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If you are new to the world of 3D or even if you have some experience you might
be wondering which 3D file format should you use with Photoshop Extended.
So in this movie we are going to look at a few of the more common file formats that
you might use. Specifically, OBJ, 3DS, and .dae, the Collada file format.
Now, what I'm actually going to do here is hop on over to Cinema4D. That's the
3D program that I use to create these little rings. If this looks scary and
unfamiliar to you, don't worry about it. You don't need to know anything here.
This is just by way of illustration. I want to show you what my original file looks
like when it's rendered. These rings are kind of glassy. They are reflective.
They have some lights here, like a purplish light and another white light.
What I did here from Cinema4D is exported this to several different file
formats, and so when we go back to Photoshop, we can compare and contrast the
differences between them. We will start with .obj. The .obj file format
is great for models, but it's not good for the total package, for files that
need materials. As you could see here in the Layers panel, we are recognizing
that we do have this metallic texture applied here, but we are not seeing
it. But if we click and drag here, we'll see this file moves in real time, that
the model looks really good, and this is typically the case with OBJ files.
No materials, but the model looks great. Now let's go over to the 3DS version of this
file. Now, with the 3DS file format here, we'll see the lights. We'll see
a little bit of reflectivity. We'll see this golden texture. But as we move
this around, you can kind of see there is some roundedness, which definitely
wasn't the case in the original file. The .3DS file format seems to kind of smooth
things over. It may be doing us a favor I guess, but it just doesn't always
look exactly accurate. I will tell you, the people at Adobe that
work on the 3D part of Photoshop just hate the 3DS file format. They mock it to
no end. So they consider it an obsolete file format, in favor of the Collada
file format, .dae. As you could see, our lights look a little
bit more accurate here. The reflections look better and definitely
the models have harder edges, they look sharper, much better than in the 3DS file.
So the Collada file format is kind of like the best of both worlds. More and
more robust 3D applications now support this file format as well. It's kind of
meant to be a universal file format. The .U3D file format is also meant to be a
universal 3D file format. That's actually what that stands for, but it hasn't
been as widely adopted as the Collada file format.
Now, I'm not saying you always need to use Collada. There is a lot of reason to
use each of these file formats. So whatever works best for your workflow,
whether you need to focus on modeling, like OBJ, or whether you want the total
package like a DAE file format, or maybe you want more compatibility, in which
case you might want to go with 3DS. Again, the choice is up to you.