Category: Dear Angelica

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VR Drawing Program ‘Quill’ Will Be Available Free On Dec. 6

VR Drawing Program ‘Quill’ Will Be Available Free On Dec. 6

A lot of corporations out there have picked up the annoying habit of charging for their products. Thank goodness Oculus is here to buck that trend. This week, the Facebook-owned virtual reality company is announcing that yet another launch title for its highly anticipated Touch platform will be completely free of charge.

Quill is a VR art experience that is being designed and released by the award winning team at Oculus Story Studio (Henry, Lost). In a blog post, the group revealed that the “illustrative storytelling” tool will be available as a beta “for free when Touch launches December 6.”

This means that Quill is the latest to join a growing list of Touch experiences offered free with pre-orders, including highly anticipated titles such as Dead and Buried, VR Sports Challenge and The Unspoken.

By making this type of content, and releasing it free of charge, the young company is betting big on its software’s ability to drive people toward its hardware. The company announced at OC3 that it had spent $250 million to help fund content for its platforms and that it planned to spend at least that much again in the future.

You get a free game! And YOU get a free game!

Quill itself was created out of the need at Oculus Story Studio for in-VR art tools while making its newest production: Dear Angelica. According to the company:

“Quill was born out of the creative needs of Dear Angelica’s Writer/Director Saschka Unseld and Art Director Wesley Allsbrook. The unique style and story of Dear Angelica required it to be painted and shaped entirely inside of VR, something that has never been attempted.

In October of 2015, during one of our 48-hour hack-a-thons, Inigo—the lead engineer on Dear Angelica and a mad genius with code—created the first version of what would eventually become Quill.”

Oculus Touch releases on December 6 at $199.

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Oculus’ Painting App Quill to Launch in Beta Alongside Touch

There’s just over three weeks to go until Oculus launches its motion controllers, Touch, onto the market. The company is lining up a strong selection of titles for the 6th December launch, with several free apps available. Back in August Oculus confirmed its sculpting software Medium would be shipping with them and now its also revealed painting app Quill will also be available in a beta form.

Quill was first unveiled back in January at The Sundance Film Festivals New Horizons festival, when Oculus Story Studios showcased its next project Dear Angelica. To create the experience the Oculus Story Studio team decided to build an internal production tool called Quill, allowing illustrators on the project to paint entire scenes in virtual reality (VR) with Oculus Rift and Oculus Touch. The technique was designed to give the artists complete freedom to create directly in VR bringing them away from the more traditional medium of pen and paper. The software allows artists to quickly and intuitively draw and create their ideas, from simple line drawings up to fully realised characters.

Quill - Wesley Allsbrook

Then during Oculus Connect 3 in October Quill was showcased again, promoting Dear Angelica which is set to feature at the next Sundance Film Festival next year. But Oculus never confirmed a public release of the software until now, pitting it against Google’s popular painting app Tilt Brush on HTC Vive.

As Oculus describes in a blog posting that Quill: “was born out of the creative needs of Dear Angelica’s Writer/Director Saschka Unseld and Art Director Wesley Allsbrook. The unique style and story of Dear Angelica required it to be painted and shaped entirely inside of VR.

“Quill was developed to let artists create and shape their artistic visions directly inside VR, no matter their stylistic preferences. For that to happen, Quill needed to be “unopinionated,” as Wesley puts it. “I, as the artist, want to have the opinions, so the last thing I would want is for my tool to have them.””

Oculus will be running a monthly artist feature on its Oculus Story Studio Facebook page, showing what can be achieved using the software.

VRFocus will continue its coverage of Oculus, reporting back with any further announcements.

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Oculus Story Studio Creative Director on ‘Quill’, an Immersive Storytelling Tool

saschka-unseldOculus Story Studio has been exploring VR storytelling through a series of short narrative experiences starting with Lost and Henry, but they wanted to push the envelope of immersive storytelling with their next short titled Dear Angelica. They developed a new content creation tool called Quill that enables artists using Touch to create immersive illustrations and animated stories entirely while being enveiled in VR. It was announced that it was going to be released sometime at the end of January when Dear Angelica premieres at Sundance.

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I had a chance to catch up with Saschka Unseld at Oculus Connect 3, who is the creative director of Oculus Story Studio as well as the writer and director of Dear Angelica, to talk about Quill and the intention behind their next cinematic VR experience.

