Virtual reality (VR) headset aren’t just great for playing videogames on they’re also good for getting creative. When Oculus Touch launched towards the end of 2016 two design apps were given away free of charge Oculus Quill; designed more towards illustration and Oculus Medium; a sculpting app, Today, Oculus Medium has received a major update, bringing a bunch of new features with it.
The Oculus Medium 2.0 update has tried to address many of the community’s feedback for the app including increased layer limit, grid snapping, and multiple lights.
“I’m super excited for this release because we’ve added a lot of features our community have been asking for—more flexible scene management, better memory and performance, and more sculpting precision, just to name a few of the larger themes of this release,” says Technical Art Director Lydia Choy in a statement. “Lots of our underlying systems have been rearchitected, which sets us up to build some powerful features in future releases as well.”
Having introduced support for importing user-generated content to decorate Oculus Home in Rift Core 2.0 only last week, today’s update goes one further by allowing sculptors to export their VR designs directly into their Home inventory.
The 2.0 update has been designed to help both advanced and beginner users alike. For those well versed in Oculus Medium there’s a new file management system, scene graph, and a major UI facelift that sholud make for faster and more intuitive navigation of Medium’s tools, settings, and options. And for novices there are new tutorials to help them adopt the new tools like Layer Resolution Visualization and the Elastic Move tool.
The performance of Oculus Medium has been increased to improve rendering: “I’m especially excited about the new rendering engine under the hood of Medium,” notes Graphics Engineer David Farrell. “We rewrote the renderer to use Vulkan, which lets us more directly control the GPU, leading to smoother frame rates and better memory management for higher resolution sculpts. Plus, you can now have up to 100 layers!”
It seems as though this week has seen a push towards those designing in VR as Google Tilt Brush saw a sizable update rollout. For any further announcements regarding Oculus Medium, keep reading VRFocus.