Adobe Illustrator - Creating 3D Product Mockups

Adobe Illustrator has some neat commands (different than in Photoshop) that also allows you to create product mock-ups. I still need to experiment more with them before I post a tutorial so this article is just a teaser to show you an amazing example of what can be done in Illustrator. Terrible aren't I?

To create a product mock-up, you first need to create a 3D shape and then map art onto the shape. What is absolutely great about creating 3D shapes is that they can be rotated any way you wish and the mapped art is automatically adjusted. See the two glasses in the example. Also once you create the basic shape, you can change the dimensions and thus have a whole family of shapes (glasses, vases, pots, bowls). All the shapes in the example are from one basic 3D shape. Learning how to use this method is more complicated than doing mock-ups in Photoshop but once a 3D shape is created it can be used over and over again with different art. Thus, future mock-ups for the same shape can be created faster and easier than in Photoshop. Stay tuned for tutorials on how to create product mock-ups in Adobe Illustrator.

copyright © 2009 Joan Beiriger