Working With Photoshop Making 3D Flooring on a 2D Canvas
Sometimes a project comes to you that initially seems doable until the works begins and suddenly the challenges become complex and demand experimentation and creative solutions. I had the opportunity to do some contract work for BlueTech on a project for a flooring products company called Inter Source.
Inter Source had chosen 3 stock photos of home interiors and they wanted to replace the flooring in each stock photo with some of the various flooring models they sell. The purpose of the project was to provide printed brochures for clients to help them envision how the flooring product options might appear in a real interior design situation. The easy part is loading the photo in Adobe Photoshop and editing out the original floor. The hard was replacing the flooring with images of the new flooring products.
The project started with BlueTech’s photographer Edwin Kehler taking photos of Inter Source’s flooring products. Edwin and myself assembled select flooring panels samples provided by Inter Source by piecing together a few boxes of flooring panels. We assembled enough of a pattern of panels to take a photo. The camera was set-up in such a way that the flooring samples were shot from an angle as opposed to perpendicularly directly above the flooring samples. So the subject of the initial photographs appear in 3D perspective.
However the image of the flooring panels needed to be duplicated and pieced together with itself to create the illusion of a fully built wooden floor. Therefore the photographs needed to be adjusted so that all the photographs of the paneling would appear flat and in 2D.
After the panels in the photographs were stretched to appear flat the flooring sample was duplicated and pieced together to create a large floor space while still appearing flat and in 2D. In order to know how big to make the 2D floor, I had guess at the square footage size of the visible floor space in the stock photos. Knowing the size of the pieces I could then assemble a floor to fit properly in the scene. Typically each scene would require a floor size up to twice the estimated square footage.
Once the floor had been assembled in 2D the next task was to put it into the 3D scene matching the original scale and perspective. If the flooring horizon from the original stock photo was somewhat flat from left to right then I found the best tool to shape the flooring for 3D was the skew tool in Photoshop. For scenes where the original flooring horizon was on an angle I found I had to first skew the replacement flooring at the approximate angles it would appear to lengthen into the horizon as if the horizon were to appear vertically level. Then I would take the skewed flooring and use Photoshop’s 3D Workspace to rotate the flooring’s horizon to match the original scene.
After the scale and perspective is visually correct, the next step was to add the proper lighting, shadows, and colour matching for the lighting in the original scene.