You have a 3D model and it's grey. In about half an hour it'll be textured, weathered, and packaged as a mod you can load — done the way you'd 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're made the way a working texture artist would make them, not the way that's quickest to explain. A few of these steps 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. Ignore them tonight.
Words in are jargon you can tap to unpack, any time, without losing your place. There's a full list at the bottom too.
What you need
A model file (.glb or .gltf), AshForge Canvas installed from the Hub, and a mouse. A drawing tablet is lovely and completely optional.
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 isn't just coloured — it also has a and a value. Those two decide whether something reads as chalk, plastic, or a gun barrel.
Drag these and watch:
The one rule
Metallic is basically a yes or no. Real surfaces are metal or they aren't — there's no "half metal". Leave it at 0 for wood, stone, cloth, plastic and paint; push it to 1 for bare metal. Roughness is where all the interest lives, and it's the slider you'll spend your time on.
Five habits worth having from move one
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:
Habit 01 · Never paint on the base
Always paint into a , or into a material's mask. If you can't switch a decision off, you can't revisit it — and you will want to revisit almost everything.
Habit 02 · Hide, don't erase
A conceals; the eraser destroys. They look identical on screen and they are not remotely the same thing three hours later. Reach for the mask.
Habit 03 · Keep light out of the colour
Never paint a highlight or a shadow into . It'll look great from the angle you painted it and wrong from every other one, and in a game the light moves. Let the renderer do lighting.
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.
Habit 04 · Name layers as you make them
Three unnamed layers is fine. Twenty is a maze, and you get to twenty faster than you'd think. Double-click a layer's name and type what it is.
Habit 05 · Look at it under a light you didn't choose
Anything that only looks right under the lighting you built it in isn't finished. Step 8 makes this a habit rather than an afterthought.
That's the whole philosophy. Everything below is just those five applied to one object.
The nine steps
1
Open Canvas from the Hub
Start the AshForge Hub and pick Canvas from its tool list. Don't launch Canvas from its own shortcut — every tool in the suite opens through the Hub, and clicking the shortcut just bounces you back to it.
2
Load your model
Top bar → 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.
Tip No model handy? Canvas starts with a default sphere, and a sphere is a perfectly good place to learn every step below. Nothing here needs a crate.
3
Unwrap it
Paint needs somewhere to live. That's the — and if your model doesn't have one, brushing will do nothing at all.
Go to Auto-UV → xatlas. That's 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 — not stretched rectangles — and be roughly the same size all over.
Tip Stretched squares mean stretched paint. If a big area looks smeared, run Auto-UV → Smart (angle-based) instead and compare. Pick whichever looks more even and move on — this does not need to be perfect.
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's all the checker is telling you.
4
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's correct, and it's the cleverest thing in the program.
Clicking that card loaded the material into every at once and hid it all behind a . Canvas has already switched you into mask-painting mode. 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.
Set your expectations These eight cards are flat colours with sensible roughness and metallic values — not photographs. "Rough Stone" is a stone-ish brown, not a picture of granite. All the character comes from what you paint on top, which is exactly what steps 6 and 7 are.
5
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 didn't want? Switch the tool to Erase and it hides again.
Tip Make the brush big. In the Brush tab, drag Size right up — covering a model with a tiny brush is the single most common way beginners waste an hour.
TipCtrl + Z undoes, up to 20 steps back. You cannot break anything here.
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.
Habit 04, right now Go to the Layers tab and double-click this layer's name. Call it base. It takes four seconds and it's the difference between a stack you can read and a stack you're guessing at. Name every layer as you create it and you'll never have to go back and work out what "Layer 7" was.
Save nowSave… your .canvas file before you go further. Saving after something goes well is the habit — most people only learn it by saving after something goes badly.
6
Wear the edges
Real objects get knocked. The corners rub down; the dents collect grime. 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's it. Canvas measured the of your model and put wear on the sticking-out parts and dirt in the tucked-in parts.
Tip Pick your brush colour before you click. Edge Wear paints in the current colour, so a light grey reads as scuffed paint and a dark brown reads as grime. Two clicks with two colours beats one click with the wrong one.
Tip that makes it look real Perfectly even wear looks machine-made. Set the tool to Erase, set Tip to Noise (grunge), and scrub over some of the wear to break it up. Now it's worn in places rather than everywhere.
7
Dirty the whole thing
This is the step that separates "textured" from "finished", and it takes two minutes.
Go to the Layers tab and click + Add for a fresh layer at the top. Name it grime — Habit 04.
Set its Blend mode to Multiply.
Pull its Layer opacity down to about 15%.
Pick a dull warm grey-brown — the colour of dust, not black.
Big brush, Noise (grunge) tip, scrub loosely all over. Ignore where one material stops and another starts.
Because it crosses everything, the object stops looking like separate parts and starts looking like one thing that has sat somewhere.
Tip Too strong? Don't undo — just drag Layer opacity down. That's why it's on its own layer.
8
Check it honestly
Thirty seconds, and it's 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.
Open the Scene tab and do three things:
Change the light. Switch the environment preset, then drag HDRI rotation. Watch what happens as the key light swings around.
Turn the lighting off. Set Shading to Unlit (flat). This shows your raw colour with no lighting at all — if you see painted-in highlights or shadows here, that's Habit 03 catching you.
Turn the colour off. Set Shading to Matcap (clay) to see pure form.
Then set it back to PBR (lit).
What you're looking for Anything that only looks good under one light. A surface that reads beautifully in the studio preset and turns to mud at sunset needs its roughness looked at, not its colour.
Tip If your metal looks like mustard rather than metal, it has nothing to reflect. Load an HDRI and turn on Reflections — metal is almost entirely reflection, so with nothing around it, it can't look like metal.
9
Save it and ship it
Two different things, and you want both.
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.
Ship it:Export → Export as Mod… writes a complete mod folder — model, textures and manifest — ready to load.
Tip Exported textures are the output. The .canvas file is the work. Losing the second one means starting over, so save it somewhere you'll find it again.
That's a textured asset.
Genuinely — that's the whole loop, and every asset you make from here is the same nine moves with more care at each one. The fastest way to get better is to do it again on a different object tomorrow, not to read further tonight — and because you did it with the habits rather than around them, none of this is practice you have to undo.
When it goes wrong
Nothing happens when I paint Almost always no UV map. Run Auto-UV → xatlas (step 3). If you have unwrapped, check you're not painting a hidden layer — look at the Layers tab and make sure the active layer's eye is on.
My paint is in the wrong place / smeared Stretched UVs. Turn on UV Checker and look at the bad area. Re-run Auto-UV with a different option.
The material looks flat and plasticky You're seeing the base colour with nothing on top. That's 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. Look at the Channel selector at the top of the side panel — it should say Albedo while you're 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.
Word key
Everything above, in plain English. These are the same definitions the tappable words use.
What next
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.
