Nice, but i did not see the free sculpting mode in Substance Modeler where you can freely sculpt dragging brush without using pre made shapes.
Not sure this will be something it can do ?
Substance Modeler didn’t show anything about custom meshes library.
Again not sur it will propose the ability to use your own mesh kitbash like in Medium.
Good point is Substance modeler will run both in VR and desktop mode.
More challengers is always better, and from Substance, Modeler could be an amazing product.
That Medium video is pretty great though. It shows the potential of how fast and accurate things can be modeled in VR. The same speed is impossible in 2D and we are still at the start of what VR sculpting can do. In the future VR sculpting is going to be incredible.
I just wait for Medium to showcase, the drag brush sculpting.
Until they show it we don’t know if it can work like Medium or it is mainly working MagicaCSG way.
It’s possible, look at some PS4 games “Dreams”.
Before they braught VR, you could already use PS move controllers in 3D space, while visualization is in 2D.
You just loose the 3D perception VR brings, while you sculpt and move your brushes in 3D space, and i agree it can be great for sketching and concepting quick.
While you many asked for Dreams on PC to work more precisely with mouse and to get back working with small hand moves instead.
VR or not VR, the sculpting work and result is exactly the same.
Also on 2D tablet you get lot more precision because you do small moves, or mouse you get friction that helps precision and feedback on precise work.
In space you have more effort to do keeping arms in the air for hours, still not big effort, and same VR inconvenience we discussed before.
I would never use VR some 8 or more hours a days, because of long term effect with screens so much close to your eyes without enough distance separation from blue light, and the way VR forces your vision divergence to work.
I think this is why many 3D artist done VR showcase, but they work mainly with tablet, for precision, no arms in the air and vision comfort.
Anyway each one is own opinion on VR, but VR does not change the 3D work result.
And Substance Modeler will be both desktop and VR, so usable for any people.
Those 3D spacial controls do help a lot. In 3DCoat you pick the object, then scale, then rotate, then move, rotate view, repeat, repeat who know how many times till it’s right, then hit Apply. With the spacial controls you move it directly to the right place and angle in one swift motion. A big part of why I say VR is so fast. When working in 2D there was many a time when I thought something was one way till I rotated it and realized it was in a way different place than I thought it was.
There is a thing I saw called the Looking Glass where you can see the object in 3D like it was in front of your face. Something like that could be a good alternative to VR in the future if you don’t like the VR goggles. It seems a big problem with it currently is it has to render so many different angles the processing power quite high for a lower resolution. In a few years it could be a thing though and would be super cool.
Edit: Just saw this. The Looking Glass 8k Gen 2 if you have a mere $17,500 lying around. Getting it to work with Blender, 3DCoat, Zbrush would be crazy cool.
Will be amazing to use such 3D screen combined with VR controllers like in last video.
The 8K does not really output 8K as some as saying still around 4K or a bit lower would be enough, but price is 15000$, and would like to know how much power is consuming compared to standard monitors.
Need some times for price decrease, but this could become next generation screens standard for all that is 3D related.
My guess would be the 8k does 1080p with the slices. If they take down the slices to 16 it would be a solid 1080p. With interlacing it would be 32 slices at 1080p. Rendering 8k in real time is hard on any hardware. The website has minimum requirements as a RTX 3090 Turbo.
It should take as much power as a regular 8k screen. On the website it says it takes up to 19V at 11.8A = 224.2 Watts.
High graphic card and more power consumption, but prices will decrease for 3D cards also as for such 3D display and it will ttotally worth it i think.
Will need 3D apps to be able to work with 3D controllers without the VR headset, like Dreams able to work in TV with moves controllers like in last video.
This technology will improve, perhaps will get it’s own GPU included to help, perhaps the user will not need some RTX 3090 Turbo.
Adobe Modeler is fantastic. I’ve been on the beta these last few months and it’s amazing what the devs have already achieved in the early stages. It’s already capable of great work. Adobe Modeler is essentially Medium 2.0. Medium is effectively abandonware at this stage. Kodon is terrible. It’s been in ‘beta’ for over 5 years and is still far from any sort of production ready.
Another great option is shapelab. It’s as close as you’ll get to Nomad/Blender sculpting in VR.
VR is a brilliant medium for 3D modeling/sculpting work. There is no other tool that allows you to truly see form in the round. I’ve had no issues staying in for hours.
As headsets improve and become more common, and software like Adobe modeler emerges we’ll definitely see VR at the forefront of 3D creation in the next 5 or so years. Anyone that thinks it’s just a gimmick simply hasn’t experienced creating in VR. I used to think that myself until I tried it. It has to be experienced. You can’t get a sense from just watching recorded sessions of other people.
Also, although it’s not my thing, Gravity sketch is extremely popular with concept designers in certain parts of the industry. I tried it out. Brilliant software. Again, not my thing, but I can see the appeal.
The thing about these VR programs is how easy they are to pick up. You can learn the whole program in a few hours. This alone is a factor that will drive popularity when headset get better/cheaper.
Although I do find these VR systems interesting, what I would really like is a good AR system. I would like to have a pattern on a table that I could do all of the work in. This would allow you to use tools on the pattern and traditional inputs like a mouse, etc.
I don’t know. Limited resources/interest, I suppose. It needs to sort out the unfinished sculpt mode first before it goes near a VR sculpt mode. Still a few years worth of work in polishing off sculpt mode first.
