Hey today I’m gonna show you how I found interesting and unique ways to use the new 3-D painting tool that came with the new update of Clip Studio.

Hopefully you’ll learn something that you can use in your workflow or that can help you make your illustrations faster and more conveniently.

I’m using the Ipad version but it works the same across every device!

Understanding how the tool works.

So, first of all the new painting feature isn’t really a tool per se, because it only allows you to directly paint with your already existing brushes on a 3-D model. It only works with the basic 3-D body models and the 3-D primitives.

So any brush that you usually use will work except for certain tools like the gradient tool, the bucket fill tool and the liquify tool will not work, rulers also don’t work, but there is a way to still use them that I’ll show you later.

Importing a 3-D model to paint on

I will start with something that’s easy to do; a tattoo on a 3D model. I will drag and drop the model onto my Canvas, the basic female 3-D model, which can be painted on.

After dropping the model onto my canvas , You simply need to click on your brush icon and start painting directly on it.

Now it’s important to understand that the painting is going to be projected from the point of view of the camera, so you often risk having your painting get distorted , you will have to rotate the camera around as you’re drawing.

Painting on a 3-D body model

Here I’m painting with the color of the skin of my character, but I recommend usually going for the color white to paint all over your character as it will be easier for you to remove the white color later and make it transparent, though you will see what I mean later.

Be careful of distortion

As you can see if you now turn the camera when I’ve drawn something it got distorted, so my best advice is to keep moving the camera around when you’re painting. That way you make sure that there is no distortion from any angle.

When you’re painting also make sure your perspective slider is at 1.

As the higher It is the more distorted the perspective will be, and the more it will change the distortion of your painting.

if you’re drawing on the front of the model ,make use of the camera presets that are at your disposition by clicking the photo icon or going into the settings of the tool property of the 3D model .

It will make sure that model is centered to the camera, that way, There will be no problem of distortion.

I’ll make use of that, along with the perspective ruler to make the tattoo mirrored on her neck.

Do the same with the camera presets when you will be drawing on the sides of the 3D model, to make sure you’re perfectly aligned with it so that your painting isn’t distorted.

Now, if you want to use the symmetric ruler, you will have to create a new layer on top of your 3-D model.

Make your 3-D model face the camera correctly with the camera presets again, and on the layer above your 3D Model place the symmetric ruler where you want it to be.

Also make sure that you brush has enable snapping on.

Make Sure that snap to special rulers is selected and that your symmetric ruler has show in all layers selected as well .

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You can reuse the 3-D models.

It’s really helpful and saves time. For example if it’s a character in your comic that you want to reuse and not draw a whole complex tattoo multiple times in a chapter, you can register that 3-D model in your material library.

Render the 3D painting

Now, I’m gonna show you how to use that 3-D model and render it in 2-D, so that it looks natural

first, remove all light source from the model so that only the tattoo appears cleary.

Then you can go two different ways, since my character is already skin colored. It’ll be fine but the other way to go about it is to make the layer of the 3-D model monochrome and only select the black color so that only the black color will be visible.

Of course rasterize your 3D model before this.

The monochrome option is great as it allows you to use both sliders to control the width of the line. As the monochrome layer can’t be rasterized i usually just create a new empty layer above and merge it with the monochrome layer, that’s if you plan on using colors though.

When you’re done coloring your character, you can go ahead and remove and clean up manually with the eraser the remaining outlines of the 3-D models that are visible. I also clipped another layer on the layer of the tattoo to color it so it appears slightly lighter.

You can then go ahead and finish the painting!

Now that you got the the model registered in your material library, you can just reuse the same method I just used as often as you want and with how many different poses you need, so this can save a lot of time if you’re making a comic. Now you don’t need to fear about having to draw characters with complex patterns on their skin Like tattoos or scars.

If you don’t want to use the monochrome version and want to draw something colored just do the same thing and erase the parts of the 3D body that don’t fit!

Remove the lines of your 3D model and replace it with the right color.

Now that you understand how it works, you can see how useful this can potentially be as you can use it as a guide for multiple different things. You could use it for anatomy references, for clothes references. For example, if your character has a belt or jewelry or symbols on his face. I even drew a face on the 3-D model to help me remember the basic characteristics of the face of my character and remember the more important features (ex: eyebrows placement or density, mouth with etc)

You can do the same with scars, moles, birthmarks or even bandages ,anything that would be close and tight on the body. It’s also useful as it’ll also be a guide for you to remember where every symbol or tattoo should be from a certain angle.

You can also feel free to make very detailed paintings on the 3-D model as it will be reused.

In this case i I painted the character white instead of the color of its skin, as this is only a rough guide that I can use almost as a sketch, my knowledge of anatomy being limited I’m not gonna render my final image with the lines that I painted on the 3-D model. I’ll clean up afterwards and only use this as a guide for the horns , symbols on his face and overall muscles placement.

