Adobe released on Tuesday a new set of software tools designed for easier creation of three-dimensional digital objects for marketing campaigns, video games and the metaverse. The company has dominated the market for two-dimensional content creation with its graphic design and photo editing tools and spent USD 20 billion and stock last month to buy rival upstart Figma, a privately-held software firm.
However, Adobe has also invested in creating three-dimensional content in recent years, a field dominated by video-game centric firms like Unity Software Inc. (U.N). The content is powerful in the metaverse, the virtual world that Meta Platforms Inc. (META.O) and others rely on for future revenue growth. But three-dimensional objects have been labor-intensive for artists to create, so the graphics company launched two tools designed to make it faster and easier to make the digital objects.
The 3D Capture tool lets users take a series of photos of a real-world object with nearly any camera, including smartphones, and then melds the photos together into a three-dimensional digital object. An early use of the software will be for e-commerce. The second tool released allows artists to switch between editing a three-dimensional object on a desktop computer to manipulating it with their hands in a virtual reality headset. The software lets virtual artists get a similar feeling to sculpting clay, while also having the precision of working on a computer, said François Cottin, senior director of marketing for Substance 3D and metaverse at Adobe.