Photoshop 3D - Understanding Depth Maps, Bump
Maps and Normal Maps Welcome back to another very exciting tutorial
here at the PhotoshopTrainingChannel.com. My name is Jesus Ramirez and you can find
me on Instagram @JRfromPTC. In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how
to work with Bump Maps, Normal Maps and Depth Maps in Photoshop. This is going to be a Photoshop 3D tutorial. And even though we're going to discuss advanced
and complex topics, I'll try to keep things as simple as possible. Also, remember that you can always pause and
rewind the video in case you miss something. The project that we're going to work on is
creating a realistic brick wall in 3D. We'll ultimately end up using a depth map,
which allows us to create 3D geometry from a flat 2D image using its luminance values. But we'll also discuss Bump Maps and Normal
Maps which help fake depth and detail in a 3D object. Okay, let's get started. So this is the image that we're going to work
with. It's just a wall. This is an Adobe stock image. I have a link to it right below this video
or you can use any other image of a wall that you like. Now before we go any further, I do want to
point out that if you're working in Photoshop CC and you don't see the 3D Menu that is because
your computer probably does not have the minimum requirements for 3D in Photoshop. So, I just want to point that out in case
you don't see the 3D button in your installation of Photoshop. If you want to know what the minimum requirements
are, you can search for "Photoshop CC minimum requirements" on Google and you'll see a page
from Adobe, and I'll link to that right below this video. So, we have this image of this brick wall
and in Photoshop, we can turn this into a 3D shape, so I'm going to click on this layer,
then go into the 3D panel. If you don't see the 3D panel you can just
click on the workspace and select 3D. In the 3D Panel, I can select the Source as
Selected Layer(s) and I'm going to select 3D Postcard and click on Create. This is going to make this wall into a 3D
object. Notice that my Move Tool is selected and with
the Move Tool selected, I can see the 3D widgets here at the bottom left and in the Options
bar. If I click away to, say, the Rectangular Marquee
Tool, you'll see that those go away. So for you to see the 3D options you need
to be in the Move Tool and you can rotate around your 3D scene with this little widget
here on the bottom left. This is what I like to use, the Orbit Tool,
click and drag and you rotate around the 3D scene. The Pan Tool moves it around and the Dolly,
which zooms in and out. So this is how I like to navigate through
my 3D scene. And you can see now that this wall is, in
fact, in 3D space. You will also notice that there is no shape
to it. There's no depth and that is because this
is the equivalent of printing out a photo of a wall and pasting it on another wall,
essentially wallpaper, is what we just did. There's no depth and light is not interacting
with it. It's not creating shadows, so in certain angles
it won't look very realistic. You might be able to get it realistic in a
certain angle, but once you move into a more extreme angle, you'll notice that it's not
very realistic. So what we're going to do in this tutorial
is learn several techniques to try to make this into a more realistic brick wall. Also, generally speaking, Photoshop creates
Infinite Lights when you create a 3D object. In this case, it did not. So, if you come into a 3D panel and you don't
see anything labeled Infinite Light, you can create one by clicking on the Light icon and
selecting New Infinite Light, and this creates the infinite light number one. And with this widget here, you can click and
drag that light around and tell Photoshop where the light source is coming from. Notice that the wall really does not interact
with the light in terms of creating shadows or highlights in the actual bricks. So what we're going to do now is talk about
several different things that you can do to create the illusion of realism. So what I'm going to do now is revert the
image. I'm going to press F12 on the keyboard or
you can also go into File, Revert, which brings the image back to your last safe point or
to what it looked like when it was first opened. So once again I just have the layer. I'm going to duplicate this layer by pressing
Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, so now I have a wall and a wall copy. In Photoshop, you can apply 3D filters and
these filters allow you to generate a bump map and a normal map. I'm going to click on bump map first and this
is going to open up the Generate Bump Map dialogue box here. And you can see a 3D Preview of what this
bump map is going to do. It's going to fake depth in 3D. It's not really going to alter the shape of