Here again, I use a perspective ruler to help me save time instead of drawing each side independently. Also, when you want to draw, for example the under of the arms, I recommend you manipulate the 3-D model, and raise its arms up so that you can draw without distortion again, the same for the in between the legs and when you’re done, click the icon to revert your model to the initial pose

Also, even if you draw a face onto a 3-D body model, I don’t recommend that you really use it as a guide, especially for the eyes and mouth as usually your character will be expressive, though it can help for the shape of the eyes but you can see above here that the face looks flat and rigid.

You could also use this for complex character clothing that are made of complicated patterns though as I said previously, this can mostly only work for pieces of clothing that are tight on the body like for example, a corset, a bathing suit, high knee socks, or a bodysuit etc

You use it as a guide to draw things like an eyepatch ,make up, goggles or even a guide for the starting point of hairlines.

Also useful if you want references and guides for anatomy that are different than usual, for example, to remember where a robot joints would be positioned on the body, just keep in mind that the 3-D model should never be your final render, but only help you to get there

It can also simply be a guide for you to paint a character in a scene .It Can help you if you have a hard time with lighting and shading, helping you know which color to use. You can change the colors of the light and shading of your 3D scene in the sub tool detail of your model.

Painting on 3-D primitives

Firstly let’s talk about resolution.

If you make small primitive and paint on it; the texture might appear blurry. For this to not happen simply scale your object before painting on it. You will then be able to scale it down without losing the resolution of your drawing either.

Make a transparency mask

Let’s say i wanted this drawing to be transparent, the only visible thing on the primitive.

The only way for now to do that is to make a custom transparent material, apply it on your primitive and paint over it.

It will even make the shadow correct to your drawing. I’ll show you how to make one, it’s easy.

First, Create a new file with a good resolution, you can go higher if you need.

 

 

Hide the paper layer and put whichever brush you have selected at 1 opacity.

 

 

Then paint a dot with that brush on each side of your canvas.

 

 

Register the layer where you drew the dots as a material, name it properly so you can find it again easily.

Then go into the sub tool details of your 3D primitive and apply the mask you’ve just made.

You can now reuse this material on any primitive you want to be transparent!

Reusing 3D primitives to build objects and scenes

Here I’ve painted a primitive box that i scaled to be a rectangle.

 

(Note that if you scale your object after having painted on it, your painting will get stretched. But if the objects is scaled before you paint on it, your painting won’t be distorted)

As you can see i made a little shop using only three primitive, two rectangle boxes and one cylinder . I only rescaled them multiple times.

The flyers are all the same plane primitive i copy pasted and repainted on multiple times.

And again, if you want to reuse it just register it in you materials!

Of course you’ll have to refine it yourself so it doesn’t look like 3D as much.

Use normal maps

When you’re done painting on the primitive i recommend you export its map so you can create a normal and apply it directly on your primitive.

Normal map create a fake sense of depth and volume that can make your texture look more 3 dimentional.

To make a normal map, first export your primitive’s map and open it again by clicking File > Open.

‘Then select the layer you want the normal map to be based on.

Adjust it your your liking, i usually paint on it when i want it to be a specific way too.

It’s also how i made the welcome sign.

 

 

Making a full scene

You can make full scenes and small backgrounds just using primitives now, et like how modular assets are done in video games.

Planes for example as great for making foliage.

you can easily create a semblance of variation by duplicating your objects and rescaling them and rotating them around.

for elements that are far in the background or that you want to constantly face the camera you just have to change the follow camera option to “on”.

You can then use the primitives you painted on with other 3D objects to make a scene fuller.

As i keep saying it’s really nice to be able to reuse assets like these mountains and trees and grass, since theyare things i need to draw often.

Before you could paint on the 3D models directly, it was hard to tell how the drawings would look in 3D if you drew on the exported map of the primitive.

Now you can start by painting an overall shape as a sketch then export the map of the primitive and detail it separately on a different file, and import it back on your primitive when you’re done!

Just like here where i first put a plane down, i sketched on it briefly what i wanted the stone floor to look like , refined it on the map directly and reimported it back in the model texture settings.

I even created a custom wall fog to put behind any 3D objects i want, the Fog , gate and mountains were made still using the transparency mask i made earlier.

I also made the gate just using two different planes, one for the door and one for the bars that i duplicated many times.

Still using the symmetric ruler and custom.transparency mask.

You can make simple scenes for your characters quickly, i also recommend you play around with the lighting options to make it look more interesting.

I’ll create clouds too, and wooden bars that you can often see, to make another quick background.

If you reuse the other assets you’ve made you can create plenty different types of backgrounds, this is great if you’re drawing a comic and characters are in the same location for a while, you won’t need to redraw the background every panel but just move around the camera for a different angle instead.

Here are all my assets reused and placed in the same scene.

Also, you can scale your primitives and in their texture settings you can choose how much it tiles. I made my brick wall huge and made the tiling twice as big, so keep that in mind if you want to make a texture that tiles seamlessly.

Of course the background doesn’t look great on its own so go manually detail and refine it to make it look prettier.

Thanks for reading!

As always i hope i could give you some ideas of how to use this new feature!

Here’s my Instagram account if you want to see more of my art. See you next time!