How to Paint Environments Over a 3D Model

When viewing a beautifully painted environment, whether it is the grand view of a mountainous sunset or a humble home kitchen, you might wonder what measures were taken to create these effective and immersive background illustrations. For intermediate readers, you may already be familiar with the foundational method of setting up a perspective grid, sketching in a basic shape-focused layout, and then detailing those shapes into jagged rocks or intricate furniture.

While it is essential to practice and understand this process, it can sometimes take a significant amount of time to complete an environment sketch from scratch as the composition gets more complex. The use of 3D-modeled bases effectively skips the mathematical and time consuming step of creating a perspective grid while still ensuring perspective accuracy, and it serves as an efficient alternative to sketching in each cube or sphere in the layout stage.

It is especially useful to create a model of an environment if you wish to illustrate several parts of the same space, as it enables you to quickly test different compositional angles, experiment with different FOV’s (field of view, which determines how much or how little is included in the composition), and easily view different lighting situations.

There is a stigma attached to the use of 3D models in artwork describing it as an invalid step in the creation process. However, its efficiency and wide range of capabilities is highly valuable for several entertainment industry roles that demand fast turnaround times during the production pipeline, including but not limited to: concept designers, visual development artists, prop designers, background artists, themed entertainment designers, etc. It is additionally valued in other commercial illustrative industries such as comics and book covers, or for creating merchandise such as posters, prints, cards, etc. 3D models are neat tools that essentially guide you into the final painting stage!

So, what 3D-Modeling Softwares are used to begin an environment painting?

Autodesk Maya

A subscription-based program considered an industry standard in entertainment for decades due to its capability to handle very complex projects and tasks with heavy loadouts or detail.
Offers discounted subscription use for students!

Blender

A free program that while not universally considered an industry standard, has become a very popular tool for indie/smaller studio pipelines and personal use due to its accessibility.
Includes a neat feature where you can set your key binds to mirror Maya’s controls, if you are switching from using Maya to Blender.

For this tutorial, we will use Blender to create our model, and learn how to export it for the final paintover process. My painting software of choice will be Clip Studio Paint, but other softwares such as Photoshop, Procreate, etc. work as well!

1. Sketch Out Your Environment!

We will focus on painting a regular bedroom with many props and personality. Consider the setting, mood, and context of your room, as it can determine how clean or strewn about the items within it are.

Explore different ideas for lighting (a ceiling light, desk light, window light, door light, etc.) as it will be useful to reference when testing lighting scenarios in Blender. Additionally, explore different color studies until you land on a choice that you feel best fits the goal of your piece. While we will not be coloring in Blender, it is helpful for when the paintover process begins.

2. Have A Basic 3D Blockout Ready

With your sketch, create a basic blockout of the room and what you believe will be in it. A simple model without textures is sufficient for this tutorial.

Blockouts are effective for setting up where surfaces that demonstrate perspective accuracy will be (floors, walls, windows, furniture that can have complex shapes such as chairs, tables, desks, lighting fixtures, fences, and more).

If you think it may be difficult to accurately hand paint something in, block its shape out! A blockout can be as detailed as you want for a more straightforward paintover process, but even a simple blockout can go a long way as a layout for your environment.

Based on your composition choice from your thumbnails, you should have a general idea what kind of angle you are going for, as well as where the focus within the environment will be. It is ideal to put the most detail into what will be visible in your camera view, to avoid working away at objects or parts of the scene that will not be included in the final paintover. It can be easy to get carried away filling a space only to realize the objects you just blocked out will not be part of the illustration!

3. Explore Lighting Situations

With your model now finished, it is important to properly light your scene and explore different points of light before moving to the paintover. Blender accurately calculates where shadows from each object will land from any given light source, as well as how light affects the plane/surface of each object, which are very valuable references when painting an environment.

There are four lighting tools to choose from:

3a. Point

Evenly emits light from a central point, comparable to the light effect of a light bulb. Its radius can be toggled to make shadow shapes sharper or softer.

3b. Sun

Lights the entire scene, emulating the total surface coverage of an actual sun. It can be rotated to change the direction of the shadows.

3c. Spot

Emits a cone-shaped light, useful for settings where there are spotlights, flashlights, or car headlights. The blend parameter controls the edges of the light.

3d. Area

Emits light from a flat surface, is commonly used for window lights or light shining from a TV or monitor.

Picking the right lighting source for your environment can depend on the mood or time of day you are setting, or the location of your focal point/focus. Learning to combine the different kinds of lighting tools together can build a readable, well-lit scene!

