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Compositing 3D elements in Project Felix

Lesson 15 from: Beginner's Guide To Working With 3D in Photoshop

Jesús Ramirez

Compositing 3D elements in Project Felix

Lesson 15 from: Beginner's Guide To Working With 3D in Photoshop

Jesús Ramirez

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Lesson Info

15. Compositing 3D elements in Project Felix

Lesson Info

Compositing 3D elements in Project Felix

- [Jesus] Okay so now we're going to composite in Project Felix and this is...I want to show you really what the power of Felix is, which is...oops, sorry. I didn't... Actually, I'm kind of glad I did that and I'll mention what happened. I accidentally had the Marquee tool and I selected the football and I hit Delete but since only the inside of the football was selected, I deleted that and left everything else. If I want to delete everything, I've got to come in to the actual 3D object here, the entire thing, It says it's football. Notice how everything is selected in blue here in the labels and also in the object. If I hit Backspace, then it deletes it. So when I was working with Fuse and I was importing my 3D model, I had to manually set the perspective of my scene. Project Felix actually does that for you in most cases. So I'll show you what I mean by that. I'm going to go into the Libraries panel and I'm going to look for that CreativeLive library that I have and I'm just going to...

open up this image here, which is the street that you've seen before. And actually, if you double click on it twice, it opens up in Photoshop. You only have to click on it once so it opens up in Project Felix. And there it is. You have the 3D grid here, you see it here on the bottom. Let me add a 3D model so that you could see what's going to happen. I'm just going to add a very simple shape. I'll, once again, add the sphere. I'm going to click and drag the sphere onto Project Felix. And there it is. I'm going to click on the Background from the Scene panel here and notice this button here, Align View to Image. What that's going to do is Felix is going to look at all the converging lines from the background and it's going to align the ground plane to it. So I'm going to click on Align View and notice it right away, Felix aligns the background to that view, and this is the horizon line. And if you look at the lines that are found in this scene, in this street, and these lines, you'll notice that they'll converge there. So Felix had a really good job in finding out where that horizon line is and it adjusted it automatically. You could also click and drag on these points yourself if you want to make any adjustments to it or click and drag on the line to move it up or down. But I think that Felix will say, "Good job," simply by clicking on Align View to Image. I'm also going to apply a material to this sphere here. You can see what's going to happen next. I'm going to click on the sphere, I'm going to click on Materials, and I'm going to select one of these reflective materials, maybe like this silver material here. And if I enable the preview, you'll notice that it's reflecting the image based light. Currently, the image based light is just the default image based light. And this is what it looks like here on the right. If I zoom in, you'll see what that looks like. There it is. That's the image based light and you can sort of see that reflection on the sphere. But if I click on Background, I can Create a Light from Image, meaning the light from the image that's currently in the background, right up here. When I click on that button, and Project Felix will automatically create that IBL. And notice the reflection now. It's the buildings right around it. So this is everything that we were just doing in Photoshop. It just...by clicking on buttons, so in a way, it's much easier. You don't have a lot of the flexibility but it certainly gives you quick... good results really, really fast. So if I swapped those and just let it do a quick render, you can see how this sphere is now rendering the reflection. But not only that, if you look closely, the yellow hue that's on the images is still being applied to the 3D object so we had a 3D object with no reflection. It'll still look realistic because it's catching some of that ambient color, that yellow color that you see on the image. So we've been working with assets that are provided by Project Felix. You can see those assets here and there's a ton of them, and you can just click and drag them and they'll automatically be applied to the 3D model that you saw and you'll see how it interacts with the background and environment. Like so. But you can also use elements from your library that you download from Adobe Stock. So I have these 3D Assets here and there are 3D models that you can download from Adobe Stock like this. 3D model here and it's going to take a second for it to come through. For some reason it's not coming through. So actually, I do want to point...there it is. I do want to point out that Project Felix is also a program that is really heavy on processing power. So if things are going slow, again, it's probably because of your computer. Also, I shouldn't jinx myself now but it may tends to crash a lot when you start adding a lot of 3D elements. It's usually best to work with just a few. So keep that in mind. So anyway, so there is that Adobe