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As those of you who follow this site know, I'm working on a four-part series of videos for lynda.com on the topic of making 3D art in Photoshop CS5 Extended. My first course, Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One: 3D Fundamentals is due to go live next Tuesday, March 29. (Update: It's live now!) And I just finished recording Part 2 of the series, 3D Objects, today. Below you see the final project from my latest work, Chapter 12: "Advanced Repoussé," created, dressed, and rendered entirely in Photoshop. (The text is not part of the project. It's just hype for the course.)

On a completely unrelated note, NAPP president Scott Kelby recently invited me to contribute to his Guest Blog Wednesday. Naturally, I said yes. And it comes out today!

But here's where these stories meet up: My guest post for Scott is all about 3D in Photoshop CS5 Extended. It's inspired by the first chapter of my 3D Fundamentals course. And it was produced by lynda.com. Seriously, it's like some kind of giant gas planet converged . . . with itself. And that planet is Saturn. Read more » 

In the entirely artificial digital sense, of course.

I'm midway thru recording Part 2 of my Photoshop CS5 Extended One-on-One series for my beloved video publisher, lynda.com. And, lo, it will go by the name 3D Objects. Photoshop CS5 Extended offers six classes of 3D objects: postcards (flat images projected into 3D space), preset shapes (spheres, cubes, but you can make more), imported models (from a real modeling program), 3D volumes (of use primarily for medical folk), the wide world of Repoussé (which I highlighted in this week's Deke's Techniques), and objects projected from depth maps (as I'll explain).

The upshot is that the Photoshop we know and love is secretly a 3D beast. Seriously, the stuff you can do with it is as bottomless as it is topless. (And side-to-sideless, too.) Just today, I was exploring the world of depth maps. These damn things have been around forever---they're responsible for those stereoscopic dolphin images that you have to uncross your eyes to see---so I was initially a bit bored. But in truth, depth maps are awesome architectural tools. For example, I built this:

What the Sam Heck is it? I think it's an alien temple. You know, you press a brick and it opens. But I really don't know. I'm still exploring. Read more »