Adobe Dimension 3.0 Release: Expand Your Creativity with New Lighting, Rendering, and Augmented Reality Workflows
My favorite time of the year is when, at Adobe MAX, I get the chance to share all the amazing new features and developments our Adobe Dimension team has been working on for the past year. Our annual creativity conference, MAX has become the perfect chance to showcase how far we’ve come since our public release in fall 2017; Dimension has become a powerful 3D design tool, and we’re constantly striving to make it better for creators of all kinds.
Our 3.0 release is one of our biggest updates yet, with powerful new features that give you control over your lighting. We’ve also added new ways to render and create high quality images and entirely new workflows that allow you to bring your ideas in augmented reality with Adobe Aero.
Add and customize multiple lights: Get the exact highlights and shadows to make your design stand out
Light, from contrast to color to brightness, is a fundamental element of essentially all art and design disciplines – from interaction and graphic design to photography and showcasing products. Making your designs shine in 3D is all about the composition, and lighting is king! Dimension now allows you to add and control multiple directional lights. Each light can be set to different directions, sizes, colors, and intensities, letting you precisely control the placement of highlights or the overall tone of lighting.
We’ve also taken these new lights and updated our Match Image feature, which lets you seamlessly add your 3D content to a background image, aligning the perspective and lighting of your design to that of the background. Match Image can now detect what type of lighting is in your image and will generate sunlight, multiple lights, or 3-point lighting accordingly. Getting a jump start on your compositing with Match Image lets you quickly see your designs in real-world scenarios and helps you produce beautiful virtual photography for marketing. It’s also useful for sharing or just getting your ideas across quicker by showing designs in context.
New Render Preview and GPU Rendering (Beta): Make design decisions faster with real-time rendering feedback
Working in 3D allows you to see and express details of a design that are hard to recreate in flat images. With a textured design, you can almost imagine the bumps and grooves on a surface, for example, how the embossing of a logo on a business card might feel in your hand. You can catch how light shines through surfaces, how metals reflect colors differently, and how all these things might change in different angles or under different 3d lighting conditions. Thanks to the reworked Render Preview experience in Dimension, you’re now able to see these details in real time, right on your canvas. This cuts down the time you spend waiting for changes to render and frees you up to make design edit. This helps you discover the best versions of your ideas even faster.
The Dimension team constantly pushes the boundaries of what technology can do, in order to help you push the boundaries of your creativity. We’re very excited to announce that our GPU Rendering (Beta) takes advantage of the incredible NVIDIA RTX™ ray tracing technology, which increases render speed by up to 9x. While the beta is only available on Windows machines currently, our research and technology teams are hard at work pushing what the future of rendering can do.
Send Dimension projects to Adobe Aero: See and interact with your designs in the real world using augmented reality
You can’t talk about 3D these days without talking about the role of mixed reality. Adobe is proud to be a leader in creating augmented reality solutions that offer to creatives of all types the power to design in AR. Our latest release lets you easily send your Dimension projects directly to Adobe Aero, which lets you view your design in the real world, add behaviors and interactions, and create your own augmented experiences.
Augmented reality is poised to touch every aspect of creative workflows. For example, when working on a branding project or product mockup, you’re able to see your design in the real world and look at its size in relation to other objects and in context. If you’re designing a space, on the other hand, you can add your Dimension projects to Aero and see how it all fits together.
Dimension and Aero are perfect tools for pushing creativity and exploring your own reality. For a full look at everything new in the release of Adobe Dimension 3.0, check out our full release notes.
Looking towards the future: Talk to the team and help build the future of 3D
To vote on your favorite Dimension feature suggestions or post your own ideas and get updates, check out our product roadmap.
Want to work closer with us? The Dimension team would love to get to know you! Join our Prerelease program to get early access to features, join webinars, demos, and design sessions, and provide feedback that helps shape our tools! You can find the Dimension prerelease program by visiting www.adobeprerelease.com and navigating to the ‘available programs’ tab.
Join a growing community of 3D designers
We love seeing and sharing your incredible 3D designs, whether they are packaging designs, product mockups, brand visualizations, or 3D art. When you’re sharing your designs on Instagram, Twitter, or Behance, don’t forget to tag them with #AdobeDimension and #CreatewithDimension, and on Behance be sure to select Adobe Dimension under ‘Tools Used’.
