Strata Design 3D CX 6: the designers’ key to unlock 3D

Strata Design 3D CX 6 a Case Study

I’d like to take a simple case study to show why I think Strata Design has some very attractive possibilities, especially for designers and packaging designers that are very comfortable in the Adobe Suite of products and are looking for new ways to present and communicate their designs in 3D, all the way up to interactive web based presentations and high quality cross platform 3D PDF publications. You can follow this sample workflow by downloading the demo version of Strata Design 3D CX 6 from Strata’s website and also watching the instruction movie here: http://www.strata.com/support/videos_podcasts/episodes/3din_part1/

The Goal

Match some designed in store point of sale units that are created in Strata Design 3D CX 6 ( possibly with the help of the Strata Enfold module which can be set to great use here) with a photograph of the actual location. A photograph is available to take measurements from if necessary.

Setting up in Photoshop

The first thing to do is open the image in Photoshop (the Strata Design 3D CX 6 plug-ins have been installed at this point already…) Then you choose the vanishing point option from the filters menu. This will bring you to a modular window where you can draw a grid that matches the perspective of, in this case, the ground plane.

You choose the option from the mini menu top left to “Return 3D layer to Photoshop”. Once this is done you can save the file so that you don’t have to set this up again and can reference this grid for future reuse.

Sending the Model to Strata Design 3D CX 6

Next thing you do is to go to Filters->Strata Design 3D CX->Match and this will start up the Strata Design 3D CX application and add both the background image along with the grid you created in Photoshop, ready for use.

Then it’s only a matter of dragging and dropping the model that you have already created onto the plane (since it’s a modeling grid every new model is added in orientation and relation to this grid). It matches the perspective of the photo exactly as you have set up the perspective grid.

Now it’s just a case of rendering out a high quality render and sending this mage back to Photoshop in a range of Strata Layers.

These render layers can then be individually blended into the Photograph.

Round Tripping the Rendered File back to Photoshop

Because Strata Design 3D CX has done all the hard work for you by separating every conceivable channel into its own layer you can even do things like toning down reflections, switching off shadows or color correction the actual artwork on the models.

Strata Design 3D CX makes it even possible to send the 3D layer back into Photoshop and you can actually rendering the file in Photoshop with Photoshop’s’ rendering options. You can even change the location of the model in Photoshop; in 3D!

This story written by Albert Kiefer

Albert Kiefer is a professional designer and technical expert located in the Netherlands. He has well over 20 years of experience in the fields of computer illustration, animation and image manipulation. He also develops interactive concepts and graphical interfaces for large international corporations that are active in consumer electronics.