Category: VR Art

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Grab Your Pencil For Art Lessons On Quest With Touch Plus Or Pro Controller

You’ve got your headset, now don’t forget your No. 2 pencil for art lessons.

Pencil! is a new app in early development that offers art lessons for Meta Quest headsets using a regular piece of paper.

You'll use a Quest with tracked Touch Plus or Touch Pro controller as a paperweight then draw in passthrough on the thin piece of paper it holds in place. In headset, you’ll see an outline on the paper to trace, an idea which won PencilXR a recent Meta Presence Platform Hackathon.

Quest Apps Can Now Use Hands & Some Controllers Simultaneously
Quest Store & App Lab apps can now use hand tracking + Quest 3 or Quest Pro controllers simultaneously, a feature called Multimodal.
UploadVRDavid Heaney

Developers of the app tell UploadVR they see it as aimed at helping people learn to draw with physical paper and pencil. The aim of the app's art lessons point toward helping people who might be intimidated by the idea of drawing find "a fun space to learn the fundamentals."

I asked Don Hopper to take a quick look at it on his Quest 3.

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The video embedded above shows Don going through the first few minutes of the app as it appears at the time of this writing. It is likely to change quite a bit in upcoming releases and there are some bug fixes planned to go out shortly after publication of this post.

To try out the demo in early access, there's an active Discord group you should join. People are already sharing creations they've made with the app in there. Pencil! should work with the Quest 2 and Touch Pro controllers, but it's "not the ideal".

While we're waiting to see if Apple connects the new Pencil Pro to Vision Pro, we'll be curious to see if more interesting ideas like this pop up for more traditional art creation and education in VR and AR.

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VR Creation Tool ‘Masterpiece X’ Comes to Quest 2 for Free

Masterpiece Studio, the developers behind the titular PC VR creative suite, released a new version of its software built natively for Quest 2, something its creators hope will appeal to people looking for an easy way to make models, avatars, and other 3D assets.

Called Masterpiece X, the free creation tool is now live on the Quest platform, bringing with it the ability to remix existing models and make it your own through “a more playful and fluid workflow: 3D remixing, which is the process of creating new content by modifying old content,” explains studio founder Jonathan Gagne in a Meta blog post.

The developers say Masterpiece X hopes to target the hobbyist creator market by offering people an easy-to-use app that lowers historic barriers of entry.

“Traditionally, 3D creation has been an extremely complex and technical topic,” says Masterpiece Studio Designer Polina Berseneva. “That’s why so many traditional tools are so challenging for beginners—there’s just so much to learn.”

Here’s how the studio describes Masterpiece X:

  • remix any part of your model – from mesh to texturing, rigging, and animation
  • find free-to-use models in the community library (or import or generate your own – coming soon!)
  • export your model to your game, virtual world, or creative project, and
  • share it with our community to inspire & help others!

The studio says Masterpiece X isn’t targeted at experienced 3D modelers, animators, or creators looking for a tool to build assets from scratch instead of remixing, as the app emphasizes ease of use over complexity.

You can find Masterpiece X is available for free on Quest 2 and Quest Pro.

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Digital Artist Behind Iconic PS5 Campaign Launches Evolving VR Art Gallery

You might not recognize the name Maxim Zhestkov, but if you paid any attention to the launch of PlayStation 5, you’ll almost certainly recognize his iconic digital art which accompanied the reveal of the console. Now Zhestkov has launched a virtual gallery that he says will feature and ever-growing collection of his digital works.

Maxim Zhestkov is the artist behind the satisfying swarm of particles that that accompanied the reveal of PS5 back in 2020.

Much of Zhestkov’s work similarly employs space, motion, shapes, and sound, which makes virtual reality the perfect medium for others to experience it.

To that end Zhestkov has released a new VR experience called Modules, a virtual gallery where he’s shared 11 different works which users can explore at their own pace and from any angle, complete with artist commentary on each piece.

Modules is rendered in real-time and available on both Quest headsets and PC VR (as well as non-VR via Steam). Ironically, despite Zhestkov’s work on the PS5 reveal, the project isn’t available on PSVR 2.

Zhestkov says that Modules will “expand to contain [my] entire body of work.”

