• Working with Images to get the best out of 3D Box Shot Pro

  
  There are a number of ways to create the textures for 3D Box Shot Pro to use. Firstly, you can design them in a graphics package like Adobe PhotoShop, Paintshop Pro, Paint.net, The GIMP or Pixlr. This requires a certain amount of technical competence and artistic skill so if you're lacking either of these, you might want to consider using our box design service.

• However, there are other methods of getting textures into 3D Box Shot Pro.
  • Use Scanner or take a photo.

If you have access to a scanner and you can physically fit the box or image you want to scan onto the scanner glass, then there's no problem and this is probably the best option. Make sure you set the DPI of the scanner to at least 300DPI as this will provide good quality images. 3D Box Shot Pro produces much higher quality images if you provide it with high quality, high resolution images to work with. Otherwise it really is a case of "garbage in, garbage out". Here's an example of the use of scanned images in 3D Box Shot Pro. This this video we scanned the cover insert, disc and booklet of the XBox 360 game, Assassins's Creed:

However, if you can't fit the thing you want to scan onto the scanner, all is not lost, because you can always take a photo.

In many ways the second option of taking a Photo is more interesting than scanning as it involves some simple but very effective image manipulation techniques. It’s worth noting that the following technique is very useful as often it’s not possible to take a good photo of a flat surface when you are facing it directly as the flash will spoil the image. However, If you stand to one side and shoot horizontally across the subject then you can capture a good quality image even in low light conditions. This makes the flash work for you, not against you. You can use any graphics package that support perspective distortion to “skew” this image into a 2D perspective, making it appear exactly like a flat image. Here’s a quick example of this:

 

In this photo the image of the poster is spoiled by the camera flash....

 

To avoid problems with camera flash, shoot from a angle across the image. From this angle the flash will illuminate the subject but wont spoil the photo....

Finally, you can "Skew" the image in most image editing programs so that it looks exactly link a 2D flat image.

Obviously we couldn't have scanned this image without a massive flatbed scanner (the poster is about 1m tall), so taking a photo and using perspective distortion provides an easy way of getting an image into 3D Box Shot Pro. Here's an example video we made using this image.