Welcome art lovers. Pull up a chair. Have some wine, some cheese and please don’t forget to roll your eyes whenever you hear someone say “Oh come on that’s not art! I could do that.”
Of course this art gallery is merely digital so all of the wine drinking, cheese consuming and philistine mocking must be done from the comforts of your own home or, more likely for art lovers, a coffee shop with free wifi.
This is UploadVR’s weekly virtual reality art roundup. Our chance to look back on the last seven days of creativity and select some truly outstanding pieces to share with all of you. Sketchfab lets us embed these pieces below so you can zoom, drag and swipe around these works to see them from every angle.
The VR art scene is on the rise thanks to creators like these. There are more awesome tools for immersive creation now than we ever thought would be possible just a year or two ago. Who would have thought that a boxer, a bird, a robot and an alien would be created in three dimensions using only your hands, your hardware and two big scoops of imagination. What a time to be alive.
Are you a VR artist? Why not share your creations with us at tips@uploadvr.com, on Facebook at UploadVR or on Twitter @Uploadvr? You just might see your work featured here next week!
For those creative types who own HTC Vive or Oculus Touch, there’s several design apps available for the respective headsets. These include Google Tilt Brush and Kingspray Graffiti VR for the former, with Medium and Quill for the latter. There’s also Modbox and SculptrVR which support both. Arriving this week is another 3D design tool aimed at creating models, scenes, and art work on either head-mounted display (HMD), Gravity Sketch.
The app is set to launch tomorrow through Steam Early Access with a set of core features in place:
Create free 3D strokes and straight-line strokes
Create revolved surfaces
Create planar surfaces
Sketch on surfaces
Copy and Paste an existing stroke or group of strokes
Change color of existing stroke or group of strokes
Symmetry
Scale up and down the entire sketch as well as individual strokes or group of strokes.
Import 3D models and manipulate
Take your creations out of our app as an .OBJ
While the Gravity Sketch team has already trialed the software with hundreds of users prior to early access – checkout Sketchfab for examples – this will be the first time the VR version of Gravity Sketch will be available publicly, there is an iOS version as well.
The studio doesn’t have a set time planned for Gravity Sketch to be in early access, but depending on feedback from users the team does have several ideas it could work on, including: 3D Grid,
Boolean Operations, Curved Surface Tool, Precision Tools (Measurements), Loft Feature, Expanded Material Library, Audio Feedback, Video Recording and a 3D Print Mode.
Gravity Sketch began as a group project between four Innovation Design Engineering students of the Royal College of Art in 2013.This idea then grew into Gravity Sketch Ltd, a company co-founded by Daniela Paredes Fuentes and Oluwaseyi Sosanya, with Daniel Thomas as Lead Developer.
For any further updates to Gravity Sketch, keep reading VRFocus.
As someone with no ability to create art I am always amazed by those that can. Virtual reality is giving artists a brand new platform in which to create and the results are often nothing short of breathtaking. This week in our weekly VR art roundup we have plenty to take the O2 out of your lungs, but let’s start with one of the most incredible sculptures we’ve ever seen, VR or otherwise.
Everyone feels, but it takes practice to translate those emotions into coherent words, and even more practice to do it on the spot. Conversely, while most people can think in 3D, not everyone can convert those thoughts onto a 2D page. But with the rise of virtual reality art, we won’t have to translate as much anymore. Five months ago I decided to make my art completely in VR, and now I can stand inside of these vast environments I’m building faster than I imagined. My audience no longer needs to guess how my sci-fi worlds would feel if they were real. I can just transport them there.
I often hear the phrase, “Sorry, I’m not an artist,” at group meetings which involve a whiteboard and stick figures, and that doesn’t surprise me. Art of any kind is hard to produce without practice, you either have to know how to manipulate matter while physics works against you, or you have to understand the technical details about perspective and shading. Digital applications like Maya, Zbrush, and Photoshop have made the job easier, but their interfaces are too complicated for a regular consumer to pick up quickly. We will always have master-level creatives, but new virtual reality apps are making it more intuitive for anyone to make art with a level of professionalism that just wasn’t possible without hours of training.
This guide is to help you understand which apps work best for certain projects, and how they could work together in order to create experiences that we haven’t imagined yet.
If you’re interested in joining the VR art community, I want to help. Google, Oculus, and Adobe are without a doubt anticipating 2017 to be a big year for VR art, and probably have a few surprises in store for us. But what’s available now, and what can those applications achieve? Better yet, how can these apps work together? I’ve been importing Gravity Sketch sculpts into Tilt Brush to add atmospherics and effects, while other artists like Steve Teeple have been building workflows between between Oculus Medium and Tilt Brush. There’s a lot of room for innovation right now, what could you come up with?
These are the top design apps. Let’s look at what they excel at, what they’re lacking, and what they could learn from each other.
Tilt Brush
Tilt Brush, created by Skillman & Hackett then acquired by Google, is a virtual reality drawing application where you use your whole body to paint in three dimensions. It’s designed to be accessible by everyone, and yet it’s feature set has enabled me to create self contained worlds for companies like Marvel. It is available on both the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift through Steam. This is a breakdown of it.
