3ds Max 2011's new viewport canvas has been completely redesigned to offer a true 3D layer based paint system right within the application. In this blog post, i'll show you a few tips and tricks regarding the viewport canvas. You'll see how to add custom brushes, how to work with your favorite 2D paint program and the viewport canvas together, use light maps from render to texture in the viewport canvas layers and you'll learn the basic workflow for matte painting with viewport canvas.

Introduction and Custom Brushes

The first video covers the basics of working with Viewport Canvas and show how to create custom paint brushes.
 

PSD Workflow and Using Render to Texture with Viewport Canvas

This second video covers the workflow between paint applications using the PSD file format. You'll also see how to use the Render to texture dialog to create useful paint layers.

Viewport Canvas and Render Surface Map

In this video, see how to paint only on selected areas in order to restrict the effect of the paint stroke. For that, we'll see how to use the render Surface Map tool along with the Viewport Canvas.

Matte Painting and Viewport Canvas

This last video covers a typical matte painting workflow with a simple example. Matte painting is the art of producing believable backgrounds for film and games. Here, we'll see how high resolution geometry can be projected onto lower resolution proxies and then tweaked using the Viewport Canvas. Our goal is to deliver the final matte paintings on optimized rendering scenes while maintaining good perspectives.