When light reflects off a surface, its path can be perturbed a little or a lot by microscopic imperfections and this results in rough or smooth-looking materials. It’s quite a bit more complicated than it sounds, of course. This image is then used for rendering the light being diffused and reflected from the surface of an object. This type of lighting essentially uses an image (often HDR) to store the scene’s lighting from every angle (projected from a sphere onto the object).
The second type of lighting used by Dimension is image-based lighting (IBL). Until there’s another way to describe this effect in glTF, we are including this information about cloudiness in a custom tag within the glTF that is only used by our glTF viewer.
The ‘cloudiness’ factor isn’t included in this extension as it’s specific to the use case of the Sun rather than directional lights in general. Sunlight can be best modeled using a directional light so this extension solves the first piece of Dimension’s lighting requirements. We helped in designing and specifying the KHR_lights_punctual extension that includes definitions for directional lights, spot lights, and point lights. The first is our ‘sunlight’ which not only models the light coming directly from the Sun but also includes a ‘cloudiness’ factor for modeling sunlight reflected around the sky via cloud-cover. There are two types of lighting in Dimension that are required for a faithful representation of the scene. A designer who is building a scene in Dimension probably isn’t interested in exporting their creation into a game or virtual world they are sharing their work of art and they want the viewer to see exactly what they intended. With Dimension’s userbase, this is a critical issue. However, this means that someone viewing the scene is always going to be seeing something slightly different than what the creator of the asset saw. This has the benefit of not bloating file size with information that would just be thrown away. The reasoning for this is that glTF assets are most often loaded into an existing scene running inside a 3D engine and so the lighting information is inherited from there. The first missing feature was that the core glTF specification doesn’t include any environment information such as scene lighting. As part of the glTF Working Group, we’ve been able to solve for these shortcomings by helping to define new extensions to the specification to make sure Dimension users can export their projects with the highest level of quality. Our users ideally want the real-time versions of their scenes to look as close as possible to what they see in Dimension and several key features that would make this possible were missing from the glTF spec. Additionally, support for technologies like Google’s Draco geometry compression allow us to shrink scenes that are often very large to sizes that are more download-friendly.Įxporting Dimension projects to glTF wasn’t without its issues, however. The glTF 2.0 spec includes a physically-based (PBR) material system that maps quite closely to the one used by Adobe Dimension and glTF is designed to be fast to load. It is ideal for representing a real-time version of Dimension’s scenes for several reasons. GlTF is a file format designed to enable the efficient transmission of 3D assets between runtimes. In Dimension 2.0, we’ve introduced a new feature that lets users export their 3D scene to be viewed in a web browser by anyone with a link. In these cases, wouldn’t it be great if having a copy of Adobe Dimension CC wasn’t required to view their creation? Publishing from Dimension to the Web Using glTF What if they want to share their entire 3D composition for someone to explore and review? Or maybe they want to publish it to the web for mass consumption. Sometimes, however, a designer might want to share something more than a 2D render of their creations. The primary goal of Dimension is to democratize 3D, making it accessible to anyone and, by doing so, streamline workflows that can see a massive benefit from 3D technologies, from product design to synthetic photography.
These artists are now able to take their 2D designs, created in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign, and easily place them onto 3D models in photorealistic environments. The power of Dimension is that, rather than directly targeting 3D content creators, Dimension is aimed squarely at graphic designers. Last year, Adobe jumped into the 3D arena with the release of Adobe Dimension CC, our 3D compositing tool that makes it easy to transform 2D designs into full, real-world visualizations. Behind the Scenes with Adobe Dimension Engineers: How We Built the 3D Publish FeatureģD design is here to stay and is quickly transitioning from a ‘nice-to-have’ to a cutting-edge skill that can set designers (and companies) apart from the crowd.