Trying Out Adobe Dimension

Well, hello there and happy new year! I hope everyone will have a healthy and prosperous 2022! For one of my projects I’m working on, I decided to try constructing a mockup using Adobe Dimension. It’s an application from Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite that has been around for a few years, but I have only opened it up and never really attempted anything in it. 3D modeling is something that I’ve wanted to dive into but have always had other things come up to distract me from learning it. I actually made a resolution last year that I would learn ZBrush, but that never happened.

So, for my mockup, I wanted to create a nice image to show off a custom card game. Simple enough and it’s something I can already find pre-made mockups of online, but I wanted to try and create my own using Dimension. The software itself is not hard at all to get accustomed to; maybe just the 3D space controls is all if you’re not already familiar with such tools. I started out playing around with the plane and rectangle shapes. The plane shape worked well for a table surface and it was nice that I could control the corner radius like you can in Illustrator and Photoshop. But to add depth, I used the rectangle shape. The downside to this was that I could bevel the edges but it did not have a simple corner radius control like the plane shape did. This was a bummer as I wanted my cards to have rounded corners. I did however find another pre-loaded shape of a rectangle with rounded corners but could not find how to adjust the radius of them. This could very well be because I was a noob to this software.

I then found a free 3D asset of a pile of cards on Adobe Stock. After downloading it and playing around (I still have not found out how to control the corner radius of a rectangle), I discovered that the base color property of the card had a PSD file that essentially was a single image that wrapped around the object (see the screenshot attached to this post). I played around with this for a little bit and tried researching if there were any templates out there or articles explaining how one sets one of these mapped PSDs up but I found nothing. It’s one of those things where it’s a challenge just to type in search words.

All-in-all, Dimension is an easy program to get started with and achieve quick, cool results, but like other applications, I found the difficulty of what I was trying to learn and do challenging and me thinking that maybe I just needed to go into a more advanced 3D modeling program. I mean, a mockup should not be that difficult to make.

Shame On You iBooks Author

Months ago I shared my iBook version of The Autobiography of FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper. With the recent updates of the iBooks Author software, Apple has removed the option to have an iBook be both portrait and landscape orientated. Even loading my previous file which had both versions is now only in landscape (the original template selected). It seems now you can only have one or the other, not both. And let me tell you, landscape looks horrible in portrait mode. Needless to say I'm not too happy about this. I hope in future releases they will bring that option back. Looks like I'll have to go and make a portrait mode version now. The good thing is that iBooks Author-created books can now be viewable on iPhones with the latest iBooks app.

Tethered, Presets, and Santa

Mrs. Claus handing Santa a candy cane

This past weekend Dodge + Burn Photography did a tag team-up for Small Business Saturday. We teamed up with Balzano's restaurant in downtown Bloomsburg to do a breakfast buffet + mini photo sessions with Mr. + Mrs. Claus. Overall it went really well and the feedback was excellent. We only had a few kiddos not into it. From a technical perspective, my wife and I were pre-planning on how best to handle the shoot; she would be shooting and I would be handling the payments, quick-editing, and delivering the photos all before the families would leave the restaurant. One of the ways we thought we'd be efficient was to do tethered shooting. Tethered shooting is basically having a USB cable connected to your camera and to your laptop. Once she'd shoot, it's show up in Lightroom almost immediately. This worked out awesome for this occasion. That is until I had to review our client's photos with them while Lisa was still shooting. This proved to be very frustrating since I would be showing a photo and then once Lisa would shoot a new image, LR would then jump to that new image. So, in theory it would have been awesome if we didn't need to review photos with anyone during the shooting. The other step to cut down our processing time was to apply a preset during the importing process. The night before the shoot when we were doing our setup, we did some test shots for the lighting and angles and such. When we came home, I loaded those pics into Lightroom and made a custom user preset. Since the lighting and environment wasn't going to change, we would apply this preset to each image as it was being imported into Lightroom. This was a huge time-saver for this type of shoot and I only then had to adjust the angle and cropping of some. All in all, this was a great learning experience for the above mentioned, as well as doing speed-shoots with the big guy in the red suit.

ASTD.org Article on Editing Images in Storyline

I recently contributed another Toolbox Tip article for ASTD.org’sLearning Technologies Blog on editing images within Articulate Storyline. Read it here.