It works by melting down plastic filament, then carefully laying down layer after layer of the melted goo. Most, if not all, home 3D printers use a process called fused filament fabrication. There are a lot of fundamental rules that govern successful fused filament fabrication, and Microsoft doesn’t offer any of the tools you need to work within them. That’s of concern when it comes to 3D printing. It’s tough to create models without any sort of idea of size or ratio to other objects in the build, and Paint 3D offers no help at all. Scale and precision are also major issues in Paint 3D. After you put a few simple pieces together, you can export them as a single file, then reload them back into Paint 3D as a single model, which you can now only scale or paint as one big chunk. There’s no way within Paint 3D, at least that we could identify, to weld or join objects together into more complex shapes. In Paint 3D, you only ever edit your project from one direction Paint isn’t perfect either, but its main issue comes from the perspective problem - If you want to paint anything but the front side of an object, you must rotate the object itself, paint it, then spin it back around.

Once you’ve slapped it in place, you either must use undo to remove it, or paint over it. Like real stickers, the 3D Paint version can’t be move once applied. It goes something like this.Īfter creating a shape at the front of your build, you paint or apply stickers, which have their own problems. With no way of welding multiple objects together, the workflow becomes a tedious loop of exporting and re-saving files. You can draw custom shapes, but the moment you finish they harden into arbitrarily extruded versions of your carefully placed points. In general, the drawing and painting tools are quick to make changes permanent.

Perspective is far from the only issue with Paint 3D. Without a rich set of camera controls, tool changing shortcuts, or many hotkeys to speak of, this process quickly becomes tedious.

As the object count grows, you’ll find you must pull each object out in front of the rest, do any work on it, and then rotate and slide it back into place. That’s not really an issue for single 3D objects, as you can rotate the object in place to re-shape or paint it.

Paint 3d mixed reality