The New 3D Panel in Photoshop CS4

At the top of the 3D panel are four small icons. They are the 3D Filters: Scene, Meshes, Materials and Lights. If you only want to look at the meshes, click on the “Filter by: Meshes” and so on. You might want to use these filters to block out other areas to focus working on certain area.

The first one is called “Whole scene”, which allows you to view and access all items in the 3D scene, 3D meshes, materials, cameras and lights. If you click on the “Scene”, this allows you to change the properties of the scene. The properties you can change are the Anti-Alias, Global Ambient Color, Paint, and change the different render settings.

The “Meshes” filter will allow you to only view the 3D meshes. If you click on one of the mesh on the list, this will show a red box in the preview box telling you which mesh you have selected.

It will also display the number of materials, how many materials are included with a particular 3D mesh, also the information about the textures, the number of vertices and faces. This information is very important to a video game developer. If you’re not a video game developer, this information will tell you if there are too many faces and vertices. If there are too many faces and vertices it will slow down your computer with longer rendering time.

The “Materials” filter will display all of the materials in your 3D scene and it will display different options for each materials. Such as Ambient, Specular, Diffuse, Self-Illumination, Bump Strength, Glossiness, Shininess, Opacity, Reflectivity, Environment, and Normal.

Finally, the “Lights” filter will display all of your lights in your 3D scene. From this menu you can select your lights and change its settings.