Almost every professional mockup template is built on Photoshop smart objects. Understanding how they store a placement explains why some mockup tools look generic — and how rendering your own PSDs keeps your listings on-brand.
A smart object keeps its source content in a separate embedded file, plus a placement: a transform (scale, rotation, perspective) and an optional warp. Photoshop applies the placement non-destructively, so the content can be swapped and re-rendered at any size.
The transform is a homography — a projective mapping of your artwork's four corners onto the product. The warp is a grid of Bézier control points (a 4×4 patch, or a larger 'quilt' grid) that bends the design to follow curves, folds, and seams.
To render without Photoshop, an engine must read those descriptors and re-apply them: solve the homography, evaluate the same Bézier surface, and resample the design once. Mockups Generator verifies this against Photoshop's own rasterization with an automated test suite.
Any PSD with embedded smart objects as the design placeholders, in RGB or grayscale, 8 or 16-bit. Warp meshes of any grid size, layer masks, and multiple placements of one design are all supported.
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