the 3D object. You can see the circle is still fairly smooth. There are no real edges, grooves and bumps. It's just faking that effect. And the way the bump map works is by taking
the luminance values of the original image and even if it's white, it's going to create
the illusion of pushing out. Anything that is black is going to create
the illusion of pushing in and the controls that you have are the Blur. If you set the Blur to zero, you'll see that
you'll get a lot of noise on the image, that's because all the dark pixels and bright pixels
are creating the illusion of pushing the pixels in and out on the 3D object. So you usually want to have a little bit of
blur so that you get rid of those details and you'll only keep the major details, and
you can adjust the low, medium and high by clicking and dragging on these icons and you'll
see how that changes and how it updates or you can click and drag on the label or you
can just come in here and type a number in. And you can adjust the detailed scale if you
want to and any adjustment that you make automatically previews not only in the 3D model here, but
also in the background, which is really what we're going to use. And you can select different types of objects
like, maybe, a cube. Since this is going to be a wall, we can get
a better representation of what it's going to look like. And notice that if we go on an extreme angle,
we can still tell that it's a flat image, but at least it's interacting with the light
so it's going to help it look a little more realistic. Now I'm going to press Cancel because this
is not how we're going to create the bump map. I just wanted to show you that this is an
option. I'm going to press Cancel and what I'm going
to do now is go into the Layers Panel, make sure the wall copy is selected and the 3D
Panel, I'm just going to create another 3D Postcard and click on Create and there it
is, once again, in 3D space. And so that things don't get confusing, I'm
going to go into the Layers panel and disable the wall--the original wall layer. So, now, we're only looking at the 3D object. And what I want to do is double click on the
3D wall object. And once again, I don't have an infinite light
so I'm going to create one new infinite light. There it is. You can click and drag on it as you can see. And I'm going to go into the wall copy mesh,
open it up, click on wall copy and for some reason, Photoshop creates an Opacity texture. I'm not sure why but I'm just going to remove
it since we don't need it. It just makes things more complicated, so,
now, the opacity texture is now gone. We have this Bump Map slider here with a folder
right next to it. If we click on the folder, we can Generate
Bump Map from Diffuse. The Diffuse is right up here. Diffuse is really the color of the 3D object
or it could be an image that you'll wrap around it. In this case, the wall is the image that we're
wrapping around. So, I'm going to generate my bump from the
diffuse. Click on that, and once again, Photoshop will
bring up the Generate Bump Map dialogue box and we can make adjustments as we did before. Something I didn't mention earlier is that
you have this check box here to invert the height, but anyway, I'm going to decrease
the Lows and increase the Highs, I think the blur is okay, and this should work, at least,
for this example so I'm going to press OK. And you'll now notice a little bit of a difference. If I increase the bump, you'll see how the
wall looks like it's sticking out more. Also, if I select the Infinite Light, I can
click and move it around and notice how, now, the light is interacting with the shape of
the wall, so it looks a little bit more realistic than it did before. You can also click on the rectangular Marquee
Tool, click and drag a selection, just a small selection, so that we could render this section. The Render button is here. You can also go into 3D, Render 3D Layer,
or you can use the keyboard shortcut Alt+Shift+Ctrl+R and once you do that, Photoshop will start
rendering this section. And Rendering means that Photoshop is going
to calculate the light, the bump, the diffuse, shadows and everything else in your scene
to make it a final image. And, obviously, the Render time depends on
the speed of your computer and the complexity of your scene, and this could take a while. Notice that just for this selection, my computer
is going to take roughly three minutes to complete. You can press the Esc key and this is a representation
of what the entire image is going to look like. What I want to do now is bring down the intensity
of the Light and the Properties panel. I have the Infinite Light selected so I can
click and drag the infinite light down a little bit so that it's not so bright. And I can do another quick render by making
