If you happen to be a fan of Oculus’ painting app Quill but wish it could do even more then you’ll be happy to hear that a new update has been launched today offering creators the chance to animate their designs.
Developed for the creation of the now defunct Oculus Story Studios’ Dear Angelica, Quill has always offered a unique look for artists and their work. Now they can take that one step further by creating their own animations. In a Facebook blog post the Quill team explains: “Starting today, artists can bring those drawings to life directly in Quill for the first time with new animation tools and VR-native workflows, including support for free frame-by-frame redrawing, copy-and-re-pose animation, an animation brush, and more.
“We’ve already seen some incredible artwork created with Quill, including the Emmy-nominated Dear Angelica. But with today’s new animation tools, production time for projects like this will be slashed dramatically. While testing the tools, our resident artist, Goro Fujita, was able to complete his animated short film ‘Beyond the Fence’ in just three weeks, an undertaking that could have lasted over a year with traditional 3D animation software.”
While having the option to animate will certainly be a boon to those who need it, the Quill team isn’t stopping there either. Plans are already underway for more features, including ‘the ability to discover and watch animated Quill stories in Facebook Spaces’, to make the content even more social.
Check out the launch trailer below to see the new feature in action and as more updates are announced, VRFocus will keep you posted.
Quill 1.4 Update Changelog
- Added animated paint layers and animation clip panel.
- Added animated brush settings to control how strokes are drawn while clips are playing.
- Added round capped brushes.
- Added auto width and transparent taper options to the previous pressure-sensitive options.
- Added brush volume grid to help with depth perception.
- Improved performance and memory use of drawings with lots of layers.
- Added ability to import a Quill drawing in document open tab.
- Added flatten group functionality (use merge button on a group).
- Added automatic stabilization to video captures.
- Implemented Alembic export of animated paint layers.
- 360 viewer locked image layers can now be scaled and rotated.
- Selection transform now shows gimbal tool.
- New option to repeat duplicate selection transform to new animation frames.
- Changed non-dominant hand thumbstick push down to toggle showing transform gimbal instead of auto-select transform object.
- Fixed video clips capturing at incorrect speed on heavy scenes.
- Fixed flipped layers rendering back instead of front faces.
- Fixed crash when deleting the selection while transforming it.
- Fixed crash with selection tool when non-paint layers were selected.
- Fixed crash when starting two-hand transform during one hand transform of the selection.
- Fixed crash during the application exit process that could in some instances could cause an infinite crash loop.