Forward: Creative Blind Spots
I’ve always prized creativity. As a developer, writer and musician, it’s what drives me. But as much as I value creativity in my work and free time, I have to confess I’ve never really felt compelled to make visual art. That’s not to say I don’t apply a design eye in my web work or that I don’t have opinions about style — it’s just that my creativity manifests in other ways. I considered this a blind spot and never felt inspired to develop those skills.
That was true until a few weeks ago, when I got my hands on a new class of virtual reality 3D creation tools including Google Blocks, Google Tilt Brush, Oculus Medium, Oculus Quill, et al. Each in its own way, these apps try to fundamentally change the process of 3D art and asset creation — modeling, sculpting, painting, etc. — moving away from two-dimensional computer screens and into room-scale three-dimensional VR space. Even in their infancy, their version 1.x states, these tools have already inspired me to think and work and create in entirely new ways.
The Old Way & The New
To contrast, think about 3D content creation happening on a standard 2D computer monitor. The simplest task, like rotating your subject, requires knowledge of a labyrinthine software suite and its many unique series of hotkeys, scrolls, mouse clicks, drags and so on (to say nothing of more complex modeling and sculpting tasks/techniques).
In new VR creation tools like my personal favorites, Google’s Blocks and Tilt Brush, you can literally step around what you’re working on, or reach out and grab it, physically manipulating and scaling objects effortlessly in real-time. It’s a revelation — a quick trailer:
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BB-8 rides again!
I’m happy to say I’ll be presenting on this topic at the St. Louis VR/AR Association on August 23 to help spread the word about these tools and XR in general. There’s a great deal of interest in XR in the Midwest, but also skepticism and inexperience. It’s my aim to change that insofar as I am able.
Conclusions
To be able to work with Google Blocks at such an early stage feels like a privilege. I can see this tool and others like it really coming into their own in the next few years and completely redefining 3D creation workflow as we’ve known it.
Masters of the old way — 3D workflow on 2D screens — will be remiss to give up their finely tuned hotkey combos, and that’s fine. But for coming generations of XR-native 3D designers, artists and developers, I truly believe this more spatial, more physical creation process will become industry standard as tools and best practices mature with time. For now, there are things I wish Blocks could manage that it can’t — and a few suggestions are appended to this section.
What it can’t do (yet), others are attempting. More creation tools are pouring into the marketplace daily, with Gravity Sketch being the latest entrant (now available in early release on Steam). A UK-based developer Tim Johnson is working on his own creation tool in his spare time, and it already does a few nifty tricks Blocks can’t yet handle.
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Watch the video on Twitter here.
Ultimately, while standalone 3D asset creation apps are great, to truly unlock the power of your work— to make it do something — you still have to export it, right?
That’s why, to me, Blocks- and Tilt Brush-like functionality would be most powerful as native Unity or Unreal 4 feature-sets — an API or plugin for use directly within these editors, where I can really make magic happen as a developer.
Perhaps there’s room for Google and Unity to partner on this — or perhaps I’m hopelessly naive for even suggesting such a thing? No idea. Regardless of feasibility, bringing all the functionality of Blocks/Tilt Brush directly into Unity itself would be an amazing achievement and one I’m starting to ponder the how-to’s of.
My questions for the Google teams would be around goals for Blocks and Tilt Brush. Are these fun tools/toys or is this just the start of a grander vision, some kind of unified VR editing suite that can totally redefine 3D creation best practices as we know them? Their blog post from Monday detailing new VR animation tools built for Blocks during a recent hackathon shows the team is thinking creatively — but what is the long-term strategy?
Here are a few suggestions from an outsider’s POV. Maybe these are unrealistic goals for reasons I don’t understand, and maybe I am using poor terminology, but fwiw:
Shape/object grouping hierarchy UI — create a panel to manage shape/object grouping, a la the layers menu in Photoshop
Symmetrical extrusion — select multiple faces & extrude simultaneously
Subdivison deletion — ability to delete subdivisions (besides undo). How about… while the pliers tool is selecting a specific subdivision, hitting undo deletes it? Or an option of the eraser that switches to subdivision deletion instead of shape deletion?
More snap-to options — ability to toggle through a few different snap-to guesses. Sometimes it’s intuitive, sometimes uncooperative
Vert & face welding — demonstrated in Tim Johnson’s work, among other things
General 2D Windows app frame insertion into VR workflow (beyond “Add reference image”)
Voice commands — if 3D modeling is becoming more physical, why not involve speech? Stuff like “rotate object 180 degrees” while selecting something… maybe
Postscript: Thanks to the Community
I have to give a shout out to the Twitter and web/blog communities surrounding VR/AR. Working on XR solo at a small company in the Midwest, I haven’t had a lot of local resources to lean on while trying to shift from web/app development (though that is starting to change). But thanks to Twitter and the incredibly supportive community there, I still feel super connected to what’s going on in XR on a daily basis. Everyone is so excited and energized by this technology and so eager to share their knowledge. You can really feel the common sense of purpose: spread the word about XR.
Special thanks to the project manager working on Blocks, Brit Menutti (@britmenutti). Just the fact that someone on this team, let alone the PM, was willing to respond to FAQ tweets from a pleb like me was inspiring. @_naam from Twitter’s videos are some of the best work I’ve seen using Blocks/Cinema 4D/Unity. Mind-blowing. 3Donimus’ Blocks models are… impossibly complex to me. A true artist. Jarlan Perez is also in that category. Thanks again to Danny Bittman and Tim Johnson. Stephanie Hurlburt works on shader stuff I don’t yet understand but is super positive and encouraging to people looking to break into the tech industry.
I went to Unity’s Vision VR/AR Summit in Hollywood, CA, this past May and saw a lot of speakers who similarly inspired me to keep at this (even before I had a real HMD in my hands). Some of my favorites were Kat Harris and Estella Tse, and Unity’s evangelist from Australia John Sietsma ended up providing me with a great jump-start on my 360-degree video work.
There are many others, but I won’t belabor the point. Thanks to you all.
Source: Medium