PixelSquid People Scans
|
We first reported on PixelSquid, the revolutionary 3D object library, back in 2015. Now the vast collection of objects and animals has been complemented by a range of 3D scans of people, which brings an extraordinary new functionality to both the website and the Photoshop plug-in.
Each of the 70 or so people in the collection has been photographed from up to 225 different angles, and fully rendered complete with ground shadows. The ability to view them from any angle means it’s possible to create scenes such as this underground staircase complex, which would be almost impossible to populate using conventional stock imagery.
The ability to view stock imagery from just about any angle is a great asset for any designer; adding people to the collection makes it an essential tool for architects, town planners, or any artists who need to add a human element to their images without being constrained by the three or four viewpoints available in conventional libraries.
Shown below are just ten of the 215 viewpoints of this man on the phone.
Using PixelSquid is easy, thanks to the Photoshop plug-in. The panel allows you to import the 3D scans into your Photoshop document, where they appear as a Smart Object that you can scale and rotate as you wish. A thumbnail is shown in the panel, and when you drag to rotate the thumbnail the new view is updated in the Photoshop document in a second or two.
You can choose to download the high resolution image (up to 2048 pixels), which seamlessly replaces the low res version already in the document. You can also choose to turn ground shadows on and off.
You can also either open the image as a PSD file, or embed it within the current document. Once this is done, you can access additional selection layers, enabling the easy adjustment of lighting, shine and so on. The one thing missing from the People collection is the ability to access separate selection layers such as shoes and jackets, as you could with other 3D objects in the collection; but that’s because they were 3D models, which lent themselves to division into their constituent parts, rather than photographic scans.
PixelSquid had already become a must-have plug-in for many Photoshop users. With the addition of the People collection – and it’s a collection that is planned to grow – this useful utility has now become an essential part of the designer’s toolbox.
You can sign up for PixelSquid for free at pixelsquid.com, which allows you to download watermarked PNG images of the entire collection, and to buy individual images for $12.99. Or you can subscribe for $19.99 a month, with no limit on the number of images you can download and no long-term commitment.
 |