Mental Canvas is a software platform that allows users to create interactive 3D sketches and narrative illustrations that feel like a combination of drawing, animation, and spatial storytelling.
You draw on multiple 2D planes that exist in 3D space, giving your drawings depth and allowing for complex scenes. Viewers can move through the drawing like a virtual space, changing perspectives or following animated camera paths. You can create guided tours, zooms, pans, and transitions between views to tell a story or explain a concept.
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Why Morpholio Trace?
Mental Canvas is a drawing tool where you can sketch on multiple flat surfaces called canvas, then decide where to place them in a 3D space. It’s kind of like stacking sheets of paper at different angles, and then moving a camera through them.
The plane is your canvas. You draw on one, then add another behind it, then another, and that creates depth. It’s almost like layers in Photoshop, but in 3D. So if you’re drawing a building, for example, you draw the front on one plane, and then if you want to draw the side, you literally rotate the next plane and place it at an angle.
It’s kind of like building a paper model, layer by layer, and turning them in space. That’s how you get that 3D look. It’s still 2D drawing, but because the planes are placed in 3D space, it feels dimensional when you move the camera through. So it’s all about illusion through layers and perspective.
Mental Canvas is great for storytelling. People use it to create animated sketch scenes, explainer videos, comics, animation-style scenes and interactive presentations.
I actually used it for a YouTube video, just to show how it works, how you can draw on different planes and create depth by layering sketches. It’s super clean for that.
You can draw a scene, add a second plane for background, another for details, and then guide the camera through it. It kind of feels like directing a little movie made of sketches.
Final Thoughts
By combining the expressive freedom of traditional drawing with the power of 3D navigation and storytelling, Mental Canvas opens up new creative possibilities across industries. Whether you’re an artist looking to add dimension to your work, an educator creating immersive visuals, or a designer exploring conceptual spaces, Mental Canvas offers a unique and intuitive platform to bring your ideas to life.
Let me know if you have any questions or if there are any other tools you’d like me to review! In the meantime, you can keep up with me on Instagram and if you still have time, check out the other apps I use as an architect here!