a selection with the Rectangular Marquee Tool and clicking on the Render button. But, anyway, for this example, this is going
to be okay and now you can see how we created a wall that is slightly more realistic than
just having it flat on the 3D Postcard. So I'm going to go back into the Layers Panel
and I'm just going to delete this layer. I'm going to show you now a different technique. So with the original wall layer selected,
I'm going to press Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac. Now we have a second copy and we'll do the
same thing. We'll go into 3D, 3D from Postcard, and click
on Create. Now we're going to talk about the second filter
in the 3D Menu here and the reason we can't see it is because we need a pixel layer selected,
so Filter, 3D, Normal Map. We're not going to click on it here but I
just wanted to show you that this was also available in the Filters and I'm going to
go back into the 3D layer. So, I'm going to double click on the 3D Layer
from the layers panel, now I'm inside of the 3D panel and I have the wall copy mesh and
the wall copy material, so I'm clicking on the wall copy material. You'll notice the Properties panel gives us
the materials. And I'll delete the Opacity Texture once again
because we don't need it. We don't have an Infinite Light so I'll create
an infinite light, so now I can adjust the lighting, maybe bring it down a little bit
since I already know that's a little too bright. And from the wall copy mesh or from the wall
copy material, rather, I can now create a normal map. So, I'm going to Generate Normal from Diffuse. Normal works a lot like bumps; the difference
is that Bump Maps create luminosity to create the illusion of depth. Normal Maps use the 3 RGB channels to create
the illusion of depth. So you can think of Bump Maps as only having
up and down and Normal Maps as having up, down, left and right. And the dialogue box looks a lot like the
Bump Map dialogue box. But if you'll notice in the background, the
image looks a lot different, but the way we create it is very similar. So I'm just going to just make a few quick
adjustments. We don't need to spend a lot of time on that
since you know how this work; they work the same. Once we press OK, Photoshop applies that Normal
Map. If I go into the Infinite Light, you can see
how it interacts with that Normal Map and it's actually a little bit better than the
last one, than the Bump Map, because the Normal Map, as I mentioned, gives you left, right,
up and down, so if I go back into the wall copy material, I can go into the Normal and
edit the texture, and this is what that looks like. If you open this up and it looks black, it
might be because your UV Overlay is active and you may have a lot of UVs so make sure
that you disable the UVs in case you can't see the Normal Map, and this is what the Normal
Map looks like. Notice that in the Channels panel, you have
the Red, Green and Blue channel. Notice how they're all very different and
that is because Photoshop is using each individual channel to create the illusion of depth in
different ways. So, the final result looks like that. Obviously this is a little bit harder to edit
than working simply with luminance values. So, now, what I can do is I can also place
this into position and I'll disable the original wall here in the background in the Layers
panel, just so this doesn't confuse us and I can come back, select that Rectangular Marquee
Tool, make a selection and click on Render and see what that Render would look like. I'm going to press the Escape key just because
I know it's going to look okay. And as I mentioned before, with the Infinite
Light and pressing the V key in the keyboard, we get all our 3D tools and I can continue
to move this around and you see how the light interacts with the wall. Now, even though this is a little bit better
than the Bump Map, it still has the same problem which is at an extreme angle, you know that
this is a flat image and even though the light interacts with it, there's just no way around
that. We're dealing with a flat image. Luckily, for us and Photoshop, there's another
way in which we can literally create depth out of an image. So let's take a look at that. I'm going to go back into the Layers panel
and this time I'm just going to delete the wall copy and just work with the original
wall layer. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate
it, Ctrl J, Command J on the Mac, then I'm going to go into Filter, 3D, Generate Bump
Map, and we're going to use the luminance values to generate a 3D object, and I'm just
going to leave it with these settings for now. I'm just going to press OK. And what I want to do is go into Image, Adjustment
Levels, and I'm going to make the darks darker and I don't really want to make the whites
