This is my first time ever in virtual reality.
But I'm not here to play games.
I'm here to create art.
OOH.
Okay, that's freaky.
Woah, I suddenly feel very trapped somewhere I've just created.
Well, at least that's my goal after I figure out what I'm doing.
Is everything in focus for you?
I don't know what in focus is
supposed to look like in VR.
After spending about 20 minutes adjusting my
headset and trying to work out whether
my headset needed tweaking or whether my
expectations were just too high, I decided
to finally move on and just cross my fingers.
Ahh there's a hand there.
That this experience wouldn't leave me with
a headache or wanting to vomit.
I bought this headset five months ago
and haven't even put them on my head until today.
I wanted this to be a fresh experience,
and so I have been super jealous of Shane, who's already been playing some games
and enjoying the virtual experience without me.
But it's finally my turn. What do I do?
What do I press? Duct tape.
I can paint the duct tape.
I've got my color picker, I've got my brushes, and I've got my tools... Teleport?
I didn't even think about what to paint.
Let's just play... Paper, okay?
The 3D space is tripping me out.
Because I can't just draw a flat piece of paper because my hand isn't flat.
And so as soon as I move in and out, it's like, not flat.
After playing around with this crazy environment for a while and turning it
into something that resembled an explosion in a
christmas light factory, I think I'm ready
to start a project.
I've decided a fun first project is to try
creating a dress with the mannequin scene here,
given my extensive experience in fashion
design, by which I mean I've never designed.
A dress before in my life... Except once.
The duct tape brand in the USA have been running a scholarship contest for more
than 20 years now where students are challenged to create and wear their own
prom outfits made entirely out of duct tape.
But I don't live in the U.S.
I live in Australia
and we don't have a prom exactly.
But yet when I was in school, I was so inspired by the idea of creating
a whole dress out of duct tape that I just had to try this for myself.
I could only find two colors locally, so my dress was pretty simple.
But I wore it to a local masquerade ball
and quickly learnt that duct tape isn't great for breathability.
And I still have it, I just can't find it.
So I've decided to use duct tape for my VR dress today, too.
And if designing a dress out of
duct tape in real life was hard, I'm not sure this is much easier.
I'm limited by my desk space here, so we'll be designing the front half
of her dress only so she just can't turn around.
I didn't think this through even after finding a mirror tool to help me,
not being able to actually touch the mannequin and have that physical
restriction to work from makes this so much harder than I expected.
The lack of boundaries is both exciting
but also really challenging, because complete freedom in every
direction means that every little movement from my hands can affect my art.
This is a learning curve that I wasn't expecting, but I am up for the challenge.
I do think that I have lost the excitement of designing the perfect dress and I might
put this one down to a learning experience so that I can move on to another project.
I'm jumping into a more familiar style next with a blank canvas that's a bit more
like the paper that I'm used to and a simple black marker.
I mean, I thought that this would be easy
and it is fun, but maybe easy isn't quite the right word.
Drawing 2D art in a 3D space is harder than I expected.
The slightest movement forward or backward means that my lines don't match up,
because instead of just drawing on two axes, I'm drawing on three.
I wonder if I'd enjoy this more if you
could like, lock a plane like a piece of paper suspended in the air for a few minutes
just to line up certain elements and then remove it when you're ready to break out
into the 3D space again.
I'm focusing so much on not moving forward
or backwards that I'm keeping the actual art really simplistic.
And because I'm used to having a desk
to support my arms, I am finding this is making me shake a lot.
But I am enjoying this.
This is something that I could see myself
spending more time to master and definitely try again.
There are really no limits to how far you could take this or how big you could go,
and this is only the first app that I've tried.
But while I'm having a great time,
it turns out that working in an entirely white room is terrible for my spatial
awareness. So it hasn't taken long for my nausea to settle in.
So it's day two, and we've bought a portable air
conditioner to help cool down the office while we wait for our normal air conditioner
to get repaired, and I am ready to jump back into some virtual art.
This time, I gave myself the boundary of working from my desk,
using the desk as a flat surface, giving me something physical to reference from.
As someone who usually only works in two dimensions, I've decided to embrace the 3D
space available to me and try some sculpting.
