My first Tilt Brush character

This is the second week of my VR experiment: a challenge to ship a new VR experience four weeks in a row. A little while ago I was browsing Twitter when I saw this incredible creature storming at me:

This thing is gorgeous on its own but then I read the tweet. This beast was created almost entirely in Tilt Brush. It was rigged, shaded then rendered in outside programs, but it was sculpted in the air inside VR.

Steve Teeps is an amazing artist with years of experience sculpting and animating (check out more of his work here) but it got me thinking…

I’ve never personally handmade a 3D character before, could I do it in Tilt Brush? I’ve struggled in Blender. It’s a steep learning curve with a maze of unique key commands and making even small objects (like a light saber) is tedious. It’s a different kind of fidelity, but what about Tilt? I decided to give it a few tries.

Tracing in Tilt Brush makes 3D creation massively more accessible

My first attempt at a character (see above) was on the 3rd grade level. I used the ‘Toon’ brush, in mirror mode, to draw a stick figure that met the requirements for a mixamo rig. It actually looked kind of cool when I rigged it, gave it a ghostly shader, an idle animation, but it didn’t have much of an identity. I learned fairly quickly that it’s tough to hand sculpt 3-D. What if you could use an object to trace?

Amazingly, a few weeks ago, the Tilt Brush team released a new feature that enables this. In the labs part of your menu, you can now bring in *any* .OBJ file. I brought in a generic humanoid and started tracing.

.OBJ file underneath the strokes

Rigged in Mixamo

Hand animated in my bedroom with Studio Mocap in Unity

Obviously there is a ton of room for improvement but this is a base to build from. Adding detail, playing with shaders and individual brushes creates ample opportunity to make a character that is distinct. The result is honestly kind of freaky. You sculpt this thing out of thin air, give it a skeleton and idle animation in your computer, then you put on your goggles and this thing is just looking at you, life sized.

A certain level of 3D design and animation will always require a deep dive into Blender or C4D but it seems like there is a huge amount of latitude here. So much cruft of the typical 3D design interface melts away in Tilt Brush. At the very least, this could be used as a vehicle to teach, to rapidly experiment, or even make realistic characters.

When you consider how accessible this is, it’s amazing to think about what the VR community will dream up.