One of the scenes in ‘Modules’ | Image courtesy Maxim Zhestkov

“Over the course of years, the project will grow as the artist grows, expanding into new territories and blurring the boundaries between art, games, and reality,” he says.

The project’s website contains a roadmap of future expansions, with an ‘Interactive’ segment coming in Fall 2023, followed by ‘Collaborative’ and ‘Creative’ segments next year.

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Vermillion Overlay Mode Lets You Paint Directly In Half-Life: Alyx

VR painting app Vermillion launched a beta for a new overlay mode this week, allowing you to paint with Vermillion’s easel in other SteamVR apps like Half-Life: Alyx or Skyrim VR.

Although it’s still in beta, opting into the overlay mode lets you bring Vermillion’s core tools into another app, which you can use for inspiration or reference when painting. The video embedded above, from Elizabeth Edwards, is a fantastic example of how the feature works – you can watch Edwards paint a portrait of Russell from Half-Life: Alyx in situ, just like you would in real life.

While Vermillion is available on multiple VR platforms, this beta overlay feature is only available on SteamVR for the moment and, as you can imagine, requires a fairly beefy PC setup. The feature isn’t limited to Half-Life: Alyx either; you should be able to use it with any VR-supported title on Steam.

Thomas van den Berge, Vermillion’s sole developer, noted that the overlay feature wouldn’t currently work natively on Quest, as the system can’t handle two games running simultaneously. That being said, Quest users with a PC VR setup will of course be able to try it out over Link.

You can opt into the overlay beta by right clicking on Vermillion in your Steam library and selecting Betas, then ‘overlay’. You’ll have to opt out of the beta to go back to the standard Vermillion studio.

Vermillion launched in 2021 for PC VR and early 2022 for Quest. Last December, it also added support for multiplayer, which allows multiple users to gather in a room and paint together in VR. You can read our interview with van den Berge from 2021 here, where he talks about how Vermillion brings accessible and realistic oil painting into VR.

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Magic: The Gathering VR Art Exhibition Launching This Week

A virtual exhibit showcasing the art of Magic: The Gathering is coming to VR this week.

The exhibit will run from Feburary 18 – 24 via xambr, the social VR platform that hosted the virtual version of last year’s Tokyo Game Show. As you’d expect, the event will allow you to explore the art of the popular card game with others. The event is being hosted in conjunction with the game’s latest launch for the Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty set.

Magic: The Gathering VR Art

The exhibit will include works from 83 different artists including Fist of the North Star’s Tetsuo Hara and Kojima Productions art director, Yoji Shinkawa, and you’ll be able to pick work up and inspect it in detail. You’ll be exploring a themed environment based on concept art from the new set. There will also be behind-the-scenes looks at the work going on at Magic creator, Wizards of the Coast.

The event kicks off at 10am Japan time and will be available on Quest 2 and PC VR. The Quest 2 app is likely to be available through App Lab as with last year’s Tokyo Game Show app, and you’ll also be able to play in flat screen on PC. You’ll be able to follow links to download from here.

We thought the TGS app was a solid effort that needed more activities for people to take part in. This experience might not let us play Magic itself in VR, but hopefully the focus on art will give fans a meaningful experience.

Will you be heading into the Magic: The Gathering art exhibit? Let us know in the comments below!

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Open Brush Shares Footage Of Quest AR Passthrough Mode, Coming Soon

Open Brush shared footage of the upcoming AR passthrough mode, coming soon to the app on all platforms.

As you can see in the video above, the new mode will let you use Tilt Brush in your real environment in Passthrough mode, acting as a halfway point between VR and true AR.

Support will be made possible with Open Brush’s transition over to OpenXR, which the team is putting the “finishing touches” on at the moment. The video above was captured using Passthrough on Quest, but OpenBrush confirmed that the mode will be supported on other platforms as well.

OpenBrush is a free, community-developed continuation of Google’s Tilt Brush art software for VR, which Google ceased development on and made open source in early 2021. Open Brush received consistent updates since launch, driven entirely by the community, adding new features, brushes and modes to the app that go beyond the original functionality and scope of Google’s Tilt Brush release. The latest 1.0 update added snapping, grid functionality, brush jitter controls and a new lazy input feature, to name a few.

