3d Glass Cube - Adobe Dimension

Adobe Dimension is a new software released by Adobe CC which
helps graphic designers expedite their 3D projects. It is a simple to use software with features to create complex shapes, add textures and environmental lighting. Today I am going to show you how you can create a 3D glass cube in Adobe Dimension. I hope by the end you have a basic understanding of how to create simple 3D objects and the basic features of Dimension.

Open Adobe Dimension and click on the create new project.

Since this is a 3D project, we do not have to specific our canvas dimensions or image size in this state.

Once you have created a new file you will be greeted with a daunting screen but worry not because it is not as complicated as you think!

For now we are only going to be learning the three important tools – select tool, zoom tool and the hand tool as highlighted in the picture above. The select tool will let you select the object on your screen and make changes to it. The zoom tool lets you change your canvas size for the render in the future. For now think of it as a way to arrange your view point. Lastly, the hand tool lets you move around your canvas without selecting the object.

Once you have familiarized yourself with the three tools, click on the cube from basic shapes (as pointed in the above image). This should place a cube in your canvas.

Now that we have a cube on our canvas, we can make some adjustments to it such as rotations, positioning and scale. To begin let us scale down the cube a bit. Click on the paperclip looking icon on the right side under “Size” settings (pointed above). After clicking the paperclip icon change the X height to something like 10cm.

The X,Y,Z guides on the cube are going to be the way we move the cube and rotate it. If you click and hold on the arrow pointers (not the square shape or circle) you can move the cube in that direction. For this example, let us move the cube up, above from the floor. Using the circular buttons on the guides we can rotate the cube about 45 degrees.

Note: The rotation of your cube might be different due to the XYZ planes, use the circular buttons on the guides to play around with rotation to your liking.

You should have your cube placed like the image above, if
you do not like a change you made you can always press CRTL+Z to go back and edit again.

Once you are happy with your cube it is time, we add a glass texture to our cube.

Click on the materials buttons on the top left of the workspace (pointed above). This should open all the textures available to us in Dimension. Make sure to click to different ones to see how they look however remember that what you see now is not the final rendered product. For now let us click on the glass material as circled in the image.

Once you click the glass material you are given a few options related to the texture on the right side of your workspace.

Using these options, you can change certain settings such as opacity of the glass, roughness, metallic appearance, the glow. There are other options like base colors, etc. however for glass I would recommend going with the default.

Like step 3 click on the Lights button on the top left of the workspace (as pointed above). You can play around with the various lighting options available to you, there are some interesting ones! However, I am going to the choose the “Sunrise Campsite” Lighting which you can find if you scroll all the way down.

Your cube should look like this if you selected Sunrise Campsite. On the right side again we have some options for our light settings however, let’s leave them default for now.

Next click on the images button on the top left of your workspace. You should have some available backgrounds for your work. Click on the Desert Backdrop and drag it to your cube. Your cube should look like this now.

Note: If you have Adobe Stock you download several new lighting options and backgrounds!

On the top left click on the render tab which should open the render screen for Dimension. Here you will edit your filename to your liking and change the Quality to High (Slow). We want our render looking beautiful and crisp so anything lower than high quality will not work! Next you want to click PNG under export formats (pointed above) and click out of PSD. Lastly, click on render and wait till it’s finished! (this might take a while because we are rendered glass in high quality!).

And there you have it, our Glass cube rendered in full 3D in a Desert Background.