Paint 3D

Paint 3D is a creative tool from Microsoft that combines flat 2D drawing with the ability to place, rotate, scale, and texture 3D objects on a shared canvas. It shipped preinstalled on Windows 10 as the successor to classic Paint, bridging the gap between simple doodling and basic 3D modeling without requiring any design experience.

What it does

The Brushes tab provides familiar drawing tools: marker, pencil, watercolor, pixel pen, and a calligraphy brush. Pick a color, set the thickness, and paint directly on the canvas. For 3D work, the 3D Shapes tab lets you drop primitives like cubes, spheres, and cylinders onto the scene, or use the 3D Doodle tool to draw a freeform outline that the program inflates into a solid object. Every 3D element can be rotated with the top handle, scaled with side handles, and pushed forward or backward along the Z axis with the bottom slider.

Magic Select is the standout feature. Draw a rectangle around an object in a photo, click Next, and Paint 3D cuts it out from the background automatically. The extracted object becomes a free-floating element you can reposition, layer over a different background, or paste onto a 3D model as a sticker. The Stickers tab also lets you wrap textures and decals onto 3D surfaces, which is useful for mock-ups and simple game assets. Finished projects export as GLB, FBX, or 3MF files for use in other 3D applications, or render down to a flat PNG or JPEG.

Who it is for

I found Paint 3D genuinely useful for two things: quick background removal with Magic Select and throwing together simple 3D mock-ups without opening Blender. If you need to cut a product photo out of its background or create a basic 3D scene for a school presentation, it handles that well and fast. For actual 3D modeling or serious 2D illustration, you will outgrow it within an hour. But as a zero-cost, zero-setup creative tool already sitting on your Windows 10 machine, it fills a narrow role that nothing else covers at that price point.