About 3D models - Dimension Tutorial

- [Instructor] Before you can get started creating a 3D scene, you'll have to find the right 3D models, and finding those models may turn out to be your biggest challenge. While Adobe Dimension is a 3D application, it can't actually create 3D assets. It can only assemble and light them. Think of it as a stage for 3D design, a helpful stage for those who normally work in 2D. After you find the right models, you need to know how to place and position them into a scene. I'll start by showing the methods for getting models into a scene, and then I'll review the methods for transforming them. If you're completely new to Dimension, you may want to watch the Dimension Essentials Training: The Basics course before going any further. All right, there's three ways to get a model into a scene, and the method depends on where the model is located. The first is to place a model from the starter assets, which we have open here on the left. If you don't see the starter assets, click on this box icon in the lower left. That toggles that panel open and closed. And then I'm going to double-click on the coffee cup model, and that will add it into the center of the scene. The second method, you can place a model from a Creative Cloud Library, which works essentially the same way. I'll click up here on Starter Assets and switch it to Libraries. Models licensed from Adobe Stock are saved to a library. We can see here that I have some models licensed and in My Library. I'll take this drink bottle and drag it out onto the scene. Drag and drop gives you the ability to place it into position. Finally, the third method is to import a model that resides on your drive. These would be models that were created in another application or downloaded from a 3D site. I'm going to go to File, Import, and we see the option to import a 3D model. And note the keyboard shortcut for that is Command + I or Control + I if you're on a Windows machine. Then I'll select this wine bottle model and say Open. That places it right into the center of the scene, actually, right into the center of the coffee cup. We'll need to slide that over into position. But before I do that, let's take a look at the Properties panel because there's a lot that you can learn about models when they're selected if you look at the Properties panel, including the physical size. We can see that this wine bottle is way too small, but the size dimensions are listed here in centimeters. I'm more comfortable with inches, so I want to change that. I'm going to go up to File, Document Settings, and that changes the Properties panel, gives us an option here to change scene units from centimeters to inches. And then I'll select back on the model, and now we see that the model's only about seven inches tall, which really isn't enough for a wine bottle. So I'll select on this and just type in 11.5, and I'll hit my Enter key. And now that wine bottle is more proportionate to the coffee cup. The size of the model has no correlation to the canvas size, and that's shown in the upper left-hand corner here. The canvas size represents the pixel dimensions of your final rendered image. I recommend working at the default size for speed, and that's what we have here. When your project is complete, you can set the pixel dimensions to a much higher size before rendering out the final image. If I click on the numbers here in the upper left, the Properties panel changes, and it gives us some fields here where we can change the canvas size. I don't want to actually change the canvas size, so I'll click back on the canvas to return to the properties for the scene. Now let's take a look at the tools and tool widgets for transforming an object. The first three tools in the toolbar on the left side are for moving and transforming models on the canvas. I'll go ahead and select this bottle again so that we can see it. And right now, I'm on the Select and Move Tool. And with the Select and Move Tool, I can grab the pink part of this widget and slide this over. The next tool is the Select and Scale Tool. You can get there with the S key. And the one after that is the Select and Rotate Tool. I want to scale up the bottle a little bit. So I'll switch to the Select and Scale Tool with the S on my keyboard, and that changes the widget here. Now with the Shift key on my keyboard, just like Illustrator, I can use any part of this widget and scale up the bottle proportionately. Now let's take a look at the Select and Rotate Tool. I'll switch there with the R key. And then, using the green part of the widget, I can rotate this model along the ground plane here. If I use the red or blue part of the widget, it'll tilt it at an angle. And when I tilt this at an angle, it actually tilted the bottle below the ground plane. There's a shortcut over here in the Actions panel. If I click on this, it'll move it up to the ground plane. Now I want to spin this around on the ground plane, but I can't do that with the widget the way that it is because the widget actually rotated with the model. Well, under the tool in the toolbar is an option to change the alignment to the scene. So I'm going to turn that on, and now we see that the widget is realigned to the scene. And I can click on the green part of this and spin it around the scene here. So that's a basic overview of how 3D models work in Dimension. Now we're ready to really dive in.