Canvas · Beginner · Tutorial 1 of 3
You have a 3D model
and it's grey.
In about half an hour it will be textured, weathered and packaged as a mod you can load — done the way you would still want to be doing it in a year.
This is the beginner path, and it is not the shortcut
Every choice below is made for you, but they are made the way a working texture artist would make them rather than the way that is quickest to explain. A few steps here are thirty seconds slower than the obvious version.
Those thirty seconds are the difference between habits you build on and habits you spend next year unlearning. There are faster routes, and it is worth ignoring them tonight.
What you need
A model file in .glb or .gltf form, AshForge Canvas installed from the
Hub, and a mouse. A drawing tablet is lovely and completely optional.
Words in are jargon you can tap to unpack at any point without losing your place. There is a full list at the bottom too.
Before you start
What you're actually painting
One idea makes everything else click, so play with it for thirty seconds. A surface in a game is not just coloured. It also has a and a value, and those two decide whether something reads as chalk, as plastic, or as a gun barrel.
Free to adopt now, expensive to adopt later
Five habits worth having
Almost everything that makes texturing painful later is a habit that was free to adopt at the start. These five cost you nothing tonight and save you weeks.
Habit01
Never paint on the base
Always paint into a , or into a material's mask. If you cannot switch a decision off, you cannot revisit it — and you will want to revisit almost everything.
Habit02
Hide, don't erase
A conceals and the eraser destroys. They look identical on screen and they are not remotely the same thing three hours later. Reach for the mask.
Tick the box, then drag the light. The real highlight follows the lamp. The painted one just sits there — and that is exactly what your texture will do in the game.
Habit04
Name layers as you make them
Three unnamed layers is fine. Twenty is a maze, and you reach twenty faster than you would think. Double-click a layer's name and type what it is.
Habit05
Look at it under a light you didn't choose
Anything that only looks right under the lighting you built it in is not finished. Step 8 makes this a habit rather than an afterthought.
That is the whole philosophy. Everything below is those five habits applied to one object.
Setup
Open Canvas from the Hub
Start the AshForge Hub and pick Canvas from its tool list. Do not launch Canvas from its own shortcut — every tool in the suite opens through the Hub, and clicking the shortcut simply bounces you back to it.
Setup
Load your model
Top bar, then Open Model…, and pick your file. It drops into the viewport. Drag with the right mouse button to orbit around it, and scroll to zoom.
Preparation
Unwrap it
Paint needs somewhere to live. That somewhere is the , and if your model does not have one, brushing will do nothing at all.
Go to Auto-UV and choose xatlas. That is the best general answer, and you can stop reading the other four options.
Canvas switches on the UV Checker when it finishes, covering your model in a grid. Look at the squares. They should look like squares rather than stretched rectangles, and be roughly the same size all over.
Why does this step exist?
Your model is a 3D shape, but a texture is a flat 2D image. Unwrapping is the process of flattening the shape so the image knows which pixel goes where — like peeling an orange and pressing the skin flat.
Anywhere the peel has to stretch to lie flat, your paint stretches too. That is all the checker is telling you.
The clever bit
Give it a base coat
Turn the checker back off. Open the Materials tab in the side panel and click a card — Rough Stone is a forgiving start.
Nothing appears. That is correct, and it is the cleverest thing in the program.
Clicking that card loaded the material into every at once and hid all of it behind a . Canvas has already switched you into mask-painting mode, so your brush is now a reveal tool.
Drag across the panel. You're not painting rust — you're painting a hole in the hiding, and the rust was there the whole time.
Painting
Paint it in
Just drag on the model. The material appears where you brush — colour, roughness and metalness together, all correct, all at once.
Cover the whole thing. Missed a bit? Keep going. Went somewhere you did not want? Switch the tool to Erase and it hides again.
These are the real controls, doing the real thing. Wind spacing up past 0.8 and watch a solid stroke turn into a scatter stamp — that's how you make grime.
.canvas file before you go any further. Saving after something goes
well is the habit worth building; most people only learn it by saving after something
goes badly.Character
Wear the edges
Real objects get knocked. The corners rub down and the dents collect grime, and Canvas can work out where those places are from the shape itself.
In the Brush tab, find Edge Wear and click it. Then click Cavity Dirt. That is it — Canvas measured the of your model and put wear on the sticking-out parts and dirt in the tucked-in ones.
The finishing pass
Dirty the whole thing
This is the step that separates “textured” from “finished”, and it takes two minutes.
One grime layer, over everything
- Go to the Layers tab and click + Add for a fresh layer at the top. Name it grime. habit 04, and you will thank yourself in ten minutes
- Set its Blend mode to Multiply. multiply tints what is underneath instead of covering it
- Pull its Layer opacity down to about 15%. this is a veil; at full strength it just looks dirty
- Pick a dull warm grey-brown, the colour of dust rather than black. black deadens everything it touches
- Big brush, Noise (grunge) tip, scrub loosely all over, ignoring where one material stops and another starts. crossing the boundaries is the entire point
Because it crosses everything, the object stops looking like separate parts and starts looking like one thing that has sat somewhere.
Review
Check it honestly
Thirty seconds, and it is the habit that separates people who improve quickly from people who plateau. You have been staring at this object under one light for half an hour, and your eye has stopped seeing it.
Three things, then set it back
- Change the light. Switch the environment preset, then drag HDRI rotation and watch what happens as the key light swings around. one light flatters; two tell the truth
- Turn the lighting off. Set Shading to Unlit (flat). this shows raw colour, so painted-in highlights have nowhere to hide
- Turn the colour off. Set Shading to Matcap (clay) to see pure form. form problems are invisible under texture
- Set it back to PBR (lit). so the next thing you judge is judged normally
Ship
Save it and ship it
Two different things, and you want both.
First09a
Save your work
Save… writes a .canvas file
with every layer intact, so you can come back and change your mind. Do this first,
always.
Then09b
Ship it
Export then Export as Mod… writes a complete mod folder — model, textures and manifest — ready to load.
.canvas file is the work.
Losing the second one means starting over, so save it somewhere you will find it again.Troubleshooting
When it goes wrong
| Symptom | What it usually means | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Nothing happens when I paint | Almost always no UV map. Occasionally you are painting a hidden layer. | Run Auto-UV → xatlas (step 3). If you have unwrapped, check the active layer's eye is on in Layers. |
| My paint is in the wrong place, or smeared | Stretched UVs. | Turn on UV Checker, look at the bad area, and re-run Auto-UV with a different option. |
| The material looks flat and plasticky | You are seeing the base colour with nothing on top of it. | That is steps 6 and 7. Wear and grime are what make a surface look like a thing rather than a shape. |
| Everything looks weirdly shiny or dull | You may be painting into the wrong channel. | Check the Channel selector at the top of the side panel — it should read Albedo while you are painting colour. |
| My metal looks like mustard | Metal is almost entirely reflection, so it needs something to reflect. | In the Scene tab, switch the environment to an HDRI and turn on Reflections. |
Reference
Word key
Everything above, in plain English. These are the same definitions the tappable words use.
What next
Do it again tomorrow
Do it again on a different model. Seriously — the second one takes half as long and teaches twice as much.
When the nine steps feel automatic and you start wanting to know why rather than what, the next course is The Canvas Bench: all six channels, masks over fills, curvature-driven wear, baking, and the reasoning behind every choice this page made for you.