The transition from 2D to 3D has never been very pleasant. Usually, if you wanted to take a 2d logo or text and make it into 3d, you'd have to put the image in the background and "trace" it with spline shapes. You could also resort to using commercial plugins like Cybermesh, or some Dos utilities that used greyscale values to determine height, but whose output could be unpredictable. However, Photoshop has a simple trick you can use to bridge the gap between 2D and 3D.
I came upon this problem when a friend of mine said that he wanted to take the skull symbol on Boba Fett's shoulder and model it in 3d.
(click the skull to get the full-size image)
He was going to trace it in 3ds4's 2d-shaper, a process which would take at least fifteen minutes of tedious vertex manipulation and curve adjustment to get quality results. I had a better idea.
Start by opening the image in Photoshop 4 (or 3). Use the magic wand to select the skull (I just selected one area and picked Select/Similar from the menubar). Then pick one of the other selection tools, either the marquee or the lasso, and right-click on the selection. There's an option that says "Make Work Path" (a dialog box will ask you what tolerance level you want to set. The lower the number, the more detailed the path will be Try a setting of 1 or 2). (In Photoshop 3 the Make Paths option is on the paths palette) This will convert your selection lines to paths, which will look like an outline of the symbol. Now go to File/Export/Paths to Illustrator and save the paths as an .ai file. This file format is readable by 3ds4 and 3dsMax.
Now that you have your shape, go to your 3d program and import it. In 3ds4 you have to go to the 2d-shaper and load the .ai file. [***NOTE*** 3ds4 does not read .ai files correctly. None of the shapes you import will be closed. Instead they'll have two end vertices occupying the exact same space. To remedy this, simply choose Modify/Polygon/Move, and click on each shape without actually moving it. 3ds will ask you if you want to connect the vertices, and you should say yes] In 3dsMax, you choose File/Import from the menubar, and load the .ai. Max has no trouble reading .ai files, and all the shapes will be closed. From there you can loft them into full three-dimensional objects with ease. This whole process from 2D to 3D only takes about three to five minutes.
