Adobe has already made considerable strides in the 3D space, implementing tools that have enabled more flexibility for 3D design and more recently with Photoshop CC, 3D printing.
This week the company took another step towards unlocking the power of 3D for designers by announcing the acquisition of Mixamo, a San Francisco based company that enables designers to create and customise a broad range of high quality 3D characters and animations.
The acquisition will provide several benefits to the design community including increased productivity by reusing assets that can now be easily customised in 3D. Maximo will help designers create realistic packaging, product concepts and prototypes before manufacturing and offer greater output options in both still and motion.
Characters are one of the biggest growth categories of 3D content and Adobe plans to integrate Mixamo’s technology into Photoshop CC to empower designers to create, customise, manipulate, rig and animate 3D content, as well as to take advantage of high quality, turnkey 3D models, starting with stock characters that can be easily pulled into projects.
One of the most in demand skills for designers is 3D and using 3D in 2D workflows adds flexibility to the design work you’re already doing to deliver better output options for websites, games, video and 3D printing. We’ve been working to close this gap between power and usability, which started last year when we announced some exciting new features in Adobe Photoshop CC that make 3D compositing and printing much easier.
Designers are increasingly being asked to create photo-realistic scenes that don’t exist in the real world. Mixamo is helping to push this further with flexibility in lighting, environment, perspective and materials to make more life-life scenes. The emergence of 3D scanning technology is helping drive demand for readily available, high quality 3D content and hardware improvements are making it much easier to work with 3D content on various devices.
