Dazzle Them With Daz Studio
So you've been ogling the 3D capabilities of Photoshop CS3 Extended but there's no sign of an upgrade? In fact, you may be watching the 3D train leave the station with that helpless feeling of once again falling behind. You know you could extend the scope of the graphics and documents you're currently creating by adding 3D content. But how? The good news is that the cross-platform DAZ Studio provides a simple, free way to begin incorporating 3D into your Photoshop workflow.
DAZ Productions has been around for a long time and has retained its focus as a provider of 3D creation tools and related content. Having a good understanding of the market, DAZ knows that making the jump to 3D can be a challenging one for 2D artists, and so makes available its DAZ Studio as a stepping stone to the 3D world. The free download, recently updated to version 2.1, consists of a 3D figure posing and animation tool that comes with a selection of scenes and props, including the versatile Victoria figure.
No point going through the many features here. But there's no doubt that DAZ Studio contains more than enough functionality to allow novices to keep busy mastering the fundamentals of 3D for some time. And in the process creating usable work, in part thanks to a plugin that displays rendered scenes as a layer in Photoshop. This lets you change poses, lights, textures and so one, and see changes immediately with Auto Update. Then you can render to a new image within Photoshop using the 3Delight render engine. If this all sounds daunting, it's good to know that the new version includes a QuickStart Interface to introduce the application's feature set, as well as a healthy batch of tutorials.
DAZ Studio 2.1 for Mac and PC is available for free download on the DAZ Productions site.
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