Clip studio’s 3D primitives are really helpful for a bunch of different things. They can make your drawing process easier and I’m gonna show you how!

3D primitives properties

First of all you can find your 3D primitives under your 3D folder.

There are a total of 6 different primitives;

A pyramid , a polygon , a sphere, a cube, a prism and a plane that you can drag and drop into your canvas.

These icons will show up under your primitive once you’ve placed it down on your canvas.

1- is to select previous 3D object

2-is to select next 3D object

3-is to specify the camera angle from presets

4-is to center the object

5-is to place your object back on ground level

6-is to reset the model scale

7-is to reset the model’s rotation

8-is to save the 3D primitive to your material assets

After dropping a primitive into your canvas you can interact wit it by clicking on it.

You can move it with the blue,red and green arrows on the X,Y,Z axis.

Rotate it with the blue, red and green curves on the X,Y,Z axis.

Do an overall scale with the orange circle.

Scale the primitive with the blue, red and green boxes on the X,Y,Z axis.

For example;Dragging the green box to the top on a sphere will extend the sphere and scale it upwards.

Whereas the opposite; dragging it down will squash the sphere.

You can also change the divisions number and hide them if wanted.

Depending on the number of divisions you set ,the pyramid, the prism and the sphere can have a change in shape.

Here’s the pyramid with a higher number of divisions. It can also look like a cone.

Here’s a prism with a higher number of divisions which makes it look like a cylinder.

And here’s a sphere radically changing shape .

So even though you have a base of 6 primitives you can get a lot more different shapes and forms that you can use and combine.

You can change the color of your primitive by going under 3D primitive texture then object color.

You can also change Directional light color and ambient light color.

And you can also change the direction of the light source by dragging on the sphere that’s in the editing menu as well, you can also choose if the primitive will cast a shadow on the ground.

Use textures on your primitive

You can import textures onto your 3D primitive whether it’s from your files or material library.

To import a texture click on the “open” icon to select a texture from your device’s files or press the “material” icon to select a texture from your clip studio materials.

When you have imported the texture you will be able to change the appearance settings of said texture on your primitive directly.

Here I’ve imported a texture on my cylinder and I’m able to make it bigger and vice versa.

You might want to play around with the settings to find what you want ,because as you can see on this cube, they are the same texture but with different levels of scale ratio.

Use maps for your primitives

Adding textures is fine when you want to be quick but if you want to be more precise you should use maps.

We will use a prism as an exemple for this but you can do it with all primitives.

When you have a primitive selected , click on the export map and save it into your files.

Then open the map file with clip studio and it should something like this in your canvas.

Now you’re able to see where things would end up on the primitive.

So if i were to draw something like this i would know where they’re positioned on the prism.

Now after saving it, import the map you made in the primitive texture menu and this is what it looks like on the primitive!

Note that this will work even with a primitive you scaled or moved.

When drawing the map if you want your drawing only to be visible, hide the background color layer and exclusion layer.

You can also change how your texture will look on your primitives by going in the alpha icon.

You can pick between three options;

1-Remove with threshold

2-Semi-transparent

3-Opaque

Turn the primitive into a still image

So the plane primitive is very useful as you can use it to remain facing the camera so that it looks like a still image.

I exported a map of a square sized plane and drew a bush and hid the other layers to make it transparent.

Now when opening it as a texture on your plane it will look clear.

Now the plane looks like a bush on your scene

But if you move the camera around you’ll see that the bush appears flat.

To change that turn on the follow camera option in you primitive’s properties menu

That way the plane will always face the camera even when moving it around.

This is useful for flat images that you want in a 3D scene, like trees for example.

Now let’s do the same but with a character.

Let’s start by using a plane and scale it to the approximate size of my character.

Export the map then draw your character and save the map again.

Here is the character now , this is good if you’re not sure about your scene yet but still want the character to face the camera.

You can also combine this with other 3D primitives if you want to add other effects etc…

Building objects and backgrounds with primitives

By using the simple shapes of the primitives we can built objects with them or built bases for backgrounds.

For example to do stairs you would only have to use a cube primitive then scale it to be a rectangle.

Then duplicate the primitive by pressing CTRL-C then CTL-V and move it on the X,Y,Z axis by using the arrows. ( it will be at the same exact place of your first primitive so just drag it to have your copy show itself).

 

You can also use them to build things like gates or barriers.

A way to go quicker, if you’re building something with reoccurring shapes, is to copy with CTRL-C and after pasting it press CTRL-V to copy the same primitive again and it will paste the same distance between your initial primitive and it’s copy. Example in the image above.

I just had to do it again horizontally this time and I made a gate/grid.

 

This of course works for every primitive.

You can also drop your primitives in a perspective ruler that you set up.

Although it will only match the perspective if it’s a 3 vanishing points perspective.

You can use them to build buildings since they’re usually made out of simple blocky shapes.

Don’t be afraid of combining different primitives to get interesting shapes, like how i used a sphere to make some sort of dome on the building’s roof.

Then just trace over it and color it to get nice results.

Primitives are convenient for when you want to built simple scenes like a street or something .

You can use primitives to build all sort of things like robots and cars. As you can see i used all the primitives to build this robot. Considering you can change the shapes of your primitives there’s a lot you can do with them.

You can also use them to build the interior of houses and other simple structures. This can be very helpful for comics as you can change the camera angle of your scene before drawing the details.

Usually it’s faster to duplicate already existing primitives and scale them again then dragging and dropping new ones especially since dropping a new primitive on an existing one will replace it(so you should drop them next or at least a bit further away from the existing ones)

That’s the end result.

Primitives can help you build a base for your scene to get an idea of what you’re going for.

You can also use 3D primitives in panoramas.

This would be helpful when adding a character in the scene for example.

You can create fantasy effects or battle effects with primitives as well.

The clip studio asset store has plenty that people made so I recommend you check that out. Here are some great ones below.(including the ones i used previously )

Here is an example oh how I used 3D primitives in my drawing.

I made the spaceship with spheres that I scaled and then exported their maps to draw the mechanicals elements.

I applied the maps to the primitives and played around with the light source of the primitive.

Thank you for reading 💖

I hope this could help in any way, primitives are a really nice addition to clip studio so i hope you guys use it!

If you want to see more pf my art i welcome you to my Instagram account ;

 

I’ll see you next time! :)