This tutorial takes your 2d package designs to 3d in just a few steps. I will cover how to apply your 2d soda can design to a 3d can.

First off we need to make the can that your design goes on. Let’s use the pen tool to make the profile of an aluminum soda can. The pen tool works like the pen tool in your favorite vector illustration program. It may be a little tricky at first but don’t worry about getting it right the first time you put the line down. You can select the reshape button on the top menu to edit your Bezier handles. When you get done it should look something like this.

Okay, now we get to spin or “lathe” this profile around to make the full 3d can. With your profile line selected choose the “Lathe” tool from the left menu. Once you have it chosen then you will need to click and drag the middle point around a little to get the lathe action started. Once it’s started I always just plug in 360 degrees in the “object” dialogue box. When you have the full 360 degree lathe done choose the main pointer tool to complete the lathe action.

Great now you have a soda can! Now let’s put a label on it. In the “Project” window click on the “new” button at the top left corner of the window. Then choose “surface texture” and a dialogue box will open up. What you need to do now is load your design you did into the “map” section. Click on the “map” button to browse to and load your image you have made. I made my design in Photoshop and saved it as a .JPG at 150 dpi. Other image types work too but they must be a raster type of file, i.e. .jpg, .pict, .tiff.

Now with your image loaded you we can apply it or “map” it to the model of the soda can. With the can selected click on your image shader you made with your 2d design in the “project” window. Once the can and the shader are selected click on the “apply” button or drag your shader onto the can. The map will be all screwed up because we need to make some refinements to how the map is projected onto the can. In the “object proprerties” window click on the “texture” tab. Now click and drag on the “map” icon. This will give you choices on how to apply the map to the can. Select the first icon that wraps the map around the object. See the image below. Note: in the preferences under the window tab I have the “show textures” checked

It may still be messed up but all you will need to do is click on the “position” button in the “texture” tab and rotate the map so it will wrap all the way around. You will also need to click and drag on the “tile” button like you did with the “map” button to select one tile. We don’t want the texture to repeat over and over and this will stop any repeating.

The last part of applying your design is to scale the map so that the top and bottom of the can will be exposed. This can be done using the “position” button to scale it down.

Okay almost done. All we need now is to make the can aluminum under the image we just applied. In the “resource” window select the “texture” tab and choose one of the preset aluminum textures in the “metals” tab. Apply it to the can. When you do that the aluminum texture will go to the top of the texture stack. Select the aluminum texture in the “object properties” window under the “texture” tab. With it selected click and drag on the “mix” icon. Choose the “Mult.” Selection. This will allow for the other texture we applied to show through the aluminum texture.

That’s it! I set up a couple of lights and dropped a camera in the scene and made a duplicate of the can to set on it’s side. You could spend more time modeling the can opening and tab to achieve a more realistic can. Play around with some of the settings and you should have something like this.