Adobe wants to take on Paint 3D with its own 3D design tool

Adobe had showcased how its Project Felix will make it easier to render photo-realistic 3D content during its MAX conference in San Diego recently.

Essentially, Project Felix is a graphical design application for creating 3D photo-realistic assets from existing pre-rendered models and images and adding compositions, background, scenery or create a new model on its own. All these elements are combined into a rendering using their proprietary V-Ray engine.

What Felix does is, it studies the background image, deciphering where the horizon points and the surface points. It also checks the lighting of the background image and makes sure that the 3D object in front of it correctly projects and reflects that background light. Basically, it tries to make sure that the 3D object fits in well with the background enough to make it look like it belongs there.

It’ll also have functions for those who aren’t into 3D graphics, by also incorporating its Adobe stock bank of models, lights and materials for users to extract and use however they wish. The cloud marketplace has a rich variety of graphical assets so ready-made elements and scenes can be created without any need to build from scratch.

It’ll be able to integrate with Illustrator and Photoshop, which both have their own 3D imaging engines. It can render a properly layered Photoshop file as well. Felix can’t however, work with shapes and designs it doesn’t already know. So a custom model, or material that’s too customized, there won’t really be much that the software can do in order to integrate it with a background or have appropriate lighting. But it’s yet to be seen if this problem persists when it officially launches.

The interface for now may be criticized for being a little too complex in terms of vocab and appearance. It is reminiscent of another 3D rendering app – Paint 3D, and isn’t all that different too. But each of these programs have their own applications. While Paint 3D may be for users who aren’t too serious, Felix goes for an approach that is made solely for the professionals.

The app is still in development stages, so it’ll take time for all of its features to truly come into fruition later on when it releases as a beta for Windows 10 and Mac OS by the end of the year.