Let’s Build a 3D iPhone on PowerPoint!
No third-party apps or add-ons required. Supercharge your next app presentation.
There’s an urban legend that humans can only use up to 10% of their brains at any point in time. While that myth is untrue, I can confidently say that humans really only use up to 10% of the true potential of PowerPoint. If at any time you sat through a presentation and kept asking yourself why PowerPoints have to be so terrible, it’s for that exact reason.
The other 90%, though, can turn an otherwise typically monotonous hour into what feels like a private movie screening. One of the beautiful features of the other 90% is 3D modeling. It’s not as feature-rich as a 3D Computer-Aided Design (CAD) program, but it’s more than enough to prototype some really fancy and eye-catching stuff. For starters, you can make your next smartphone app pitch deck a memorable one.
Believe it or not, everything on that animation above was designed on PowerPoint — well, everything except the background image. That was taken from Unsplash.
No, You Don’t Need to Be An Artist to Do This
PowerPoint can manifest your vision with no need for artistic ability. But the product you create will leave people thinking you’re a digital Picasso — only because they don’t know how powerful PowerPoint really is.
The most empowering thing about designing on PowerPoint is that it all starts with shapes. You don’t need to draw anything from scratch or know which tools do what. All you need to do is get creative with the way you use shapes. For example, in this iPhone tutorial, all we are using are rounded rectangles. No joke — everything in this tutorial is constructed from rounded rectangles, one of the most basic default shapes you can find on PowerPoint.
What you’ll realize though, after designing it, is that the product magnifies everyone’s impression of your artistic abilities. People will start thinking you’re a digital Picasso. In reality, you’re just fitting shapes together like how you learned to in pre-school.
Enough Chit-Chat. Let’s Build!
3D design on PowerPoint is really simple. All you have to do is first make a shape. You can do that by clicking on Shapes from the Home or Insert tabs. From there, I inserted the shape — Rectangle: Rounded Corners. After selecting the shape, you can click on the Format tab to adjust the length and height (on the right side of the tab). We’ll use this in more detail later in the tutorial.
Now, the fun part.
In the same Format tab, click on click on Shape Effects (see the image below) and select 3D Rotation. You can play around with all of the available options but for the sake of the tutorial. If you look at the image below, you can see what it looks like — on the left is the 2D rounded rectangle, and on the right is the 3D version with the effect Perspective: Contrasting Right.
But you can do more than just click on preset formats. You can make your own. To do this, click on Shape Effects again, go down to 3D Rotation, and then select 3D Rotation Options on the bottom of the panel. On the right of the window, a new pane should appear titled Format Shape. Within the Format Shape pane, there are two sections that are relevant: the 3D Format and 3D Rotation sections. Take a look at the image below for reference. The Format Shape pane is opened with 3D Format and 3D Rotation selected.
3D Formatting
Within the 3D Formatting section, there are several options: Top Bevel, Bottom Bevel, Depth, Contour, Material, and Lighting.
- Top Bevel and Bottom Bevel. Beveling smoothes out the edges. For example, it’s likely that your phone has a bevel (iPhones have bevel); otherwise, when you touch the edges of it, it would feel sharp rather than smooth. The top bevel option gives the front of the shape some smoothing (the front of the phone), while the bottom bevel gives the back of the shape some smoothing (the back of the phone). Right now, the front and back bevel might not make sense but once we add some more dimension it’ll make more sense. For both bevel options, you can adjust the width and height to change how the bevel looks
- Depth gives the shape a 3rd dimension. It is adjustable by changing the Size variable. You can also change the color of this new dimension.
- Contour adds edges to the shape. You can play with it if you want, but for the purposes of this tutorial, we won’t be using it.
To design the shape of the iPhone, we will use the rounded rectangle and adjust the length, width, and height. The length and width are adjusted by going into the Format tab at the top — the dimensions are on the right. Set the height to 5.65, width to 2.79. The depth can be found in the 3D Formatting section of the Format Background panel.
By default, though, the measurement of height and width is in inches, while the depth is measured in points. That’s simple to change, just add the inches symbol (double quotes like “), and the number will be converted into points. So, for example, 0.30” will be changed to 21.6 pt. After setting the dimensions up, you can play with the contour to add softer edges to the phone. Once you’re done with that, the outer shell of the iPhone is complete. It should look something like the image below.
