 3D model to image. Text to 3D, I'll let you play with that at home. It's fairly straightforward. Type in a prompt and you're going to get a 3D model. It's a great way to get started. What I want to show you here is 3D model to image, which is incredibly powerful and really fun to play with. So we're going to actually go ahead and just click on that. And because it's our first time using this feature, we're going to agree to the terms of use and user guidelines, of course. Now what I want to do is I'm actually going to start generating images by using this camera model as an input. So it's going to guide Firefly to generate images, which gives me so much power, so much control. There's a couple of options here. So there's Generate a composite scene. Okay, that's going to take my 3D model and give it a new background. There's Generate a new image. So it's going to take the model and it's going to use it to guide it, but it's actually going to completely replace the model and the background. And then there's Generate a new look for my model. So let's take a look at each one. Let's start by generating a composite scene. So I want to take my camera asset and put it in a background. So let's describe what we want. We want a nice camera on a wooden glossy table at dusk with reflections and a cup of coffee, maybe.

All right, now this option here, Match color, that's how strong we want it to match the color of our existing camera. So we can dial that in a little bit. Maybe I want it to be exactly matching when I leave that super high. We can also open the styles and effects settings so I can choose if I want it to be more of a photo, more of an art, if I want to apply various different styles, color and tone mapping. Yeah, lots of different things I can do here for the effects, I could do things like is it divine? Perhaps. I hope so. I hope it's all divine. Lots of things to play within these settings. For the moment, I'm just going to leave it fairly generic because I want to just going to see that. And then I hit the Generate button. Now just like most of our Firefly features, this is going to go ahead, take that 3D data, sending it up to the cloud, doing our process in there. And in just a couple of seconds, we'll get those results back.

My results came back. It only took a couple of seconds. And here you can see, again, we have this effect where, as I click on these, you can see the influence of the original 3D object and then this result. You can also deselect these to go back into seeing your original design, so you can see exactly how that 3D object is influencing the creation. Now this is really cool because it actually does things like it actually inputs the reflections back onto the lens of your 3D object. So I'm able to keep the core of my 3D model while also getting entirely new situation for that to be placed in. This is really cool. All right, let's generate a completely new image altogether instead of a composite one. So this is how strong we want to match those 3D shapes. So instead let me deselect this. Let me just do a different camera angle just so that we're really clear that we're making a new image entirely.

And we'll use the same prompt, a nice camera on a wooden glossy table at dusk. But instead of matching the shapes 100%, maybe we'll choose 70%, and then we'll click Generate. Now because it's not color matching, it's shape matching, it's going to have a little bit more leeway here in how it's combining things together. You can see in the previous result, the colors of the camera were almost identical. It was really trying to keep that exactly as is. Whereas this one, it's just using the shape as a guidance, but much more freedom in how it's interpreting that. And it's actually really close still in terms of, again, that shape matching because I did set that fairly high at 70%. But overall higher quality here because it's actually able to adjust the colors a little bit more freely. So really, really cool. All right, last but not least, we can generate new looks for the model. So instead of generating the whole background, we're just going to describe the camera here. So instead-- And, again, I'm just going to deselect this. We'll change a different camera angle again. I'm just trying to make sure that it's always clear that I'm doing a new design so that don't get confused with previous ones. So let's just describe a completely different look for this camera. Say we want it to be hot pink leather and yellow plastic camera with the blue buttons. I don't know if that's going to work, but just going crazy. And, again, you can actually get apply different styles and effects. So maybe we'll do neon. I'm going to go crazy here. Go ahead and hit the Generate button. So this is going to just give you a new look for the model itself without worrying about the background context. And, again, the default here, the matching of the color, I have it completely low. I could change that up if I want to keep some of it. It's going to follow the shape of the object while giving me an entire new look for this. So let's see what it did. That's so cool. Really cool, powerful feature for just creating a graphic. Now I could go ahead and snapshot this to a clipboard. Let me come back over into Photoshop and just whoop.

It didn't work. Download. Let's download it here. We'll put it on our desktop.

Sorry, guys. That's the nature of doing these demos for things that are still got bug fixes going in. That snapshot will work. There we go. So I was able to just create this image again. Totally can composite and combine this in. I could save this, seashell project and then, sorry, Substance 3D Viewer project, and then add that as a smart object layer into my Photoshop document. So these are just a couple of the ways that you can play with Firefly using 3D model to image inside of Substance 3D Viewer Beta. We're really excited about bringing this new application to you. We're really excited about learning with you. So please join us on the forums. If you have a moment, take this in-app feedback survey. Let us know how you're liking it, what we can do to improve it, and we can't wait to see what you make.

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Integrate 3D with Photoshop Using the Substance 3D Viewer Beta App - OS100

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About the Session

Discover how the Substance 3D Viewer beta app enables rapid exploration and integration of 3D into everyday design workflows. Join Jeanette Chow, senior product manager at Adobe, to see how the Substance 3D Viewer can unlock 3D creative capabilities in Photoshop to add new perspectives to your designs.

You’ll learn how to:

  • Supercharge your designs by incorporating 3D models into your Photoshop compositions
  • Explore the latest generative AI for 3D, powered by Adobe Firefly
  • Share 3D files with colleagues and clients and with consistent visual information

Technical Level: General Audience

Category: How To

Track: 3D

Audience: Art/Creative Director, Graphic Designer, Print Designer, 3D, Illustrator

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