Quill is like a mix between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe After Effects in that there are 2D vector brushes that have a bit of motion graphics flare. This gives the “quillustrations” their own distinct feeling that is very unique to the VR medium. It’s more like stepping into a surrealistic dream or through someone’s impressionistic memories that really come alive when you are co-present with them. There’s also a lot of dynamic movement as the environment and you watched characters drawn and constructed line by line.

Unseld says the studio’s intention with Quill was to create a ‘non-opinionated’ tool that feels more like the style of the artist that rather the tool. The closest analogy in the VR world is probably Tilt Brush, which also uses 2D vector-like brushes. But Tilt Brush takes a much more opinionated approach with their highly-stylized brushes, and so it’s often easier to tell that it’s a Tilt Brush creation rather than who the artist who created it.

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Artists Are Taking to 'Tilt Brush' with Incredible Results

The advantage of a tool like Tilt Brush is that it’s a lot easier for non-artists and casual creators to make something that feels amazing, just from the sheer joy of being able paint with light in 3D for the first time ever. But with Quill, it’s going to be a lot harder for non-trained artists to pick up the tool and feel like they’re the next Picasso. It’s more of a blank slate, and will require more of a learning curve for each artist to be able to fully express their style.

Oculus Story Studio has also been collaborating with comic book artists to be able to empower them to create immersive VR art, but also craft an entire story within VR using Quill’s storytelling engine. Dear Angelica is the first proper film/movie/VR narrative experience to be created with Quill, but it’ll be interesting to see more independent artists start to use the tools to craft the stories that they want to tell. Until then we’ll have to wait until Sundance in January before they release the tool more widely and start talking about other projects that are being created with it.

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The post Oculus Story Studio Creative Director on ‘Quill’, an Immersive Storytelling Tool appeared first on Road to VR.

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Dear Angelica Gets a Teaser Trailer and Will Release Along With the Quill Early Next Year

There is an ongoing tradition of Sundance Film Festival revealed by Oculus Story Studio, as in 2015 it was announced that the studio itself had started up, and then this year’s festival was the introduction of Dear Angelica using the Quill. Next Sundance Film Festival there will be the release of the short movie, along with the creation software.

Using the Oculus Touch controllers, which were revealed to be coming out by 6th December this year, the Quill is something similar to Oculus Medium, and this tool helped in the creation of Dear Angelica. Below you can see the teaser trailer for the title, which uses an incredibly dream-like atmosphere, and it is all described as an adventure. The news of its release came out during the Oculus Connect 3 event that ends tomorrow.

DearAngelica

For more on the latest releases and reveals from Oculus Connect 3, as well as all the news, updates, and features in the world of VR, make sure to check back with VRFocus.

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How Facebook’s ‘Quill’ Art Tool Differs From Medium And Tilt Brush [Hands-on]

How Facebook’s ‘Quill’ Art Tool Differs From Medium And Tilt Brush [Hands-on]

I was standing inside an illustration made with the art tool Quill from Facebook’s Oculus. My right hand was for painting and my left hand showed a tool panel with a nested list of objects representing everything in the scene. Using this list, I could select all or part of the illustration, with control over the scale of whatever is selected.

What this means is that if my illustration had a a road with a car driving on it and a person in the driver seat, I could use the same intuitive stretching gesture to resize all of these elements together, or the car and the person driving in it or just the person. If I want a life size road, I can do that. If I want a tiny little car, I can do that too. If I wanted to remove the driver — it’s as easy as grabbing him. This layering system also lets artists modify — like for coloring — only a single part of the overall illustration.

We spoke this week to Oculus Story Studio creative director Saschka Unseld about the differences between Quill and Google’s Tilt Brush, as well as from the Medium creation software, which is also from Oculus but has been in development for a longer period of time.

While Medium is used to sculpt and mold virtual objects into shape, according to Unseld, “the most successful things in Quill are loose, like there is the illusion of volume but it is is still an illustration.” The goal with Quill is to offer a tool that lets artists express themselves without feeling constrained.

Google’s Tilt Brush is perhaps the most well-known HTC Vive app, and Unseld noted “what makes Tilt Brush so incredibly fun is you have a line with sparkles, or it glows or it’s neon. But what if I don’t want my line to glow?” According to Unseld, Quill differs from Tilt Brush in that its brushes lacks these extra “effects.”

“I never ever ideally want people to be like, oh, this was made in Quill,” he said. “This doesn’t have a look, you can do whatever you want in there.”

Quill has been in development since late last year and Oculus built it in tandem with the newest Dear Angelica project from Oculus Story Studio. Both Quill and Dear Angelica should be releasing in early 2017, around the Sundance Film Festival.