OCULUS QUILL

Felix Stief details how to use the 3D painting app ‘Quill’ to create a stylised environment entirely in VR

Felix Stief

AUTHOR

Felix Stief is a self-taught 3D artist. He is the lead environment artist at Studio Syro and has produced a wide variety of sets for their original series TalesFromSodaIsland. www.instagram.com/stieffelix

For this tutorial, lead environment artist Felix Stief will be demonstrating how he uses Quill to make an illustrative outdoor scene directly in VR without needing any other software. Quill is an intuitive, artist-friendly VR painting tool that allows the user’s unique style to come through and generate illustrative hand-made scenes without requiring any sort of 3D background. The software can only be used in VR and artists ‘paint’ by drawing geometric 3D strokes in the air around them.

Quill will come naturally to those with a 2D illustration background because it’s more similar to Photoshop than it is Maya. The whole pipeline from drawing, to texturing, to animating is all done with a limited set of tools and artists who master them can produce great results extraordinarily quickly without needing to get too technical.

Working in Quill means working in an infinite canvas. Without boundaries it can be easy to become overwhelmed by the possibilities. The goal of this tutorial is to explain the process when working in Quill to help you create an immersive scene without losing track of the rules of composition and staging. This will guide you through various key steps including initial VR sketching, painting in details, basic Quill animation, and keeping everything optimised enough so that others can experience it in VR too.