3D Model of a Video Camera Created in Blender

Even though Photoshop is what you might call my "first love", in the interests of staying versatile I spend quite a bit of time working in other applications: After Effects, Flash, Illustrator, Audition, etc.  This weekend I found myself sitting in front of Blender, a 3D modeling program.  Here's what came out:

Full render

Rendered without materials

This camera is fully modeling, textured, and rendered from scratch.  For those who care, I used only one image at a single angle for reference.  It's rendered in Cycles.  The sample size is 1000 at 1920 X 1080 resolution.  No textures were used.  It's all done using Cycle's material engine with only a tiny bit of node work.  There is a bit of graininess.  It could have used some more time cooking in the rendering engine, but big renders take lots of time, and it's time to play video games, so couldn't have my computer tied up all night.

Anyway, there it is; a near-photo-realistic picture of a camera that was not taken with a camera.

Comments and feedback are welcome.

Enjoy!

Captain America's Shield Tutorial

In today's tutorial, we will learn how to make a near photo-realistic reproduction of Captain America's iconic shield using a couple of tricks that aren't usually thought of when you're working in Photoshop.

This is one of the longest and most complete tutorials I've done, and it has tons of stuff packed in here.  It uses bump mapping, normal mapping, 3D material imports, image-based lighting ... the list goes on.

Installing 3D Material Presets Using the Extension Manager

Hey folks, here's a quick tutorial showing you how to download and install free material sets available from Photoshop.com for you to use in your 3D projects in Photoshop CS 5 Extended.  Once installed, these materials will permanently be available for use in your projects.

Stay tuned.  An upcoming tutorial will be using some of these new materials.  Thanks for watching.