Intro

Hello! I will go over making backgrounds with Clip Studio Paint 3D. The official term is "kitbash". It is a process to put together a 3D render in order to work on top of it later. Look around on the internet with that term and you will find many many tutorials. I will focus on functions and not so much on painting this time. I will keep this article short because there are a lot of things that I need to show in real-time, so I highly recommend watching the video.

 

This tutorial is mostly for beginners and some advanced things at the very end, let me know if I missed anything.

One of the first things you should look into is the material tab if it is not open.

Here are many categories for 3D, you can check out many default things that come with CSP. You can just drag and drop them right away and it should open the scene right away.

Simple navigation

After you drop the model you will be able to navigate. To do that, keep in mind that you need to check the Operation and Object tool.

 

1) Will let you move the camera around the center of space. For shortcut - hold the left mouse.

2) Will let you move the camera up and down. For shortcut - hold middle on the mouse.

3) Will let you zoom forward or back. For shortcut - hold right click and move up and down ( left and right will not work)

4) Move the object.

5) Free rotate the object.

6) Rotate up and down.

7) Rotate left and right.

8)Move object attached it to the floor or other object.

It is pretty easy to navigate fun to figure out what does what. The bottom right pannel is the same as the one on the left, but with more options. Honestly, they are super easy to figure out. Clip Studio Paint did a great job with naming and organizing that pannel. Nothing is confusing and everything seems intuitive.

There are only a few things to point out. Perspective is a very important one. The same exact picture could look different with a smaller or bigger perspective. Cameras usually have different mm sizes for different lenses. To simplify, small mm will distort the image more (fish eye), and bigger mm will flatten the image.

 

Clip Studio Paint is the opposite of cameras though. A small perspective will look flat, but a bigger number will distort it more. Here is an example:

The first image is 1 perspective. The second image is 6 perspective. It depends on the effect you going for. Rooms look way cooler with an intense perspective.

 

P.S. Some models have preset views! It is under Preset button. If you click and they look off, it is most likely because your perspective is off.

Turning 3D into line art

There are a few ways you could do it. There is a very cool function that is called 'LT conversion of layer". It is under layer pannel. It is ONLY for version [EX] for Clip Studio Paint. Here are links that explain a lot of things in-depth about the function. You can usually use it on default and it should work great. It just changes the 3D render into line art.

Sadly, I do not have the EX version for Clip Studio Paint, there is however is a workaround. It is not perfect, but it works for me.

 

After you are done with the render, right-click on the layer and rasterize it.

Now you will only have the image left.

 

After that go to Filter - Effects - Artistic

Switch it to Lines only. Play around with settings and you can get similar results. There will be more clean up and there are some limitations, but it still works.

Here is the quick result that I got for myself.

Then you can paint and add more things under it. Adding characters or anything else that you want to.

Where to find 3D models?

You can always look around Clip Studio Paint Materials! Just filter it by 3D and look around for any things you want to add to your scene.

I already made the search with the filter and the tag on it. You can also look around other websites for 3D models. Here are some main ones.

Just go into Free section and read the license. Some people do not want their art to be used in commercial projects. If you are not familiar with 3D, then look for FBX and OBJ formats. OBJ is usually better because it has less information and more likely to not cause any problems.

It is super easy to import the models. Just drag and drop it on the canvas. Keep in mind that you need to have the same layer selected to add it all to the same scene or else it will be on a different perspective. There are also different artists that share their work.

This artist has a great selection of environments on CSP store.

Some models have the wrong scale because programs sometimes use meters or centimeters. In order to fix that you will need to go into the object scale in the tool property pannel. It is tedious, but at least it is fixable.

Outro

I hope this helps to start and experiment on your project. You can always learn Blender that is free software that lets you make high-quality models. There are plenty of tutorials and I highly recommend it. I use it myself.

 

Let me know if you have any questions and keep in mind that I explain a lot more in the video. Thanks for reading!

 

Here is a playlist I made for other videos on 3D by different people, including official Clip Studio Paint channel!

Here are my social media links: