This is probably one of the easiest ways to make any 3d object using photoshop. The trick is to use SketchUp to make the basic object that you want, then using photoshop you can style it with some gradients, or what ever you want. This way of making 3d objects with photoshop allows you to customize the object’s faces and make complex shapes easily (using sketchup).

How my 3d object turned out:

An overview of what we will be doing:

• Use SketchUp to make the basic shape of the 3d object
• Get the 3d object into photoshop
• Use photoshop to add some colouring and highlights/shadows

SketchUp

(if you have SketchUp and know how to use it, skip this part)
If you don’t already have Google SketchUp, you can download it here: Google SketchUp.

Get Google SketchUp 6 as this version is free, and is all you will need.

Making a 3d object in SketchUp

SketchUp is a really easy 3d modeling program to use, for the purpose of this tutorial i’ll do some boxes, but of course you can make whatever you like.

To make a box, all you need to know about is the rectangle tool, the push/pull tool, the move tool and the view adjusting tools. Most things with SketchUp are easy to figure out by using the old trial and error method, just play around with it.

The rectangle tool looks like this:
To use it, just press and hold your mouse button down then drag it to the width you want.

The push/pull tool looks like this:
To use it, hover it over the face (top/bottom side of the rectangle) then press and hold ur mouse then drag it straight up/down.

The move tool looks like this:
To use it, just select the object you want to move and then drag it to where you want it.

Finally, the view tools look like this:
The hand is used to pan from side to side/top to bottom and the orbit tool is used to rotate(orbit) around your object. (hold shift to easily switch between these two, when using one of them).

Now once you get a good looking box, move onto the next part. Here is a preview of the boxes i made:

Importing the 3D object into Photoshop

Importing? What i really mean is just take a screen shot of your 3d object then create a new canvas in photoshop and paste your screenshot there. Follow these steps and you can’t go wrong:

• In sketchUp: get your boxes in a good looking perspective/view
• Take a screenshot, press “Print Screen” on your keyboard, or on a mac press Command+Control+Shift+3
• Fire up photoshop and create a new canvas to the size of your screen resolution
• Paste it, Ctrl+v or apple+v

Styling your 3D object

This is the really easy part, just get rid of the background using the wand tool (make sure the tolerance is down low). Now delete the axis lines that are left behind.

Adding a gradient/colors to individual sides is so easy, though it does take a little bit of time to get the right colours for the direction of light. Just use the wand again for each face of the box and fill the selection with whatever gradient/colour you like, i like to make a layer for each face i change colour of, it just makes it easier to update (using layer styles).

Download my PSD file to see first hand

After doing that i merged all the layers together (ctrl+e for each layer) and then did a Gaussian blur (filters >> blur >> Gaussian blur). I will have to admit, the lines do look a lot better when the image is smaller, so if you want a big image as your final work, make the sketchup image big to start with, then scale it.

Here is my final work, in 6 different colours:

Overview

This method can be used for pretty much any shape that you can make in SketchUp, just be creative. If you have Photoshop CS3 extended(and the required plugin), you can import your Google SketchUp models and rotate them and edit the faces far easier. For more information on this plugin visit: Adobe plugin download page and a news review of it. I have never used this plugin, so i won’t be much help if you ask me about it =[