The tsunami of “cgi” has been building slowly for a few years now. No longer are cars photographed, but their 3d representations are deposited into stock photos of a location and retouched to look the part. This certainly saves time and money, (imagine trying to secretly airlift your new model of Land Rover to Mach Picchu for a shoot, and get the photographer and lighting gear all there too) but makes times a little more sad for automobile photographers.

Recently even Photoshop has been imbued with the power of ’3d’. Something I have not had the opportunity to experiment with until recently. And crikey. It’s not just 3d that Photoshop can cope with, but apparently it can deal with video clips too. As though it were something perfectly natural. I hear it can also edit photographs… Perhaps Imageshop would be more descriptive now?

Still, the implications of this bear relevance to my showcase project. Spherizing a texture to create a planet never looked quite right. And not just because I’m no expert at it. Now, though, I can apply a texture map directly to a sphere, and even ray-trace it within Photoshop! Cloud layers can no doubt be introduced slightly above the planet texture too, making things even more realistic. Looks like I’ll be putting down Blender just as soon as I’d picked it up.

I’ve included the video below just as a proof of concept piece. The texture is a public domain NASA image.