Creating Augmented and Virtual Realities

Chapter 3. Virtual Reality for Art

Tipatat Chennavasin

A More Natural Way of Making 3D Art

Traditionally, making digital 3D art was more like drafting than like painting or sculpting. A lot of the challenge was in understanding how to manipulate 3D space with a 2D interface. To view 3D objects on a 2D display, the artist often works from multiple views, like working on a technical drawing. These 3D objects are made from geometric shapes, which in turn are made of vertices or points in space. Moving these points in 3D space with a 2D mouse required much more abstract thinking instead of traditional art, which is more directly applied.

Looking at the interfaces for the most popular 3D programs like Autodesk Maya (Figure 3-1) and 3D Studio reflect these complexities. Because of these challenges, very few people could make 3D art. Then there was a new wave of 3D modeling programs, such as Pixologic’s Z-Brush (Figure 3-2) that had a fundamentally different take. Such programs used a pen tablet as input and a sculpting-like interface that transformed the field of 3D modeling and allowed more artists to work in 3D. By using a pen and letting artists directly manipulate the geometry with gestures that were more natural, the creation of 3D art was further democratized. But even though the interface was more direct, it was still awkward to work on 3D objects through 2D displays and 2D interfaces. With the introduction of the consumer wave of virtual reality (VR), that all changed.

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