SketchUp isn’t the only product where I’m involved in the support forums. While SketchUp was with Google I was a ‘Top Contributor’ in the SketchUp forum, I’m still involved with Google in the Web Search forum, though they rebranded the TCs to be called Product Experts now. When SketchUp had its own forum here, us TCs were renamed as Sages.
I’m also what Adobe calls Adobe Community Professional, and MVP in their forum (their acronym is Most Valuable Participant I think). In fact, today I was supposed to be at an ACP Summit in Los Angeles, but a bad fall from my Brompton foldable bike while departing the recent SketchUp DevCamp event changed my plans. The product I know best of Adobe’s is Adobe Animate (previously called Flash Professional), I spent about 17 years programming things in that tool. I have some things I’m working on where I will use SketchUp along with Animate. But that’s a story for another day!
Today I wanted to talk about Adobe Dimension:
https://www.adobe.com/uk/products/dimension.html
It’s Adobe’s tool for creating photorealistic product shots, using a combination of background images and 3D models. A year ago they added native support for SketchUp files, and even ran a session at 3D Basecamp in Palm Springs.
Although I’m not going to make it to Adobe MAX, their conference that starts tomorrow, SketchUp will have a booth in the Adobe Dimension area of the exhibition hall. I’ll edit this later when I find out the booth number! Manning the booth with be two SketchUp team members, Niraj Poudel and Eric Sargeant. Make sure to go and say hi if you’re at MAX.
The main reason I wanted to start a topic was to check if any of you are already using Dimension, and have examples of what you have made with it. It’s a good tool for a SketchUp user to know about for a couple of reasons. First, it’s another potential market for you, where you might create models that Adobe Dimension users would buy to then use in their product mockups. Also, it’s a decent renderer, if you occasionally would like to see a photorealistic version of your SketchUp model, and you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, you could download Dimension and use it just for rendering your models.
Here’s a quick test I did using the Super Hornet from Aaron’s live modeling session:
I didn’t spend much time on this, just replacing a few of the SketchUp materials with something fancier inside Dimension. The program also supports Substance, which will allow for procedural textures, that should add to the realism.
Anyway, I’m the amateur here when it comes to being an artist! If you do use Dimension, please post some examples. Eric and Niraj will no doubt show off what you have done during the conference, so feel free to include some sort of credit in the image.