4. Finalize Camera View and Render Your Scene

With our final model now properly lit, it’s time to finalize the camera view. This viewpoint will be what is rendered and exported as the final image to paint over.

A simple way to adjust your camera is to click on View, hover over Align View, and select Align Active Camera to View.

Then, hover over Navigation and select Fly Navigation. This allows you to navigate around your model with the camera view automatically locking to wherever you look, making it easy to manually set up a desired angle.

An image border will appear with a set image ratio, which can be adjusted in the Output tab. Set it to the dimensions you would like your final paintover image to be. It is important to ensure that your rendered blockout image comes out at a good enough quality and size to be able to paint over.

Finally, render it! If you wish to create an output with accurately rendered lighting, make sure your rendering engine is set to Cycles. However, if lighting accuracy is not an important factor in your piece or if it features little lighting, EEVEE is a sufficient and significantly faster (and lighter) engine for rendering.

Once the render has completed, export your image as either a JPG or PNG. Depending on the complexity of the model, JPG can be a preferable choice, as PNG’s can quickly become heavy files due to its lossless image preservation.

5. Import Your Rendered Image and Begin Painting!

Using your preferred paint program (Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Procreate, etc.), open your exported 3D image as a new canvas. If the blockout is very detailed, the painting process will be straightforward. If it is simpler or only consists of basic shapes, don’t worry! Even simple rectangles, spheres, and cubes are a great perspective aid for manually sketching in all of your detailed shapes during the flats step.

Referencing your sketch and color study, create an Overlay layer and begin roughing in the flat colors of the floor and wall, followed by the flat colors of all of the objects in your blockout. The goal of this step is to make sure there is no visible grey from the original image while mapping out your colors. Using an Overlay layer achieves this without directly covering it up like a Normal layer would.

Remember, your blockout simply serves as a perspective layout, so you do not have to feel tied down to only painting what was created in your model! View the blockout as a preliminary sketch that comes before painting over it. During the painting process, I often think of new things to add into the scene that I did not initially block out in Blender as the environment develops.

6. Going From Flats to Full Render

With all of the flats mapped out and/or additional details or item flats added in, it’s time to fully paint!

Rendering environments can be intimidating depending on size and complexity, so it can be helpful to choose specific areas within the composition to focus on rendering once at a time. It can be easy to try rendering everything in the scene at once, but I find that taking the process slow and working away at the scene piece-by-piece is less stressful and feels more rewarding in the end, knowing you have put focused detail into each area.

Using textured brushes across the surfaces within your environment can greatly add implied detail and grain into a 3D model’s smooth surface.

If you are going to have posters in your environment or other kinds of 2D elements, it can be very helpful to create the designs in a separate file. Once finished, you can easily warp them to their respective locations in the perspective of your scene!

Ultimately, the level of finish is up to you, whether it be a simple, cell-shaded scene or a highly-detailed, painterly scene that conceals the 3D model to begin with.

7. Short Exercises

If you feel confident with 3D modeling and painting but are still unsure about committing to a full environment piece, here are a couple short exercises to familiarize yourself with combining the two:

7a. Exercise 1: Painting Different Textured Spheres

Environments are filled with many different kinds of textures, and as an artist, it is your role to bridge the gap between a 3D model and an illustration by painting in these textures.

Set up at least four spheres and assign four different kinds of textured materials to each sphere to paint. This can include but is not limited to: wood, metal, plastic, glass, dirt, grass, fabric, etc.

The goal is to feel comfortable painting different textures from all angles!

7b. Exercise 2: Item Paintover

Environments can be filled with a variety of props, easily making a composition feel intimidating by the sheer amount of things to render! In this exercise, you will only have to focus on one.

Sketch out ideas for an item you would like to paint, and then create a simple 3D model of it. Follow the steps to render, export, and import your model into a canvas to paint over the item.

The goal is to familiarize yourself with painting over a single prop, to better prepare you to fully furnish an environment painting!

Learning how to paint an environment over your own 3D blockout can be intimidating, as it’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the endless amount of detail you can add to your model. Remember that 3D blockouts simply serve as a perspective and lighting guide to help construct your painting. Even the simplest models can aid you more efficiently than hand-drawn perspective layouts. As you practice integrating 3D modeling into your workflow, you will find that it is a great tool to aid in creating accurate and interesting environments filled with life and curiosity in its world.

References

Angeline (@zangelink) • Robogeddon 3D Model. (2026). Instagram.Com. https://www.instagram.com/zangelink/