While the official and now discontinued Google version of Trust Brush remains available for $19.99 on the Oculus Store, Quest users can download Open Brush entirely for free via App Lab for Quest, with more features than you would get in the paid version. Open Brush says the app will remain free, even with all the new features planned for the future.

Will you be trying out Passthrough mode on Open Brush? Let us know what you think in the comments.

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This Pioneering Fractal Artist is Returning to VR with a New Album Soon

It’s been a while since we last wrote about Julius Horsthuis, a visual effects artist who authored a series of fractal 360 videos for VR which are simply mind-blowing—both now and back in the good ol’ days of the Oculus Rift DK2 when we first experienced them. Now the Dutch artist announced a new album is coming to VR headsets sometime this year that’s slated to throw us head-first back into his contemplative fractal worlds.

Called ‘Recombinaton’, the VR album is set to fractal visuals created in Mandelbulb3D—par for the course with Horsthuis’ pareidolia-inducing creations that recall alien worlds, life, the universe, and everything.

The experience isn’t real-time rendered—that simply wouldn’t be possible given the level of detail. Instead, it’s been pre-rendered and captured in 180-degree, stereoscopic 3D video, which features 4,096 × 4,096 pixels per-eye at 60fps.

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Image courtesy Julius Horsthuis
Image courtesy Julius Horsthuis
Image courtesy Julius Horsthuis

Back when Horsthuis announced the project in December, he said it was taking “a hell of a long time to render,” which is no surprise considering the level of detail and overall length. Recombination is set to be his longest VR experiences to date, clocking in at “well over 30 minutes.”

But what does it all mean? Horsthuis says Recombination explores “various themes in Physics, Math and Biology.” We’ll just have to wait find out more than that, it seems.

Horsthuis published his first fractal video back in December 2013, however we’re more familiar with Foreign Nature from 2015, which was his first 360 fractal video made especially for VR headsets. Since then, Horsthuis has published nine VR shorts, ranging from five to ten minutes.

There’s no firm release date yet on Recombination—just “2022”. In the meantime we’ll be keeping eyes glued on the artists YouTube channel and Twitter.

The post This Pioneering Fractal Artist is Returning to VR with a New Album Soon appeared first on Road to VR.

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These Are The VR Projects Heading To Sundance 2022

The lineup for next year’s Sundance Film Festival was announced this week and 10 VR projects made the cut.

All of the VR content is, as usual, included as part of the festival’s New Frontier selection. There’s 15 total projects in the selection this year, with 10 specifically for VR — an increase from this year’s 7 out of 14 New Frontier projects.

It’s a varied selection, a mix of in-person, online, live and on-demand events, presented across many different forms of VR content.

Projects like Flat Earth VR (by Where Thoughts Go developer Lucas Rizzotto), pictured above, will enter the realm of VR satire, immersing you in the quest of a flat earther to travel to space and prove the haters wrong by taking a picture of our pancake planet.

Meanwhile projects like Suga’, Cosmogony and Gondwana will err into live performance territory, each offering an experience that is either live, dynamic or time-dependent in some way.

Gondwana, pictured below, places you in the Daintree rain forest in the middle of a 24-hour sequence that repeats through the duration of the festival. Every 14 minutes, time jumps forward a year and highlights existing and future degradation brought on by climate change and climate data projections. It’s a dynamic experience wherein the more people who take part in Gondwana, the more the forest becomes resilient.

After this year’s Sundance Festival back in February, we wrote a bit about the selection as a whole and what it represents for the immersive VR media landscape:

My takeaway from this year’s selection reaches an all-too-familiar conclusion; wondrous potential, genuine enthusiasm and arresting innovation are at war with budget constraints, technical proficiency and films that, frankly, don’t need to be in VR.

We rounded off our summary by remaining optimistic that a future selection might see creators tap into meatier opportunities and experiences that set the VR medium apart from the pack. Could 2022 be the year? We’ll have to wait and see.

You can read more about next year’s schedule over at the Sundance Festival site.

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Free Version of ‘Masterpiece Studio Pro’ VR Creation Suite Now Available for Non-commercial Use

Masterpiece Studio (formerly MasterpieceVR) today announced it’s releasing a free edition of its latest professional VR creator suite, Masterpiece Studio Pro. The free software license is targeting individuals looking to use the suite for non-commercial use.

