When attempting to modernized Windows 10, Microsoft threw a lot of spaghetti at the wall that included a replacement for the legendary Paint app called Paint 3D, that experimental phase is over and so is Paint 3D.
As of November 2024, the handful of sadomasochists who still use the oddly future-stilted Paint 3D app in Windows will need to make their peace as Microsoft has updated the app with a new cancelation banner that reads “Paint 3D won’t be available in the Microsoft Store or receive updates starting on November 4, 2024.”
The new banner takes Paint 3D’s seven-year deprecation journey to its final conclusion with its inevitable removal from the Microsoft Store and stripping it of support development beyond this November.
While the conceptual replacement of Microsoft’s aged in-box graphics editor was well warranted effort by the company, the resulting implementation left a lot to be desired by users. In typical Microsoft style, the company was so “preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should,” when it came to features for Paint 3D.
Windows 10 users were speckled with seemingly useless 3D features such as integration with Remix3D.com, playback of creation process in movie format, 2D artwork functions, customizable predefined models, limited animation tools, and more. While that might be nice for a handful of amateur animators, not only did Microsoft not expand on its vision, developers failed to deliver mainstay features from the standard Paint app such as multiple windowed support and scanning directly into the application, among a handful of others.
Beyond its hodgepodge of feature sets that were sometimes useful or not, the Paint 3D app was a slow resource hog in Windows. Understandably, the system toll a 3D animation app would be a bit of a drain on a computers CPU and GPU. However, as funnelling Windows users who were used making quick mark ups, cropping edits, and amateur paste/copy print outs to this now bloated app may have ultimately led to its lack of overall use and eventual cancelation.
Since deprecating Paint 3D roughly a year after it debuted, Microsoft has slowly, painfully, but ultimately successfully updated its standard 2D paint app with enough borrowed features from Paint 3D that it can finally pull the plug on its Dr. Frankenstein monster brain child.
Over the last three years, Microsoft’s Paint development has been turbo charged and delivered updates to the aged image editing platform that users make regular use of from other graphic manipulations apps such as OS-theme support, layers, machine-learning supported background removal, a new AI-powered text-to-image creation tool and the recent sketch and AI embellish feature.
There are still a handful of creative concepts that 3D Paint introduced that could be ported over to Microsoft’s standard Paint app, but the need for the company to support two distinctly different graphical editors is a concept best left in 2017.
