[feature] Modeling & sculpting in VR

So on a Blender Today episode Pablo said that some one at the blender foundation is looking into VR Support for Blender for sculpting. :slight_smile:

This was also mentioned on the Blender Code blog for siggraph briefly near the end.

" Met with a representative of Oculus (someone I already knew a long time and who switched jobs :). We’re discussing to setup a project around VR authoring together." Source https://www.blender.org/press/siggraph-2018-report/

I love comments like this, when you look back at 2 year old comments that say that the thing they are talking about will be dead in 2 years. And no one should be wasting their time on it.
But then 2 years later, it’s only gained momentum and is even more feasible.

Yeah, it’s dumb to want to do something like this for more than an 30-60 minutes. BUT, there are quite a few cases that it would add benefit.
One is product design. But more common now would be, checking in to how the VR view is for the game your designing. That’s kind of important, so reducing the time to do that is pretty killer.

You can already check your modelling/ texturing and lighting ( using Eevee ) in VR :grinning: Download BlenderXR - it’s free:

It’s is the most amazingly useful build for checking designs in VR without having to go the whole unwrap/material/export-fbx/open game engine/import_fbx/make material etc etc, it saves Hours!

Be aware that their version of Blender 2.8 is slightly behind the daily builds, so it might be wise not to overwrite files that are crucial, save to a separate location, and don’t expect any file you’ve saved from within BlenderXR to open in more recent builds of a regular 2.8.

Standing in a Blender scene in VR is awesome.

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So this is interesting. Sorry, it was intersting at one point in time. They stopped Blender development two years ago, presumably because they weren’t making any money off it? But they still sell the same plugin functionality for Maya… are they making money on Maya, or are they just holding out because they want Autodesk to buy their company?

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Hey @eobet,

I have no idea. When they originally released that there was no VR viewer in Blender, so it was the only option. Obviously, since then VR viewing was added to Blender, albeit at it’s most basic level - you may need to enable this in your add-on preferences . . .
image

You can’t do anything ‘manipulative’ ( ie modelling, sculpting etc) but it’s perfect for just standing in your scene to assess it. It’s NOT real-time if you try to view a scene in Eevee with full lighting and materials, at least not on my rig, but the other viewport shading methods work fine and it’s more than enough to be able to assess what you’ve created without having ( in my case ) to export it to Unreal.

Cheers,
Dj

There is this addon which adds basic manipulation and some tools: https://freebirdxr.com/

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