Hey guys, I made some experiments with VR today and thought maybe this might be interesting for you:
The aim was to user my physical graphics tablet in VR. In fact to work as if the 3d Viewport was actually “real” 3d as it would be with a real stereoscopic graphics tablet (which to my knowledge is not existing right now and would probably cost a fortune).
My setup was a Huion graphics tablet, a Valve Index VR glasses, Blender and the VR software Bigscreen:
To sum it up: It actually worked!!! Regerettably with some flaws (see further below), which hopefully can be solved in order to make this really userful for a day-to-day work:
So first, what did I get?
- Blender was displayed on a floating screen in Bigscreen
- All Areas were displayed in 2d apart from the 3d Viewport, which was in 3d, which was soo much different compared to working on a flat screen!
- I could position the floating screen right were my physical graphics tablet is located, so the whole setup was very intuitively to be used
Settings in Blender (3.0)
“Properties Editor” → “Output Properties” → “Stereoscopy”: Checkmark
Title Bar → “Window”
→ “Set Stereo 3d”: “Top-Bottom”
→ “Toggle Window Fullscreen”
Make sure you are in Camera View
Settings in Bigscreen
“Settings” → “Desktop”
→ “3D Setting” → “OU”
→ Optional: Disable “Show on big screen”, enable"Show personal screen" and position/size personal screen to your likings, I positioned it right where my graphics tablet is located in pysical world
Although the experience including performance was great, I encontered a few issues:
Bad resoution/Text unreadable
Probably due to physical resolution of Valve Index?
Paralaxis bad/not adjustable (=> Eye strain)
Not whole area of physical screen visible (for exampe in Sculpt Mode the tools were not visible in VR although visible on physical screen)
Mabe due to resolution ratio of my physical monitor?
Only working in Camera View
To summarize, I believe this has veeery much potential if the issues can be solved somehow!
Update on this: I tried it with Desktop+ instead of Bigscreen and Convergence/Paralaxis is solved, also the issue with cut away screen.
Remaining issues are (1) bad resolution/scrambled text in menues as well as (2) the fact, that this only works from camera perspective (if you change the view while working on an object, the sterescopic effect stops). I suppose both can only be fixed in Blender software itself but would be happy to be proven wrong.
I can assure you that the 3d viewport is truly stereoscopic, as if you were in the VR Scene Inspection. The advantage is that at the same time you can see all other viewports, menus, etc., but they are flat (which is good).
By the way, I was able to solve both problems mentioned:
(1) The menu texts remain sharp and readable when changing “Preferences” → “Interface” → “Display” - > “Resolution Scale” from 1.00 to 2.00
(2) The stereoscopic effect is preserved while navigating by enabling “Lock Camera to View”.
However, there is one downer left: The mouse cursor is only displayed on one eye and can’t be switched off when sculping, for example, despite the also available 3d cursor (remains as an annoying crosshair in the center). If this could be turned off (and - now I get greedy - if you could zoom seamlessly into 3d scene inspection), I would be in Blender-in-VR heaven
If one were to be very precise, one would have to say that the effect is only perfect if one looks exactly frontally at the virtual screen, since the viewing angle and distance in the 3d viewport are determined by the position of the Blender camera and not by one’s own position in virtual space. In practice, however, this is hardly noticeable, the effect is also vivid from other angles and usually you would automatically look pretty straight at the screen while sculpting.
I think the only way this would be truly perfect (easy to set up, perfect position dependent 3D effect) would be if the whole thing was integrated directly into Blender. That’s the famous 10 percent to the perfect solution, which will probably only exist in years but hopefully at all.
But for me it is already perfect enough and as far as I know the only (and - except for the hardware - free) option now to work stereoscopically with traditional input devices.
And, who knows, maybe some cool developer and Blender enthusiast out there will pick up the ball and develop a cool addin
Btw. another at least as good approach would imo be to have mouse/tablet support in VR Scene Inspection (currently no cursor is displayed at all, but in fact it‘s already possible to sculpt, if you „accidentally“ find the right spot with your mouse or take a quick lock at your real screen!). And then have all other viewports and menues floating and freely positionable in VR space. Or to be able to blend them in into your visual field (like a 2d HUD or menu in a VR game) by clicking on a floating icon, or moving the cursor to a corner/side of your view.
For keyboard acrobats: For example with the software “Reality Mixer” you can actually blend in the physical keyboard in real time into a VR environment, if you look in the corresponding direction.
Solved it with sledgehammer approach by replacing the file “crossa.cur” in the Blender sources with a transparent icon and compiling my own Blender version. Open Source rules!
I thought this was worthy of bumping this post. I’ve just been trying out Kodon again recently after their updates and reworking of the program. It has really come a long way since this thread, in terms of stability and useability. It has a new GPU voxel sculpting engine, much better UI, and the poly sculpting toolset is the best of any I’ve yet tried in VR, with the brushes on par with other sculpting prgrams. It’s still an ongoing work in progress, but the devs are on the right track.
I did some dirty hack to make the default VR addon in blender display a mirror of sculpt brush cursor in VR view.
I think using this alongside a desktop screen in VR is a better approach than using the stereoscopy camera view. It resulted in way less fatigue for me.
You will have to compile from source if you want to have this feature.
Hope this can help someone with similar need.
