Good video and overview of some of the new 3D feature in 13.1, Rich.

I'd like to take a moment to reply to a few statements in the comments, if no one objects… No? Cool.

@Rich: Blender is quite powerful, but for a great many designers, photographers, and the like, who want to incorporate 3D into their designs/workflow, Blender is rather complicated and has a steep learning curve. Solo mentioned he found and liked playing with the (simple) UV system in Photoshop, but finding the UV system in blender, little own using it, is almost nearly impossible (user exploration learning).

@Frederick: Having 3D in Photoshop for designers makes practical sense as a lot of them have Photoshop but want to add a 3D text treatment to some wording. Looking at ads 75% or so have 3D text in them of one sort or another.

As to the rendering, there are lots of computers out there, and 3D requires a decent machine, and real-time ray-tracers require powerful video cards. Due to all of the various platforms and hardware configurations, they need to balance between performance and requirements, while still being useable. Think of it as a GL preview (draft) and a ray-traced Rendering (final) and the entire 3D system seems to get better and faster with each release for the most part.

@Solo: I I believe the engine is an internal Adobe 3D Engine (I think they're all called Mercury or something). While there isn't baking, I believe that you can export your 3D scene with some file formate and it will save out al of your textures as well.

My 3D app of choice is Cinema 4D, and I think you will like it. I jokingly refer to it as the prosumer version of Maya, cause Maya has a lot of very cool features, but complicated, like HyperTexture NLE. (I hope it's HyperTextre... or is it HyperShader?) (^_^)

@Jason: Photoshop 3D engine is not a port of After Effect 3D engine, as apparent by the inner-opp/file- compatibility fiasco in CS 6. Had they have been you would still be able to use your CS5 workflow and make (3D) things in Photoshop and import them into After Effects, etc... And there's a vast difference between the 3D systems in both application, as well as user experience. Hopefully they will all come together and fix their inner-opp issue, as it would benefit everyone involved—especially as you get the Master Collection and more with the Creative Cloud membership.

@Slimdog: Yes you can lathe objects, after a fashion. Make a closed path that is the profile of your lathed object. then 3D > Create 3D Extrusion… down in Bend Y change it to 360° and adjust the axis-widget to the side you want to rotate around. I think that's it. You then paint on the objects Extrusion material.

Okay, that's it. Thanks for the moment and I appreciate you're reading my reply. Cheers!