So we’re going to be starting on this document here and you can use the watermarked preview version. You don’t have to license this in order to follow along. And so what we’re going to be doing is working with a starter asset in Dimension. We’re going to be applying some textures to this. So that’ll give us a chance to play with some of these beautiful textures and then we’re going to match image to this. So we can get this takeout box looking like it’s sitting on this actual table. So to start all of this, let’s go over to Dimension. Let’s create a new file. So from the home screen, choose create new.

And from this new blank screen, let’s come down here in the starter assets. If you have your filters turned on you can click on the models tab here which is the little cube. Let’s come down to models and let’s come down, and choose the takeout box. So if we scroll down here a little bit we’ll find this in here.

Oh, there it is. Couldn’t see it. Okay, so when we click on this, this will be applied right to our scene.

I’m going to come up here and turn off my render preview for the moment, we want to be able to work in Dimension a little faster since we’re just going to be applying a couple materials real quick.

So now with the model selected here, over here in the scene panel, you’ll notice that there are three items to this particular model. We’ve got a sleeve, we’ve got a bottom lid and we’ve got a top lid. So let’s start with the bottom lid. What we want to do for the bottom lid is we want to apply a cardboard material to this. So what we’re going to do is I’m going to just select the bottom lid so that it selected here on the stage. Now in the left hand panel, let’s scroll down here into the materials.

And in our materials, let’s scroll down to the substance materials and let’s come down here and select cardboard.

So at the bottom, once selected, you can either just click on this. You can also click and drag this and drop it on the bottom or you can click and drag and drop it into the layers panel. Whatever you find the most comfortable, we just want to make sure that we’re applying the cardboard to the bottom of this takeout box here.

Now, once you’ve applied that, let’s scroll up into the Adobe standard materials and let’s find the glass material.

So let’s click and drag on glass and let’s drop this to the lid top.

And this is super cool, by applying this we’re basically taking that entire material and now having Dimension treat that as if it were molded out of a piece of glass.

Now, if you come down here to your widget, you can sort of rotate this around a little bit.

You select the takeout box, the whole thing.

We can rotate this around and you can see the different lighting, and the environment sort of reflecting off that glass shape there.

In reality, this would be plastic, but we’re going to get exactly the same sort of effect here with glass.

And then finally for the sleeve, let’s select the sleeve. Let’s come down to the materials here and let’s come down and select the first item here. We’re going to apply the striped pattern here. So this is the striped glossy paper.

Now the substance materials in a lot of cases have a lot of extra parameters that we can set which make these incredibly powerful. So with the sleeve selected, if you click on the little arrow here to the right, if you can’t see the material, click on the little arrow to the right, you’ll see the materials applied to this object. We can select the striped glossy paper, and then down here in the properties, there are a bunch of different settings that we can change down here. So we can change how many stripes are actually showing in this. So I might want to increase this a little bit, just to give it a little bit more texture. We can also choose the rotation amount, we can choose whether there’s a lot of scratches, we can set the roughness of the material. So it doesn’t look too glossy. So we can maybe pull that down a little bit. You can just come in here and play with all of these different settings inside of here. For the offset rotation, we can move this around.

I think this looks interesting if this is around maybe 45 degrees, just gives that much more sort of interesting look with the shape. But again, you can come in here and change all of these different properties. The roughness and the metallic nature is going to give us the ability to sort of tone down how glossier shiny this looks. Though, I might not want this to look too shiny on the edges here And also in the resources, there is a PDF where I have a few extra steps in here like adding a graphic that we get from the assets. So I’ll be sure to download the PDF and you can try this again, following the PDF. This is also being recorded too, so you can watch the recording again and try this. But I want to jump now over to the match image feature because I definitely want you to see, in addition to being able to apply these different materials, I want you to see what Dimension can do if we give it a simple JPEG file and have it determine the perspective, and lighting from that file.

So what we’re going to do is we’re going to come up to our scene. If you’re on the sleeve, click the left arrow here to go back to the main set of layers.

Let’s select the environment panel. And then down here for properties, let’s go to background, click on the white swatch here next to background.

Then we’re going to come over here and select image and we’re going to bring that Adobe stock graphic that you downloaded. And you can just drag and drop that right inside of this dotted line or you can click select a file.

In either case you’re going to locate that preview image.

You’re going to click open, now then we’re going to see something that looks like this. You can click away from here to make the panel go away.

So this is typically what you would see. We have a model that we just built sort of without any perspective or camera settings. And we brought in an image that was taken from a camera that does have perspective settings wherever the camera was when it took this particular photo. So now we want to have these two things be matched up. So now let’s click on the environment panel right under scene. And since there is an image being applied under the actions panel, there’s a button here called match image.

So again, make sure you’ve selected the environment main panel here with the little earth icon, then under actions, click match image. Then in this next dialogue box, we want to check all three options. We want to have Dimension evaluate this object in relation to other things that can identify in the photo using Adobe Sensei. We wanted to be able to detect lights that are in the photo. And we also wanted to match the perspective. So with all of these turned on, let’s come down here and click okay.

Then Dimension will sort of phone home, sort of check out with Adobe Sensei, evaluate the image and then apply what it learned about the image to what you’ve done with the model that we’ve built inside of our scene. And so now once that’s done faster than I can even explain it, we now have this model where the camera, position, rotation, and lights have all been set up for us automatically in order to move this into place.

So now at this point, let’s go back to the environment. Notice we got two directional lights. We added some lights earlier in the webinar today, a three-point lighting system, but you can also add lights one at a time. And so notice that Dimension actually added two lights based on what it gleaned from the photo that we matched this to.

So let’s select one of the lights, let’s come down to rotation and let’s move these around. And here’s where I would move these around until I got a really interesting sort of highlight. So I’m sort of paying attention to this top ridge here on the glass and this ridge over here on the right hand side. And I just want to come in here and sort of art direct the way the light is shining across my model. And when we’re doing this part, you’re going to want to come up here and turn on your preview up here. Because again, that really quick indication of where the lights are shining might not be exactly where the light shine when Dimension actually applies real world physics and lighting to this. So we want to turn this on and then come in here and play with the rotation. So I move this around, I really like this highlight in the front here so I’m going to move this around until that highlight starts to stay in place and same thing with the other pieces. And then we can just come around and play with both intensity and rotation for the two different lights.

So at this point, you’re paying attention to the glossy paper. You’re paying attention to the highlights in the glass. You’re paying attention to the shadow. You’re paying attention to all the different pieces that are going to help you put together this photo-realistic scene so that when we render this out, we’ll be able to put this into our project and create this really photo-realistic or synthetic photograph that we created from Dimension. -