Creating 3D printable objects with Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended

In April 2010 Adobe released the new Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended. One of the new features of that Photoshop version is the Repoussé, a tool that allows you to create 3D objects extruding texts, selections, paths and layers masks. To celebrate the CS5 release, Adobe 3D printed some souvenirs via i.materialise for the team that developed the Repoussé technology. Nikolai Svakhin, one of the Photoshop Developers, wrote a terrific tutorial on how to create 3D printable objects with Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended.

Adobe Photoshop is the world’s leading graphics editing program. Its extended version basically adds 3D capabilities to the program. One of those exciting new 3D capabilities is called Repoussé.

“Repoussé is a new research system for the interactive enhancement of 2D art with 3D geometry. Repoussé creates a 3D shape by inflating the surface that interpolates the input curves. By using the mean curvature stored at boundary vertices as a degree of freedom, a user is able to manipulate the inflated surface intuitively and efficiently using a single linear system.” — Adobe Systems

If you’d like to try out this new exciting feature of Photoshop CS5 Extended, you can read the tutorial ‘Creating Solid Printable Objects in Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended’. Nikolai Svakhin thoroughly explains how he created the model for the 3D printed souvenir with the Repoussé technology.

And if you are wondering how 3D actually ended up in Photoshop, I can advise you reading ‘The evolution of 3D in Photoshop’ by Corey Barker.