NVIDIA Canvas is a free AI painting application for Windows PCs with NVIDIA RTX graphics. Instead of painting colors and textures by hand, the artist paints rough areas labeled with real-world materials, such as water, grass or mountains. Canvas generates a realistic landscape image from that layout. NVIDIA distributes it as a beta aimed at concept artists, architectural visualization designers and others who need quick environments and backdrops.
Painting with materials
The brush in NVIDIA Canvas does not lay down color. Each brush is a material, and the painting acts as a map that tells the AI what should occupy each part of the frame. Canvas has 20 material brushes, among them sky, clouds, mountains, stone, river, grass, snow, flowers, mud and bushes. A few triangles drawn with the mountain material become a mountain range; a band of water at the bottom becomes a lake or river.
The generated image updates in real time beside the painting, so every stroke changes the result straight away. Swapping one material for another rewrites the whole scene. Repainting snow as grass turns a winter view into a green one. Changing the sky area to cloud can move a scene from sunny to overcast. Work can start from a blank canvas or from one of the sample scenes included with the app.
Users can split paintings across layers. This keeps elements such as a foreground hill, a lake and the background sky separate. Users can change one without repainting the others.
Styles and custom images
The material map decides what is in the picture; the style decides how it looks. NVIDIA Canvas includes nine style images in standard mode, each with ten variations. These change the lighting, time of day, color and atmosphere of the same layout.
Users can also load their own JPG image as a custom style. Canvas then carries the visual character of that picture into the generated landscape, which helps match a scene to existing reference art or a project’s color scheme.
How the AI generates scenes
The image generation in Canvas comes from NVIDIA’s GauGAN research, now in its GauGAN2 model. A generative adversarial network (GAN) reads the rough segmentation-style painting and produces a realistic landscape from it. Processing runs locally on the RTX graphics card’s Tensor Cores rather than in the cloud. Output in standard mode reaches up to 1K pixels.
The model is built for landscapes and natural environments, so Canvas is not a general image generator for people, objects or interiors.
Panorama mode for 3D scenes
When creating or opening a file, NVIDIA Canvas asks for either the Standard or the Panorama workspace. Panorama mode paints a full 360-degree landscape and generates it as a 4K equirectangular image, the format 3D applications use for environment maps. A 3D view lets the user look around the panorama before exporting it. Eight styles are available in this mode.
In a 3D program, such an environment map can light the scene and supply reflections, or serve as a skybox or distant background. Suitable destinations include Omniverse USD Composer, Blender and game engines such as Unreal Engine.
Export to other editors
Users can save finished standard images as PNG or as a layered PSD file for further work in Adobe Photoshop or another graphics editor. Canvas exports panoramas as environment maps, with EXR among the supported formats. Canvas is meant to sit alongside these programs: its landscape is a base for concept work, while retouching and final detail happen in the artist’s usual editor.
