By Liyo Kikon
HERE is something which no one expected – Microsoft releasing a new paint program? That sounds like a question which needs an additional question mark. But it is true, the new paint program will soon be made available with the Creator’s Update for Windows. This time, the good old paint program where everyone tried to draw a stick figure at least once will be injected with steroids and turned into a muscular, yet adorable 3D program. During the Microsoft event on October, they announced this new Paint 3D and now it is available as a preview edition for those who want to explore this new bundle of joy.
Paint 3D is a very simple and easy to use software, much like its predecessor, anyone can pick up the software and start creating things without any tutorials. When you open up the program, you will see the same old familiar white canvas in the middle and a the toolbar on the right, you can simply select a brush or pen, pick a colour and start drawing immediately. The different tools available are the normal pen, brush, water colour, ink, pencil, crayon, spray can and the popular fill bucket. Right off the bat, you can draw just like before on a 2D canvas. But where the new Microsoft Paint shines is its 3D capability, and you will notice that there are a few tabs on the right panel. If you click those tabs, you will find the different 3D models and options. In the 3D shapes menu, you will be presented with basic 3D shapes such as a sphere, cylinder and others, which you can click to select and when you draw on the canvas this time, it will place the 3D object into the canvas! Congratulations, you are now officially a 3D creationist.
You can move the 3D object using the anchor points around the object which will enable you to move it up or down, front or back. With the basic 3D shapes and a few creative ideas, you will be able to create anything you can imagine. The place where Paint 3D really shines will be its ability to paint directly on the 3D model as a texture. If you are a 3D artist, you will be well aware that creating textures on a 3D model require us to unwrap the 3D model, take the information to a drawing program, paint it and bring it back to the 3D software. It is actually a really complicated process. But with Paint 3D being targeted at beginner 3D artists, they skipped the whole process of unwrapping models and gave us the ability to paint directly on the model, much like the popular software – zBrush, but in a simpler form.
There are a lot of clever features with which Paint 3D can impress even the professional 3D artist, such as the “sticker tool” which enables the use of ordinary 2D images and placing them directly on the 3D objects and it will ‘stick’ to the object as it if was a part of the texture. And then there is the ability to change the paint material when you are using the brush tool to paint on the object, you can choose from matte, gloss, dull metal and polished metal. But the one feature which was really impressive is the magic selection tool. When you import a photo to the paint program, you can use the magic selection tool to draw a square around your main object and it will automatically select the object and remove the background! Even if there are a lot of things in the background, it will automatically detect it and remove them.
There are other features such as 3D text, history slider – which is basically an undo button in a slider form, Image effects and export to fbx format. One of the best things about Paint 3D is its integration with Microsoft’s 3D community where a lot of artists have uploaded their 3D models and you can also upload yours or download the ones created by others directly into your scene. It is available in the form of a tab so you never have to leave the program to look for 3D models. This community is large since they have collaborated with Sketchup to bring in a lot of professionally made 3D models.
To be able to use Paint’s 3D functions smoothly, you will definitely need a 3D card in your machine and a minimum of Core i5 processor. Paint 3D will be officially released in the form of an update next year, but if you would like to try it out, you can do so by downloading the preview edition from the Microsoft Store.