whiter. I don't want pure white, so I'm okay having
an off white color. I just need a little more contrast and press
OK. So this is going to work a lot like a Bump
Map where black pushes pixels in and white pushes pixels out. So I want the separation in-between the bricks
to be darker and the bricks to be brighter, so I'm going to come in, select the Burn Tool,
and I'm quickly going to just start burning in-between those bricks. Make sure that your Range is set to Shadow. Exposure is fine at 50%. And I just want to make sure that there's
no bright areas in-between the bricks. I'm going to go a little faster than I normally
would just for the sake of saving time, but I think you'll get the idea and once you see
the results, you might want to spend a little more time on your image. And I'm not using a Wacom tablet, but a Wacom
tablet will probably be a little more accurate, so if you have one, I recommend using it. To be frank with you, I would use it if I
was actually working on a real project and not recording on a tutorial, but that's not
to say you can't use the mouse if you don't have a Wacom tablet. Okay, I think that will work, and also, you
might want to select the Dodge Tool and make sure that the bricks are not too dark. And, again, for this example, I this will
work. I don't have to spend too much time, so we'll
just work with this. Remember, we have the wall copy selected and
that's what we've been working on and the regular layer is still there. So in the 3D Panel, instead of 3D Postcard,
what I'm going to choose now is Mesh from Depth Map. In a Depth Map, as I said before, we'll push
in the dark pixels and we'll push out the bright pixels, and this is actually 3D geometry,
so I can select Mesh from Depth Map. Make sure that you have Plane selected and
click on Create. And now you'll see this groovy-looking thing
here. I'm going to go into the Layers Panel and
just disable the wall, just so it doesn't confuse us. Back on the 3D Panel, I can click on Depth
Map and you'll see that with the Move Tool selected, I have this 3D widget here. And let me rotate the camera around so you
can see what we created. This is what we created just now. And I can come here and hover over the Scale
Along Z axis cube is the blue one. I can click and drag that to the left and
notice that if I come back far enough, now, it looks more like a real wall. And I can come into the Orbit 3D Camera Tool
and you'll see now that this is, in fact, 3D geometry. We're no longer faking depth. This is actual depth, so I can move that around,
I can zoom in and I can do all sorts of things now. So this is a more realistic wall and if I
press M on the keyboard for the Marquee Tool, click and drag, hit the Render button and
we'll give it a few seconds to render, you'll see how this is a more realistic render. And, obviously, if we work with the Infinite
Light, the shadows and highlights will affect the image. Also, notice what happens on this extreme
lighting here. Notice how now the shadows are even more realistic
because this is real 3D geometry. So, you can create some really cool effects,
and you may be wondering how do we edit the colors and maybe add a more realistic texture. Well, we'll do that next. But, first, again, Photoshop creates this
opacity texture that I don't like so I'm going to remove it. It just makes things more complicated when
we start applying different effects, but what you really want to do to apply a texture onto
this wall is going to the Diffuse. Notice that we already have a texture here,
so I'm going to go into Edit Texture. That's going to open up in a new tab and this
is essentially the Bump Map. It's using two instances of the same thing. If we edit this, it will not affect the depth
map. If you do want to affect the depth map, you
got to go into the Depth Map layer and click on Edit Source, and it's going to open up
an image that looks just like this. But if you edit that second image, it will
affect the 3D geometry; the diffused texture will not. Anyway, so now we're in the Layers Panel,
I can come back into the bricks.psd that I'm working on, enable that wall background, click. Drag it over to the wall copy tab--I'm still
holding--and I'm going to hold Shift when I release, so it places it in place. So notice how it matches perfectly. I can press Ctrl S, Command S on the Mac,
to save, go back into the brick.psd, and notice how, now, it applied that texture onto my
brick wall. Let me disable the original wall image so
we're only looking at the 3D model. And, again, this is the 3D model with depth,
and I can adjust the depth if I want to by clicking on the 3D model and using the 3D
widget, just scale on this D axis; so see how that works and you can adjust the depth
accordingly, of course. Another thing that you can do is go back into
