Animation in Photoshop: Part two

- We've walked you through some of the essentials of working with 3D objects as well as creating them. Let me show you another real world design where a 3D object can come in handy to enhance it. We're going to build out an informational graphic for a video project. Now, to continue our refresher, all of these things here are pretty elaborate, and for example, you might find it useful to actually go in and manipulate the object. If we take a look here at the layer itself, you'll notice that the beetle has its own texture, there it is. If I double-click, you see it comes into play. Make a new layer and load up a different color. Let's go with a gold. We'll place this entire layer into Color mode. Now, it's very easy to paint. What I want to do is introduce some gold to the back part of the beetle which looks like it's these parts here. The stomach area and its back. If I close and save that, you'll notice that it updated. In fact, even while you're right here, you can continue to paint right on the object itself. So if you wanted to make manipulations, it's very versatile. All right, let's finish that out with a simple animation. We'll twirl down here and select the beetle in the background. Let's just rename that Beetle_BG so it's clear. What I'm going to open up is the timeline. Now, you can create a video timeline and it makes it for you. Remember, this gives you all of these different layers and if needed, you can come down and change the Timeline Frame Rate. Switching it to a preset that matches your needs. Additionally, all of these layers can be dragged out to new durations as you see fit. You'll find a course about the video editing features in Adobe Photoshop on Lynda.com but as a professional video editor, I would tell you that it's really designed for photographers or designers who find tools like Premiere Pro or Final Cut Pro intimidating. It's a pretty basic editor, but for now, we're going to use it as a motion graphics tool so you might find it useful. With the object selected there, let's grab that beetle. Scroll down. There's the beetle in the background. If I twirl it down, you'll see a range of properties. What we're going to use here is the object itself. We've got our different layers here. There's the beetle. What we're going to do is rotate it. I can either rotate the camera position or the actual cross-section here, it's up to you. Let's scroll down a little more. You'll see there's controls for the mesh which will actually give us the entire object. If I turn the stopwatch on and then simply go a little bit later in the scene, there it is, well, there's the beetle. With the beetle selected, let's just make sure the object is rotated and you'll see under Properties here all of your controls. I can simply rotate that on the y-axis if I wanted for a slow turn. Maybe you just want subtle movement back there. Maybe a little spin on the x-axis, too. There we go. Let's turn that on the z-axis. You see what it's doing is it's showing us a different part of the subject. You can also enter the values in but I sometimes find that dragging is a little more intuitive. Well, there's two key frames there. There's the first. There's the second. What it's going to do in between those two values is animate. Now, Photoshop is not a great real time tool so if I drag through here, it's going to be a bit stuttery. But you can get an idea of what's possible, If you're satisfied with that, now it's just time to move on to rendering.