Hey Guys.. last week I had a very short tutorial – bringing you to the work of someone who I completely admire – Scott Kelby. However, I felt like I could switch it up this week and come up with something a little bigger.. so here’s an entry plus..

I saw that e-frontier (the guys that have Poser) have offered a plugin for Poser 7 to export 3D Objects into Photoshop CS3. While Photoshop CS3 isn’t really a true 3D rendering program, its ability to play nice with all of the popular ones out there can really make for an interesting meshing of technology.

I wanted to see how easy it would be to setup some stuff in Poser and play around it in Flash. So here we go!

I opened Poser 7 and placed a sample character on the stage. From there, I gave it one of the predefined poses, and a pre-defined facial expression. Poser really does take the guess work out of doing all of this stuff. Just double-click on the character, double-click on the pose, double-click on the emotion, and off you go.

Once you have the figure setup, you are going to want to make sure that you turn off the floor that the figure is on – called the Ground Plane.

Once you have the figure set, you can go ahead and export it to an OBJ that you can open in Photoshop CS3. (poser4). I would save this file in a separate folder, as it will save out the OBJ file, as well as its associated textures.

Once you have created the OBJ file, you’ll notice that there is a series of files that come along for the ride, creating the skin (texture) of the 3D shape.

Create a new file in Photoshop and set your background color. Once that is set, click on Layer>3D Layer>New 3D layer from file. From there select the OBJ file that you exported out from Poser.

From here, the layer works just like every other layer in Photoshop. In this case, I am going to want to brighten up the object a bit – a simple Brightness/Contrast adjustment will do here. (poser8)

The great part about this 3D layer is that you can manipulate it in 3D right in Photoshop. Double-click on the 3D layer and you will get a series of controls in the Tool Options area that will let you rotate, roll, drag, slide, and scale your object, right from within the layer!

The textures are all accessible as separate layers in the object file. You can double-click on any of the textures, or you can show or hide textures as you see fit.

From here a couple of layer styles and effects, and you can start coming up with some amazing creations.