The free version is said to contain the entire set of features of Masterpiece Studio Pro, which is a subscription-based service aimed at freelancers, teams, and educators using its creation tools for work.

Like its original 2019-era Masterpiece Studio, Masterpiece Studio Pro lets users create 3D assets within VR, letting you use motion controllers to draw, sculpt, texture, optimize, rig, skin, and animate things like characters or objects. The Pro version was launched back in April 2021.

Image courtesy Masterpiece Studio

One of the biggest caveats with the original was the inability to export models, which was a feature only paying users could access. That’s still a thing with the free version of Pro, although the studio has now created a public library where creations can be published and viewed.

“We believe this Free version will help showcase your work, bring value to other creatives, and help build the creative community of the future,” the studio says on its Steam page.

The Ontario, Canada-based startup is pitching the free license as a way to support VR indie creators by not only letting them learn the ropes of their software for free, but also by establishing a way to share and remix those publicly shared creations. You can find it on PC VR headsets for free over at Steam and Viveport.

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Facebook Spins Out the Excellent ‘Quill’ VR Animation App, Open-sources File Format

Quill is a brilliant VR drawing and animation app originally born within the now shuttered Oculus Story Studio. The app continued on after the group’s closure, but with seemingly few long term plans for the app, Facebook has decided to spin it out by handing ownership over to its original creator. As part of the transition, Quill’s proprietary file format is being open-sourced.

In the early days of Oculus the company started internal groups like Oculus Story Studio which was tasked with exploring cinema through the lens of VR. One of the films the group released was Dear Angelica (2017), which was played back in real-time with a unique painterly look. That VR film was made possible by an internal tool that allowed artists to use VR headsets and controllers to draw and animated in 3D. Eventually Oculus moved to release the tool to the general public for VR drawing and animation; that’s the short story of how Quill came to be.

Quill uniquely combines the artistry of hand-drawing and hand-animation with the benefits of CGI, enabling some seriously beautiful works of VR cinema.

That’s why it’s something of a shame that Facebook has announced it’s giving up on the app. Seemingly uninterested in any long-term play with the brilliant tool, the company is handing off ownership.

But only time will tell if this is an end or a new beginning. Thankfully Facebook opted to give Quill away to its original creator—Iñigo Quilez and his company Smoothstep—which will maintain the app going forward. The app will continue to be available on Rift under the name Quill by Smoothstep. The Quill Theater viewer app on Quest will continue to be available but generically rebranded as VR Animation Viewer.

While Smoothstep hasn’t said much in the way of its long-term plans, the hand-off from Facebook came the same day as a new patch for Quill, version 2.9, which made some small improvements and fixes.

Seemingly in an effort to unbind Quill from its proprietary nature, the hand-off has also brought an open-source version of Quill’s unique file format called IMM. Facebook says it hopes the move will bring an “expanded creator and audience ecosystem for VR animation.”

Indeed, one of Quill’s key challenges was distribution. Unlike making a flat film which can easily be viewer via built-in players on literally billions of devices, the proprietary nature of Quill has meant that native playback of the artwork is ‘stuck’ on Oculus headsets only. The only other approach is exporting to a more interoperable format and then use other tools to render and distribute your project.

Now that IMM has been open-sourced, it should be possible for people to build IMM players for more devices, which could mean more wider distribution. We’d love to see a version built with WebXR so that Quill works could be seen easily by a wider range of devices from VR headsets to smartphones. With the open-source format, it’s also possible that other VR artwork tools could support exporting to IMM.

With Quill in the hands of Smoothstep, the app could also overcome another issue: platform exclusivity. Because Quill was made by Oculus, there was little hope that we’d ever see a version for other VR platforms, like PSVR or SteamVR. With the app now owned by an independent company, that might be a real possibility for the future, which would give more artists access to this excellent tool.

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The path of Quill is strikingly similar to what happend with another VR art tool that was also started at Oculus, Medium. Apparently not interested in any long-term plans with the tool, Facebook opted to sell off the project to Adobe, which has recently incorporated it into its latest 3D creation tools.

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