Not entirely unexpected since the acquisition of Substance Designer/Painter, Adobe is removing the 3D features in Photoshop.
addendum
According to the above article a Substance-based 3D rendering engine will replace the current legacy 3D tools:
As the Substance products continue to refine their 3D creation tooling, adding new 3D capabilities and extending the common 3D renderer across more Adobe products, Photoshop will incorporate that same rendering engine to make consistent display and manipulation of Substance models and textures possible all within Photoshop.
3D in PS is awful to work with/in, and adding the Painter engine inside it doesn’t really help.
Maybe for the occasional 3d painter it might be ’ good’ enough, but anyone else is painting with Painter, Mari or 3DCoat in a more professional setting.
To clarify, there is no plan to add any other 3D feature in the core of Photoshop at this point.
Removing the current 3D toolset will allow Ps to get rid of a lot of legacy code and run overall faster as a result, ditching OpenGL and relying on more low level and modern APIs in the future.
It was probably removed because it was poorly worded. We do have plans for more interop between Ps and Substance but not really what was alluded to in the original text
Oh, hi Jeric! I did not realize it is YOU. Alright, so no more 3d import or display whatsoever in Photoshop.
Which is a good thing on the one hand, but perhaps also a lost opportunity to do something along the lines of Clip Studio Paint. It means losing part of the art community - but they probably already made the switch to CS Paint anyway by now (as did I).
I am all for it. I’ve never even once used it for work since it was introduced. It was one of the worst decisions to include 3D mode in PS in my opinion.
I’m glad it’s going away and hoping to see faster performance once it’s removed. And I’m also hoping you guys are working on modern color management implementation with OCIO and Open EXR support out of the box.
My experience is the opposite: there is no control over mesh resolution whatsoever, and the results are problematic in Photoshop’s 3d meshes. Often this is overlooked, because the meshes are then rendered at lower resolutions within Photoshop.
(and the rendering in Photoshop is… well, better left where it belongs: in the past and unused.)
In Blender I achieve better results, and rather easily nowadays with the new custom bevel option. It is not possible in Photoshop to have separate control over offset and bevel strength, which is required to prevent mesh blowups. And there are issues with sharp corner control in the graph editor as well in PS.
And of course, if I want to do some really weird beveling, I can extrude along a curve, which is just not an option in Photoshop.
Anyway, Photoshop’s letter bevel might initially look all-right, but the devil is in the details.