Even though this is not a 3D program, it's really more of a drawing program.
But some of these brushes are creating a 3D effect that I think could work
to create a bit of a polygon sculpture effect.
And I can't wait to see what I can create with these.
This is definitely a fun project.
And while it isn't coming together as quickly as I'd hoped or as perfectly as I
pictured in my head, I think I'm finally starting to get
the hang of drawing in virtual reality and get a feel for how these brushes work.
I spent a few hours on this piece, and I'm going to take a break so I don't
end up with headaches and nausea again today.
But I'll come back tomorrow to see if I
can turn this into an epic mountain scene and hopefully bring it to life.
For now, it's at least got my son's approval.
It's now day three, and somehow I forgot to save my project.
So whether or not I was happy
with my progress, it's time to start over, and I think I'm okay with this.
My mountain scene yesterday was a good
practice, but it wasn't quite what I pictured.
So now I'm starting from scratch
with a bit more experience from having tried VR art for a few hours,
and I have a bit more understanding about how this brush works.
In the 3D space.
I'm feeling more confident, I've got a clearer vision,
and I've even worked out how to teleport to other areas so that I can work
in a bigger space and reach the back of my project without crashing into my desk.
The 3D lighting and reflections make it
really hard to match the exact same colors to reuse again.
And I've just discovered that I can
actually save a color in a little palette at the bottom, which is going to help
a lot in being consistent throughout this piece.
I've also realized now that the environment I choose completely
changes the appearance of these colors, which I wish I knew yesterday.
So I'm using the default environment today to keep my 3D colors looking as close as
possible to the colors that I am choosing from the color wheel.
I still feel a little out of my depth here, being unfamiliar with VR,
unfamiliar with sculpting, and just with this whole process.
But this is fun, and I would love to try
some other programs that focus more on the 3D building side of this
and that maybe allow me to then paint on the surface later or to make
adjustments just like you could in real life.
Imagine if I could take a tool and dig
some of this back out or change the color or paint details.
I feel like this technology is only going
to get better, and this is already so much fun to use.
I can make this really big, or I can get really small with these
details, like adding lots and lots of trees.
But this is still missing something, because the biggest advantage of virtual
reality over real life is that we aren't limited by gravity.
And so far, everything I've created is anchored to my table.
So it's time to add something in
the sky.
Of all the things I could add to my sky,
I thought a simplified round hot air balloon would be one of the easiest,
but no, it turns out drawing a perfect sphere with a rectangular polygon tool
in 3D space with no grids or guides is actually really hard.
I'd even say this is the hardest thing
that I've tried to do in this whole project so far.
I started over about three times before accepting that I needed to draw
an intricate graph in this 3D space to try and map out the shape of my sphere.
And even this process was a huge mess because I'm just eyeballing everything.
I don't have any rulers or any way to lock
my lines on a particular axes, so it's just a lot of guesswork.
In hindsight, I should have just tried.
Like holding up a ball like like this
and just tracing around it unless I move the ball, then that's just as bad.
Maybe I should have just used a 3D program with a sphere tool.
The main problem here is that I can't just
make a draft sphere and then just adjust it later.
So I've just had to redraw it a bunch of times until I eventually
got it close enough.
Just don't look too closely at the details.
After adding some snow just for fun, I've decided we need some clouds too.
And these were possibly the most enjoyable part of this whole project.
I have spent between four to 6 hours in virtual reality at this point,
but I could easily have spent another hour just making more of these clouds.
But at some point, it's time to
leave my magical virtual world and step back into reality.
I wish I could give you a full tour in 3D of what I have created.
Because what you get on your screen
just doesn't do it justice in the same way as being in the room and being able
to reach out and look around like I gave our team the chance to do when I was done.
And I'm not sure how much my eyes and head would handle designing like
this frequently, but I definitely had fun.
I'd love to hear your thoughts when you see the final results in a moment.
And please let me know if you'd like
to see me try more content like this or other art projects in virtual reality.
I have tried something a little similar
to this in the past where I used a 3D iPad app to create
a coloring book that you can walk through which you should watch next.
And don't forget to subscribe.