Dawson County Sheriff's Office Badge 3D Design

I was contacted a few weeks ago by the Dawson County Sheriff's Department in Georgia. They had an image of their department badge that they use for digital and print media that they felt looked too cartoony and fake. They wanted a new version that looked realistic. Over the course of the last year, I have been learning Adobe's newest program for 3D Modeling Adobe Dimension. And rather than trying to fake a 3D realistic look in Photoshop, I decided to create a model of the badge building out each detail as a custom 3D object that could be assembled in a 3D environment so I could position it however I wanted it and render realistic lighting effects, shadowing, and highly customizable metallic looks to get the result below. This was one of the coolest projects this year and it grew me as a designer.

The Process
It began by breaking the design down into its parts and discovering all of the shapes. Some can be made with simple shapes already in Adobe Dimension. Others needed to be imported as custom 3D objects. This was accomplished by illustrating the shapes in Adobe Illustrator and then placing them in Photoshop as either a Smart Object or Shape. From Photoshop you can then extrude those shapes into a 3D object and then export that 3D object as a .stl file. Next, we can import that into Dimension as a 3D shape and add material and adjust the lighting to get the desired effect.