1. The Ethics of 3D

Creative Commons photo by Jim Frost

3D seems to be everywhere these days, but is it bad for us? ABC blogger Mark Pesce thinks it might be.

Exposure to the kind of fake-3D we see in movies and video games can affect a person's real-world depth perception. Unless a different technology comes along, Pesce argues that viewing 3D in this way for long periods of time could cause permanent perceptual damage(!).

But the media companies must have thought of this, right? Not really:

All of this is rolling forward without any thought to the potential health hazards of continuous, long-term exposure to 3D. None of the television manufacturers have done any health & safety testing around this. They must believe that if it's safe enough for the cinema, it's fine for the living room. But that's simply not the case. Getting a few hours every few weeks is nothing like getting a few hours, every single day.

To follow up on this question of ethics, what about 3D accessibility, as well?

Even if it proves to be harmless (which I doubt -- more on that next week), as it turns out, some people can't see 3D. It bears noting than an experience should not require 3D, or one risks excluding at least some of the audience.

As designers, it seems as though we ought to be more careful in our application of 3D.

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The new logo for the Cooper Union starts with heavily abstracted 3D letterforms and then adds enough motion to create a piece that is greater than the sum of its own parts. I think the simplicity is what really makes it successful. Too many animated logos are generative affairs that don't perform well in practice. Any static frame of the Cooper Union logo is recognizable as a branded part of the whole. That makes it a winner in my book.

Via.

Last time, we converted our 3D rendering into vectors. We left off with a Photoshop file which we’re going to finish today with textures and shading.

First things first, I made a slight mistake in the last tutorial that I need to correct. Luckily, there’s a quick fix.

In the previous version of the graphic, I colored in the vectors with shading. This certainly makes the image more interesting, but shading so early not a good idea, as we can do it much better with Photoshop.

Dull, but fixed.

So, if you’re following along, go ahead and make all of your fills a neutral version of their base color. In my case, it’s mostly brown with a little light gray for the blade. When that’s done, export the file again and you’re ready to go for today’s tutorial.

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We left off last time with a high-resolution high-contrast rendering of our model. Now it’s time to explain why.

Here at DLB, we prefer to make most of our assets as vectors. Vectors are mathematical representations of lines (rather than pixels which have a fixed scale) so they are always crisp and perfect at any scale. That’s why we like them so much. We’re absolute neat-freaks, whether it’s geometry or CSS and we don’t like building things more than once.

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Before things get rolling, I should say that I’m only going to provide a 1,000 ft. view of our process. This is for two reasons: 1.) every project is different, so the best I can do is provide a summary of the steps we take, and 2.) this needs to fit into a digestible blog post, so I can’t be too verbose with my details (lest I venture into QED territory). If there is enough demand, in the future I can write up something more in-depth.

In general, there are four steps to generating a graphic from a 3D object the DLB way:
1. get a model, 2. render the model, 3. vectorize the rendering, 4. style the graphic.

We’ll cover steps 1 and 2 today and finish off 3 and 4 in future posts.

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One of the hallmarks of “Web 2.0” style are graphics that use 3D effects—glossy reflections, depth cues, etc.—but aren’t truly 3D at their source. At DLB, we often take the opposite approach, using 3D models to produce graphics that aren’t overtly 3D. We’ve found over the years that this method not only looks good, but in some cases has increased our productivity over more traditional techniques.

I should state upfront that we didn’t set out to work in 3D. It’s primarily a symptom of my training as an architect. Although most architects still draw your standard 2D plans, these days we also do a fair amount of design work using 3D. The majority of us know how to model fairly well. When Paul and I first started out, I used to draw everything by hand, but since I went to school, whenever I want to create a graphic it just seems easier for me to start with a model of it.

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