Stock 3D model that I imported. And again, you can just click on Assets, select it, and apply whatever material that you want. I'm going to actually delete this one as well and I'm going to go back into just a simple shape just because in this class, I want to work with 3D models that are not going to be slow to work with. But what I really wanted to show you was that you can also download a bunch of different materials from Adobe Stock, like all of these here that I'm scrolling through are Adobe Stock materials. And again, you can simply drag those into your 3D model and they apply that look right away. You can see the preview here at the bottom. I'll make that larger. This is a really cool one, it's just the wood pattern. And another one that I like a lot is way down here at the bottom. It's this guy here. This one looks really cool. Notice how this one also has transparency. But anyway, so there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of materials that you can download from Adobe Stock onto Project Felix. And much like we saw before with the football 3D model, you can download these onto your desktop and then upload them to Photoshop and work with the materials on Photoshop as well. But anyway, so you can see how this one has transparency and it's pretty cool. One thing that I do want to show you is what happens when you are working with an image that Project Felix cannot find the horizon light from. So I'm going to go to Background and I'm going to go back into my Libraries panel and I'm going to go back into that CreativeLive 01 class and I'm just going to click once on that background. Here it is. And notice that the Align to View Image button is disabled. That is because this particular image has no converging lines, so Project Felix had problems finding out what the horizon line was. If that happens, you're going to have to do it manually. So you can click on this icon here with the Background selected, this icon here, the Toggle Horizon Control. And you can just click on that white line, it turns blue, and then just drag it down. And once again, the horizon line is where the ground plane meets the sky where all the converging lines meet. So our ground plane, the snow, will meet the sky probably right about there, and that's a very good guess. And if you want to find out more of our compositing, I do have a class here at CreativeLive on compositing that you can check out and I talk about horizon lines and the different things that you can do to make your composite look more realistic. But anyway, so now, we have this matching perspective 3D element on our background. Now if we remember, we set the image as the light with the other street image so this looks a little unrealistic because the colors are not really matching its environment. So I would have to click on Create Light from Image again. And now, the lighting matches. If I turn on the little preview here, you'll see how that works. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to show you how to render this and take it to Photoshop so you can enhance it even further. So, so far, we've been working on the Design tab. If I click on the Render tab, you're going to see it render once I click on the Render button. So you can decide how you're going to output this. You can give it a file name if you like. You can output it as a PNG or as a PSD Layer, I recommend using PSD. So you can download as a PSD. How fast do you want it to render, the higher the quality, the slower the render is. In this case, we're just leaving that Low for a faster render and we can click on Render. And then, you'll see the image start rendering itself. And at some point, you might get to a point where you'd think the render is good enough and you no longer want to keep waiting for the render to complete. If that happens, there is this Snapshot button right here that you can click on. You can click on Snapshot and you can save a file, a PSD of that particular state. So I'll just call it Snapshot. Save it in the Desktop. Click on Save. It's still rendering but I can stop it now if I'm happy with the snapshot that I've just saved. In this case, I'm happy with it. I'm going to close it, press OK. And I'm going to go into File, Open, there should be a Snapshot here in the desktop. Yup, there it is. And click on Open and you'll see in the Layers panel that I have my 3D object, my background, and this solid that we don't really need so I can just delete that. And now we can work with it in Photoshop. So yes, question? - [Woman] Does Project Felix have a timeline or do you bring it to Photoshop to animate? - Yeah, you would bring it into Photoshop to animate, and if you brought in a 3D model onto Project Felix, the only way to export it would be as a PSD or a PNG so it wouldn't be a 3D model anymore. So once you go from Project Felix to Photoshop, now you're just dealing with regular 2D images. So notice that this layer is just a 2D image. So any type of animation that I would do would be just a regular 2D animation. I really wouldn't be able to move it back in 3D space or rotate it at this point.

Ratings and Reviews

Maria
 

Very informative class! I was expecting only basic information, but Jesus went into quite a few specific details and showed some useful tricks. Many many thanks!

Chouaib Rama
 

Of Course this is amazing class

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