Skins 3D Painting

Alright, so this is something I've been mostly putting off for years because I haven't seen any workflow that includes the one thing I need to be able to do: Draw shapes with bezier (or similar) curves. Times are changing and as models get more detailed the need for 3D painting is increasing.

So, for anyone here who does 3D painting: How do you draw crisp shapes in 3D? I've found many "tutorials" which all amount to instructions on importing and setting up the model in Blender/Substance/Quixel/whateverothersoftware and then squiggling the mouse around to be like "look, painting in 3D!" Literally no one is freehanding designs with a mouse and getting a half decent result.

Not a single tutorial covers how to actually draw a shape that you would want to put on a car. Is every single person who is 3D painting liveries drawing their shapes in another program and then importing it as a decal or stencil? That sounds like an absolutely abysmally inefficient workflow.

As far as I can tell, the only option for 3D painting that allows you to draw shapes with a pen tool (or similar) and then project onto the model is Photoshop. Since acquiring Substance, Adobe has discontinued all 3D tools in Photoshop. The tools remain, sort of, but all of them are broken in one way or another and entering the "3D Workspace" you are presented with an alert saying as much. With every successive update the tools get more and more broken. With my CC subscription I can only go as far back as version 22.1, and that release is already extremely broken when it comes to the 3D tools.

Even Substance doesn't have such a tool as far as I can tell; from the documentation the pen tool in there only works in the 2D window, not the 3D window.

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So, what are you guys doing for drawing shapes for your liveries? Is there any software out there that allows you to draw shapes right in the 3D view with a proper curve tool?

Please tell me I'm being stupid and missing something obvious, because to me this would be the very first creation tool I'd put in a 3D painting program.
 
Last edited:
Small update: Last night I discovered 3DCoat which has some spline tools for drawing shapes to project onto the model. It's a little unrefined, but it's basically what I'm after. By far the closest thing I've found so far.
 

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