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VR sculpting tool, Oculus Medium, was released to the public last week. And it may just be the most powerful demonstration of just how monumental the Oculus Rift -- used in concert with its Touch controllers -- can be.
Even the most mainstream users will find it easy to grok.
SEE ALSO:How Oculus could revive the 3D-printing revolution that never happenedAfter living with Oculus Medium for about a week, here are some of the most important things about this groundbreaking app that you should know.
Tutorials
Although most people could begin engaging the app with no guidance, I strongly recommend you take at least a couple of the brief tutorials offered.
Those tutorials, hosted by a rich-voiced avatar that floats alongside you, quickly teaches you how to use the Oculus Touch controllers and runs you through the basics of the app's menus and interfaces.
Touch controllers and app interface
For all but the most hardcore gamers, the Touch controls will likely look intimidating. But looks, in this case, are deceiving. They're easy to use. Additionally, the controllers also have capacitive sensors, which enable them to detect how you're holding the devices, making their use in VR fairly intuitive.
Slightly transformed inside Oculus Medium, the corresponding controls in the app are exceedingly simple, assuming you take the time to run through a couple of tutorials.
Little Plant sculpted in Medium by Oculus user FrozenPea. 2nd sculpt ever!
After you're done with tutorials, the app's interface will immediately feel a lot more natural and almost intuitive. Undo and Redo is just an analog stick tilt away, and shrinking and expanding your VR sculptures by pulling the Touch controllers apart and together, as you would with real clay, feels incredibly natural.
The functions bring to bear the impact of having the Touch controllers in your hands, each represented by virtual hands in the app. And whether you're a rightie, a leftie or ambidextrous, switching the controls can easily be done within the app.
During the app's development, the Medium team realized that one hand -- the sculpting hand -- would be dominant, so that dominant hand flexibility is important.
The power of stamps
As powerful as Oculus Medium is when you start from scratch on a new work, that power is dramatically increased when you access the 300 stamps available.
The stamps include anatomy (yes, you can build an entire person from head to toe), letters, numbers, primitive shapes, and even a variety of widgets for those creating mechanical models.
You can also import your own models into the app. However, when I asked Oculus Medium engineer and director Brian Sharp about this function, he told me that there's a limit to the level of detail you can retain when importing your own models as stamps. So keep it simple.
What you can and can't do
Color: You can't blend colors -- a feature new users have frequently asked me about.
To work around this, some users instead play with the opacity of different colors and layer them on top of other colors on a model. But ultimately it's not the best solution, so coloring in Oculus Medium, for now, is fairly basic.
Mimicking real sculpting:The developers of Oculus Medium decided to bring the classic spinning sculptor's turntable dynamic to VR, and it's pretty fun.
Personally, I found it less useful for working on my sculptures and more useful for when I want to take a break and examine my work from all sides without having to spin it around myself. Other than that, the tools -- clay spray gun, paint gun, flatten, inflate, cut, clay, swirl, smudge, smooth -- are remarkably true to their names in terms of functions.
It really feels like you're sculpting and painting.
Animation:Slow down, eager VR modelers. Yes, it would be nice, but no, you can't animate your models in Oculus Medium.
And when I asked Sharp about the possibility of this feature in the future, he said it probably won't happen, and if it ever does, such a feature would take so much development it would likely launch as its own, standalone app.
An work by Landis Fields of ILMxLABCredit: Oculus mediumLighting:They put a lot of thought into this. There are a couple of ways to play with light.
First, you can control the way the light hits your model in-app, something that can help how you develop and show off the model. Second, you can also add a glow to objects by accessing the Material tab. Seeing the glowing materials effect in a finished three-dimensional model is one of the most impressive demos of the app.
Layers:If you're familiar with apps like Photoshop, the Layers concept here is the same. Except waymore interesting.
Flicking layers on and off and watching fully formed objects wink in and out of existence in front of you is both disconcerting and exhilarating. You only get 20 layers, but that should be plenty for most users.
Getting your work out there
The app is all about letting you show off your work, in a number of ways. The most impressive, which we've covered before, is by exporting your model as a .obj file, which can then be brought into a 3D animation app or used to print out a 3D version of your model.
But you can also share your work by creating recordings of your work process.
And if you want to use the app to perhaps teach or walk someone through a model, you can also include yourself (as a VR avatar) in the recording, effectively making Oculus Medium a presentation tool as well.
Credit: Oculus mediumYou can also simply add your model to your personal gallery and share that gallery link with friends in the Medium community (U.S. only for now).
You can set your gallery to public or private, and you also have the ability to add Creative Commons licenses to your models.
Conclusion
If you're a VR skeptic who's convinced that Oculus Medium's just another gaming platform that you (a non-gamer) have no use for, the app is something you simply musttry.
Similarly, if you've always wanted to create 3D models, but were intimidated by complex apps like 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya, then toss aside your previous fears. You now have a tool that will let you model in 3D with very little training.
The beauty of your work, as in the real world, will only be limited by your imagination.
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TopicsApps & SoftwareOculusVirtual Reality