3D Sculpting in VR

I feel lucky to have a friend who owns an Oculus Rift so I can experiment with this cutting edge VR technology. Ever since he purchased the marvelous device to edit movies in 360°, he has been eager to have me over for a game of Beat Sabre or Robo Recall and it’s been an absolute blast to be transported by the goggles. Beat Sabre is a similar game to guitar hero except that you are slashing blocks to the beat left and right, it is exhilarating and makes me feel like I am training to become a martial artist in a way. What I like the most about the first person shooter Robo Recall, is how dynamic it is to shoot the AI opponents all around you. You feel like a badass stretching your arms in all directions as you take aim looking towards only one of two targets you hope to destroy.

The default difficulty level is slow, making it an excellent game to get used to the VR environment as you teleport with one joystick and decide where to face with the other. You simply cannot walk without a mod. This system is surprisingly intuitive and helps to deal with the cord which can start wrapping around you if you’re not careful.

While the more difficult levels are wild, it is the objectives themselves that make the last few accomplishments so difficult, like protecting a computer which can’t be touched even once. The foes only speed up so much to allow the player to deal with swarms of them. This is what my friend said after hours of practice.

While both these games result in activity that is a far cry from a high intensity interval workout, they are excellent motivators to have fun while moving, getting the heart pumping. I particularly like how you need to squat in Beat Sabre to avoid a horizontal block.

Even more interesting to me than the games is the possibility to sculpt and paint in 3D. I tried to understand as much about an app called Medium as I could, by trying out the menus.

To create this bird, I used the right hand side touch controller to squirt clay in mid air like soft served ice cream. After this, I used the move option to stretch the clay into the long ribbons that you see here. The combination of crisp dance moves while stretching the clay and the act of sculpting is extremely potent. Normally sculpting takes time and an effortless work of art can be everything but to make. This bird took me about 30 minutes to both sculpt and paint. The material glides like charcoal on Manila paper except in 3D.

You can bring the art towards you, push it away and rotate it in an intuitive manner. So long as you are working on a single layer, there is not too much to think about but create. It was interesting to see the spray paint go trough the object, what an economy of energy in order to paint all the creases! However, I would have liked to see a mode with a collision script to paint surfaces. I doubt that it’s in there because the software was already lagging from the data intensive activity of my artistic expression.

I do love the curious artifacts that appear when stretching the clay but I also find them limiting. I am talking about the archipelagos floating at tips of my ribbons. The smooth tool is sub par, you can tell when it cleans up all but a few of these floating bits. If you tried to use it to create a sharp, blade-like edge to one of my ribbons, you would fail for lack of precision.

Still, not bad for a first gen VR art application.

I imported some preset sculptures into another project. A skull and a T-Rex and I could not find out how to paint them, I could only paint the clay thing I made. That was the most frustrating part.

I was proud of myself for making some sense of the layers and menues; how to add lighting too! It gave me a sense of what art galleries will be like in the future. By the end, I was naturally overwhelmed, there is a lot of potential but it will also birth an army of artists all competing for the same premium virtual gallery just as how things are set up now in the real world.

Not easy being an artist but it is also a lot of fun;)