THE PROS
A Sense of Environment and Presence
When you first launch into Tilt Brush, you’ll find yourself standing on a floor in a dark environment. You always have the option to switch to a blank canvas, but the floor helps ground your understanding of scale and world location. While you can scale your scene like other applications, the world’s vertical rotation is locked, so you’ll always have an intuitive understanding of what is up and down. This locked rotation feature is the main thing I find myself needing with the other design apps. That said, I wish Tilt Brush included an option to unlock rotation so drawing on the underside of things would be easier.
The shadows created by the shaded brushes help to initially sketch out a scene without being confused about the way a stroke is facing, or how far away it is from you. I prefer to use flat brushes to create my own shading, although it’s critical for beginners to have access to shaded brushes so they don’t need to worry about creating their own shadows. This extra worry is one of the biggest problems people have when attempting to make 2D art. Here’s a pre-production comparison between Tilt Brush’s shaded brushes and Quill’s shadeless counterpart.
Teleportation
Tilt Brush is currently the only professional design application that grants you the ability to teleport, so if you’re designing a game level or movie set, you can easily preview your world from multiple perspectives without losing your prefered world scale or rotation. This also allows you to make your Tilt Brush creation a self-contained VR experience, like Stu Campbell, Steve Teeple, and I did for Marvel’s Dr. Strange.
Guides, Symmetry, and 2D Drawing
Guides are like 3D rulers which allow you to draw on a two-dimensional plane. You have the option of using a square, sphere, or capsule guide that can scale non-uniformly, and then place them anywhere in your scene. This makes it much easier to add details on walls, create textured floors, or to just create any kind of 2D art. Here’s an example of a wooden bridge I made for a mixed reality video by using the square guide.
When it comes to angular precision, you can also snap straight lines to a 90 or 45 degree angle relative to the world, which makes creating buildings and maps easier when coupled with guides. Tilt Brush also comes with a symmetry tool that you can grab and place anywhere around you, which makes creating characters and vehicles a lot easier. The experience of seeing a ghost brush copying your arms movement is pretty mind blowing as well.
Special Effect Brushes
Tilt Brush comes pre-loaded with 36 brushes that can really make your scene pop. For example, there’s a particles brush that emulates snow falling, a light brush that can symbolize what aspects of your scene will be glowing, and a fire brush that could represent explosions. While I personally only use about 10 brushes for most of my art, it’s extremely convenient to have the options available.
Overall, the brush selection just makes Tilt Brush fun. It’s a great way to get people into making art. You can start with the silly brushes, and then work your way up to using the program more seriously. Sometimes I just want to play and create a lot of effects to see what happens.
Tilt Brush is positioned as a key application in the virtual reality ecosystem. Not just by the virtue of its early timing, Tilt Brush remains a high quality and ever evolving tool for those wishing to create in virtual spaces. With such a status, it makes sense that any new program even slightly resembling it sparks comparison in a discussion. Gravity Sketch is the latest to fall under the microscope within the 3D design arena. It’s is a creation tool that simplifies 3D design for objects, scenes, and more and Oluwaseyi Sosanya, the co-founder of Gravity Sketch, spoke with us in-depth about the tool and the development team’s goals for it.
Illustrator vs. Photoshop
Immediately Sosanya broke down the easy comparison to Tilt Brush, using popular Adobe software as an analogy. “If we’re looking at it for face value today you can kind of look at Tilt Brush as Photoshop and we’re Adobe Illustrator,” he says. “We were not trying to create these majestic scenes in VR. We’re actually trying to fit in with existing workflows for designers, architects, and concept artists.”
Essentially, while Photoshop is great at creating photo-realistic images, Illustrator lays the foundation for different interfaces. With this same idea, the Gravity Sketch developers believe this new experience aligns with Tilt Brush as a companion rather than competing against it. Sosanya says he’s even witnessed instances where objects were designed in Gravity Sketch and then exported to Tilt Brush to dress them up.
What makes Gravity Sketch an efficient 3D design tool comes down to its ease-of-use. You draw as easily as sketching on a piece of paper and it produces 3D models with thickness and volume that you can scale and modify freely in a virtual space. These models can then be introduced seamlessly to a CAD platform for more in-depth design and drafting, or even used for 3D printing.
“There are some great tools out there like SketchUp and Blender which are kind of making it really easy and natural for people to kind of get in,” Sosanya explains. “But the vocabulary requirements and the kind of mathematics behind operating within the software is really challenging especially for kind of non-literary thinkers.” Gravity Sketch is a tool for creators that think spatially, so the app removes a lot of the text and numbers from the interface, approaching with a “show” over “tell” design. For example, the program’s 3D interface does a good job of showing exactly what a tool will do when selected as opposed to drop-downs of text explaining them. It’s a stripped-down and clean UI that is even available in the iPad version of the application.
“Part of our mission is not just about creating an awesome tool but it’s also starting to be one of the early people that lay the foundation for how interaction should happen in 3D,” Sosanya proclaims. “Even from our interface we want to make a statement. We want to actually start to pave way for the future and we do hope that people take inspiration from us.”
In March of this year, the 4-person team released a limited Beta for iPad and have been making adjustments with user feedback in anticipation of the VR release. They’ve got a few people involved in the VR early access version as well. They’re targeting January for launch. It will be coming to the HTC Vive first with Oculus Rift and Touch implementation soon after, so it won’t be long before we see if the developers’ mission comes to life.