the 3D Layer. On the wall copy, we can edit the Diffuse
again, but we already have it open on this tab, so I'm going to open up this tab and
I'm going to create a new layer because, now, we can work on this texture like we can with
any other Photoshop document. That means that we can paint on it if we want
to, so let me just quickly paint something here. I'll just paint 'PTC' on here and I can even,
maybe, create a Shape layer here and maybe fill it with green just so you could see the
difference and maybe even increase the stroke, something like that. And to make it a little more realistic, I'm
going to double click on the side of the layer here and bring up the Layer Style window and
adjust the underlying layer Blend If just to make it more realistic. Notice that if I hold Alt, Option on the Mac,
click in the Center, it splits those in half and it creates a more gradual transition. What I'm doing here is hiding anything that
is darker than this shade of gray. So if it's this shade of gray or darker, it
becomes invisible. If it's in-between this shade of gray and
this shade of gray, then there's a gradual transition. And if it's between this shade of gray and
white, then it's 100% visible, so notice what happens when I click and drag on these sliders. I'm going to press OK and I'll do the same
thing on this Shape layer. Split those by holding Alt, Option on the
Mac, and click and drag just so that they interact better with your background. And on this one, maybe I'll even bring the
opacity down. It might be too bright for the effect that
I'm going for, and maybe bring the opacity down on PTC as well, maybe something like
that. You don't need to spend too much time with
this. I just want to show you how this will work. I'm going to press Ctrl S, Command S, to save,
go back on to the brick wall and you'll see that, now, those graphics are applied to the
wall and, obviously, they look very realistic because they're applied to the 3D geometry
and I'm just going to do a quick render here so you could see how they look. In my opinion, this is a little too bright,
so what I might do is maybe work on the Infinite Light, maybe even reduce the lighting a little
bit, and maybe even rotate it into a different way just to create something more interesting
and obviously, for the background here, I could do a sky. And the way that you can create a sky is by
maybe creating a gradient and just selecting white and blue, which I already have selected,
but if click on this top one, notice that the opacity is set to zero, so let me bump
that up to 100 and maybe select a different kind of blue that may look a little more realistic,
so, something like that. Obviously, you can spend a lot more time or
maybe even use a stock photo. And I wasn't planning on doing this, but I
just said it, using a stock photo of a sky here that I've used, so let me use that and
you'll see how that works. And this is one of the reasons why I like
Adobe Stock in the Creative Cloud. I just have all these assets that I can use
for all types of designs. But, anyway, this is just something that you
can do to create realistic effects and really cool designs using Photoshop 3D and, I guess,
stock images and, of course, our final step now will be just to render the image by selecting
the 3D wall copy and clicking on the Render button. Once you're making your final render, you
don't have to make a small selection. You can just simply click on the Render button
and let it render for as long as it needs to. And one very important thing to note is that
even though in this tutorial we used the Depth Map to complete our project, it doesn't mean
that Bump Maps or Normal Maps are not as good. They definitely have their place in 3D and
in a lot of cases, they are the better tool for the job. Also, you can apply a Bump Map or Normal Map
to this Depth Map to create an even more realistic 3D image. In case you're curious, this is what my final
render looks like. I also quickly want to show you another image
created using a Depth Map. This mountain was created using a similar
technique as the 3D brick wall that we just created. As you can see, there's a lot of applications
for this method of creating 3D geometry. And that's it for this tutorial. I hope that you enjoyed it and that you learned
something new. Make sure that you leave all your comments
or questions down below. If you create an image using this tutorial
or any other of my tutorials, feel free to share it on Instagram with the hashtag #PTCVids. I often do a search for this hashtag to see
what you're all up to. Also, don't forget to subscribe and click
on that Like button. If you have a friend who you think might enjoy
this tutorial, please share this link with them now. Thank you for watching and I'll talk to you
again soon.