3D Rotation
3D rotation takes the existing shape and changes the perspectives. You can rotate it along the X, Y, or Z-axis. The final variable, Perspective, warps the angle that you view the shape in. For the purposes of this tutorial, we will not adjust the rotation for now — the default settings for Perspective: Contrasting Right gives us a good placement to use already. As we add other objects, though.
Creating the Face
Now it’s time to create the background image of the front of the iPhone. To do that, first we want to make a copy of the iPhone shape we just made — I know this sounds random, but we are going to use the shape of this to cut out the exact image we need. With the copied shape, we will go back to the Format Shape panel, and at the bottom, click on the Reset button. That will remove the 3D effect on the shape.
The image I’ll be using is an image from Unsplash by samsommer. We’ll take the iPhone shape that we have, and put it on top of the image, in the exact position we want to cut out. Your iPhone shape will be black but I made mine a bit transparent so it’s easier to see.
First, select the image. Then hold SHIFT and select the shape (this will select the image and shape). It is very important that you select the image, first. After you do this, go into the Drawing Tool’s Format tab, and select Merge Shapes. Select Intersect from the Merge Shapes options.
The result should look like the image below. The Intersect option keeps everything of the original object that intersects with the shape. The first thing you select will be the original object, which is why it is important to select the image before the shape. If you did it the other way around, selecting Intersect would just result in the original shape.
Once you have this image, you are ready to reshape it to be 3D. It’s slightly different to get to the 3D formatting panel for pictures, but the panel is still the same. To get to it, just click on the Format tab underneath Picture Tools, and then select Picture Effects right underneath. From there, do a 3D rotation with the same Perspective: Contrasting Right. After doing 3D rotation, you will need to do some adjusting to the image to fit it into the iPhone. If you followed the iPhone dimensions I gave previously, then the image dimensions that fit will be 5.65" x 2.79". The result should look like the image below.
Creating the Top Camera Area
Designing the top camera area is the next step. the iPhone has that rounded area at the top that houses the camera and speaker. We can recreate that with 1) a rounded rectangle for the base area, 2) a circle for the camera, and 3) another rounded rectangle for the speaker.
For the rounded rectangle, you can adjust how rounded the edges are by selecting the orange dot (see the top left of the image below) and adjusting it by moving it left or right. When you move it all the way right, the sides of the rectangle will be entirely rounded.
After you round it out, adjust the color, remove the outline, and apply the 3D effect to it. When you put the shape on top of the existing phone, though, you’ll notice that the shape doesn’t fit the right perspective. In this case, you’ll need to use the 3D Rotation tool to adjust the angle of the shape. Again, if you followed my original dimensions, you can use the following dimensions and angles for the base area:
- 0.22" x 1.24" length x width
- X Rotation: 335.1, Y Rotation: 356, Z Rotation: 5.8, Perspective: 85
Finally, you can use the same shape in different colors, sizes, and dimensions to create the speaker and camera. For both objects, the 3D dimensions are the same. For the speaker, use 0.07" x 0.38" and for the camera, use 0.06" x 0.05".
Bonus: Putting It Together & Adding Animation
Once you have all of this done, select everything and group it together. Group it by selecting everything, right-clicking on the selection and choosing the Group option. This way, you can animate it as a single object. Go to Animations, select the Lines effect, and then change the Effect Options to go right. You can adjust the starting and ending points of the animation. Pull back the red dot (ending part) to shorten the travel distance of the phone.
Then click open the Animation Pane (see above), right-click the animation and select Effect Options. From inside there, you can select Auto Reverse under the first tab, Effect, and then Repeat: Until Next Click in the Timing tab. Auto Reverse tells the animation to rewind back to its original location. Repeat tells the animation to go again. Collectively, you are telling this animation to rewind and repeat until you are done with it on the next mouse click. The result of these animation options should create this:
I hope this tutorial provided you a glimpse into the power of PowerPoint, and taught you to think outside the box when it comes to designing your next presentation. The tutorial stops here because it has provided you an initial introduction to all the tools you need to jazz up your own presentation, not just the 3D design. For example, the animations, shapes, and colors can be used to add other features such as a circle pattern in the background that rotates. You can add buttons too, and give them 3D appearances with animations to look as if they’re popping out of the screen.
PowerPoint is arguably the most underestimated tool that all businesses use. With the right knowledge of its features and a little bit of imagination, a user can manifest almost anything onto the screen. 3D renders and animations are just one simple example of everything that you can do.
