How to Become a VR Artist

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Virtual reality is opening new ways how artists can express their vision without having to spend long hours fighting confusing desktop applications or learning the basic principles of composition and perspective. This guide takes a close look at several popular design applications for VR, exposing their main features, advantages and disadvantages, and where they could possibly improve in the future.

Tilt Brush

First released on April 5, 2016, and currently developed and published by Google, Tilt Brush is likely the most well-known room-scale 3D painting virtual reality application on the market today. Tilt Brush is available on Steam for the HTC Vive, and the application is designed to be accessible to everyone.

It immerses users in a dark environment with a clearly visible floor, which helps with the perception of scale. To prevent confusion, this virtual world cannot be vertically rotated. This limitation is offset the ability to instantly teleport to any location. By jumping to various locations, artists can see their creations from multiple perspectives without losing their preferred scale or rotation.

Tilt Brush include several tools for drawing on a two-dimensional plane, such as 3D rules, the ability to snap straight lines to a 90- or a 45-degree angle, and a handy symmetry tool for easy character and world creation. Thanks to the sizable collection of 36 effect brushes, it's very easy to add particle or effects to the scene.

Because Tilt Brush is designed with casual users in mind, it doesn't support multiple layers, so everything you create is located on the same layer, and you cannot easily go back and delete individual strokes.

Quill

Created by Story Studio for the Oculus Rift, Quill is a VR illustration tool built to empower artists and creators, whether to create final art or as a concept creation aid. [1] Unlike Tilt Brush, Quill's target audience are professionals in the entertainment industry.

As such, it comes with many powerful features that make painting in virtual reality much easier. The most important feature is the ability to paint in virtual reality on an infinitely scalable canvas. Artists can effortlessly create huge megastructures and then zoom in and focus on tiny details. When leveraged to its full potential, it allows artists such as Goro Fujita to add an insane amount of detail on every level, as illustrated in his recent creation titled "Worlds in Worlds".

Quill's layer system is very similar to that found in Photoshop, a popular raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Systems. What's more, Quill can import photos while retaining their alpha channel and thus preserving transparency.

Oculus Medium

Oculus Medium is an immersive VR experience that lets you sculpt, model, paint, and create tangible objects in a VR environment.[2] This approach is very different from Tilt Brush and Quill and much more similar to traditional sculpting applications which professionals are used to, like Pixologic’s Zbrush and Autodesk’s Mudbox.

Sculpting in Oculus Medium is done with a sizable collection of sculpting tools and Touch controllers, which enable authentic hand gestures and movement for a natural, tactile experience. The sculpture can then be painted on in 2D, allowing artists to to achieve an unprecedented level of color realism.

Medium supports up to 20 layers and as high polygon density as your GPU can process. The extensive support for layers is especially useful in conjunction with the ability to customize materials. Currently, artists have the option to choose a default, metal, and emissive material then customize sliders that affect the material’s reflectivity, diffuse color, and more.

Gravity Sketch

Compatible with the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift, Gravity Sketch is an intuitive 3D creation tool that empowers users to create amazing 3D models, scenes, and artwork in a fun and intuitive way.[3]

Whereas all previous apps are developed by relatively large companies, Gravity Sketch is an independent company that focuses on innovation. With Gravity Sketch, it's very easy to create complex patterns. The application allows artists to draw a single stroke, and then have that stroke be instantly replicated 1-9 times in a circle. This can be used to create interesting fractal patterns or highly detailed symmetrical buildings.

Gravity Sketch doesn't have a traditional undo button. Instead, users spin a dial to go back in time. As such, the undo feature in Gravity Sketch is also useful for quick comparisons with previous versions.

References

  1. https://www.oculus.com/experiences/rift/1118609381580656/
  2. https://www.oculus.com/medium/
  3. http://store.steampowered.com/app/551370/