Extrude 2D Images with Blender + Photoshop

okay so I want to show you how you can take two dimensional images like this and turn them into 3D Extrusions in blender or any software any 3D software so where you'll need this is when a client asks you to take their logo or some symbol and turn it into a three-dimensional object that's how you do this but where I've also found this technique here really really useful is recently with mid-journey just being able to generate some insane super intricate patterns in mid journey and then taking that and putting that into 3D that's been a lot of fun so let me show you some of this um you can see here you can just go absolutely crazy with mid-journey and generate some ridiculous looking patterns and take this and you know create unlimited variations of them and it's um you know you can take that and turn that into a 3D Extrusion like this and so I'll show you an example of doing that but just know that this this process here works with any kind of image that you can use it's gonna work best with like symbols and patterns and like 2D Vector style kind of shapes but it works with any any two-dimensional image you can run it through this process and it'll be the same so we're going to be using Photoshop to turn it into an SVG if you're not using Photoshop if you're watching this channel just get it it's worth it there are I think online converters you can use like SVG converters I would probably not recommend that because they seem sketchy but I don't know if you don't if you know more about that than me then do whatever you want anyways this is how I do it and uh yeah you can see this this is just so much fun so the first thing we need is the image so here's an example I'll just use one of these from mid-journey so I have a big folder of just intricate patterns from mid Journey which I can show you here I just have a big folder of like stuff like this of just faces and eyes and stuff carved into patterns and just just cool symbols and stuff so I'll take one of these and I'll show you the exact process that I use to turn it into an SVG and then use it inside blender let's open up Photoshop and then the first thing I'm going to do is actually not drop the doc or the photo directly in here what I'm going to do is create a new document now mid-journey exports images at 1000 by 1000 usually but I actually want to make the document here a bit bigger because I find that just works better when making the selection and you'll see why that's important in a second but we're going to hit file new and let's just do 3000 by 3000 seems to be a good amount for me you don't have to use that exact number but that's just a good amount that has worked for me so I'm going to use that and now once we have this 3000 by 3000 document I'll just take um any of those mid Journey patterns I just showed you so I'll just take this one for example just take that drag and drop it into this thing in Photoshop and now just hit enter And so there's a few things we need to do basically we just we need to make it black and white and then increase the contrast so it's just solid either fully black or fully white and then make a selection based off of that and then we can export it as an SVG so the way you do that is we're just going to go to uh the adjustment layers down here so right just uh click on this button here the half circle click on Hue saturation and just drop that to zero to desaturate it let's create a curves adjustment layer and then we can just use this as like a color ramp and blender just kind of crunch this to any point that seems like it gave me some like finer sketched out like details in here I don't want any of that I just want as close as I can get I just want it as close as I can get to like fully black or fully white so just tweak this until you find a good balance that seems like it would look good if you can just picture this extrude it into 3D just picture what that would look like in just pick a value or an amount here on the sliders it seems like it's going to be right and it doesn't need to be perfect like this is fine um so once you have that you just go to what we need to do now is just select the uh white part of this image and deselect the black Parts but I'm actually going to invert this first so let's just do a quick invert um so that when I make my selection it just selects the parts that are white here the easiest way to select only the white pixels and leave the black pixels unselected is you just go to this channels tab right here uh just control click on any one of these thumbnails and what that'll do is it'll just select the white pixels and leave the black ones so just control click on that if I head back to layers and then just look at this you can see it just made that selection based off of the the brightness of each pixel and now what I want to do is just go to paths right here and then click this button at the bottom if you hover over it'll say something like create path from selection click that give it a second and you can see it's now made a path based off of this selection so now what I want to do is just go up to file or sorry layer new fill layer and then just choose solid color and then just doesn't matter here hit okay the color doesn't matter hit okay and now we've got a color fill there um and this this is what allows us to export this as an SVG so if you don't do those steps and you just try and Export it as an SVG straight away it won't work and you'll be wondering why so make sure you make selection make a path make a colorful based off of that path and now we can export it so all you do is just go file export export as just choose from the drop down menu here format just choose SVG scalable vector graphics and then we can just hit export choose somewhere desktop doesn't matter I mean for you organize it but for me it doesn't matter and then let's just go back to blender we can just go file import so we're just going to import the thing we just exported so there's two options here SVG is grease pencil don't choose that one choose the one down here that says scalable vectorgraphics.svg this one right here click that and then we can just choose the thing we just made and you won't see anything at first but it's actually in here for some reason when you import it it doesn't make a selection so you just have to like find it in the thing over here so just click that and there we go so it's in there now what I want to do is just like move it over here I'm going to set the origin to the center of the geometry if you don't see that function you just hit F3 type origin to geometry and then just save that to your quick favorites or shortcuts Okay so we've got this now I'm going to delete the texture on it because it's just making it annoying to look at and so it's now in here but it's just a 2d thing right now the way you extrude it into a 3D thing is um right now it's actually a curve technically so this lets us just choose this uh if you go to this menu down here this green thing and then just choose extrude just turn that up a little bit so we'll just do like .01 or something that'll be fine and there we go so we've got it in 3D now if you want to Bevel this you can but the more intricate it is the more it's going to be up from the bevel and I wouldn't recommend it uh going too far but what you can do is you can turn this up slightly so that you can do um well that's way too much point oh let's try one more zero you can do it a little bit and then you'll get all these weird lines shooting off if you just convert that to a mesh so right click convert to mesh and then just go to edit mode and then just kind of Select these parts like this and then just Ctrl L to select linked geometry then you can just delete that and then you're like left with a cleaner version it's not perfect like when you Bevel it you will see some imperfections but it's uh as long as you don't push it too far it'll be fine one thing just to note here that I forgot to mention is the less intricate your pattern is the easier it's going to be to get a good result so um normally when I've done this it's been fine but in this example it actually kind of messed up and you can see the eye was like inverted on one of these so if you uh if you have really fine lights and fine shapes it's gonna increase the risk of like messing it up like you can see here I think something in here got really messed up but so yeah just try and um when you're dialing in your color ramp or your curves rather just find a place that's going to be leaning towards maybe like the less intricate side and same thing with the pattern like I've tried using um like super super intricate patterns way more than this and it's been just a mess and really hard to use so uh just try and try and keep the bigger shapes like the chunks of like white in here just as simple as you can while still being like a cool pattern and that'll just give you a better result more often but uh yeah normally it's not this messed up I don't know what happened there but normally you can get like just a clean result like this so don't worry too much about that should be fine for you so there we go we've got now a mesh from this thing and it's fully 3D we can scale it however we want duplicate it around unwrap it with a quick Cube project or smart UV projector whatever put a put a texture on it throw some lights in there and before you know it you've got something like this just you know you stack them on top of each other do whatever you want put it in a temple or put it in sci-fi piece or there's so many cool places where you could use this and it would be awesome so hopefully that was useful um and yeah I'll see you around bye

Channel: Max Hay

Views: 59,860

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Id: aXmC02c6ESg

Length: 9min 20sec (560 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 07 2023