VR for Artists: How to Bring Illustrations into 3D with Tilt Brush

1. Introduction: Illustrators, painters, jars. Have you ever been curious about virtual reality? Or maybe curious about learning 3D? Or just adding some depth to your illustrations? Or have you ever just wanted to step inside of your artwork? Luckily, the skills that you already have can make something really special and breathtaking in VR. I'm Collin Leix, an animator at the studio Gunner. Gunner is an animation and illustration studio in Detroit, Michigan. We make animation and illustrations for clients, but we also make our own creative short films. I am obsessed with using virtual reality tools to make digital art better. I'm going to teach you how to recreate your artwork in virtual reality with Google Tilt Brush and how to tackle the new challenges that come along with that from making decisions and space to using this new tech that may seem daunting at first. This class is for people who have some experience with illustration, drawing, or 2D design. Not only will you be entering the third dimension, you'll also be expanding on your creative skillset. I'm going to tell you a little bit about how VR came out and how to stay comfortable and safe when you're using it. Then we'll talk about how to prepare an illustration to be impactful in virtual reality. I'll show you around the program Google Tilt Brush, including bringing in reference images and how to get the most out of a simple brush. I'll show you how to record a video of your work to share it with the world. We're working in 3D, but with an ease and gesture that's really unique compared to current traditional 3D workflows. Let's go. 2. Class Project: First off, I want to tell you about the class project. One of the coolest parts of drawing your artwork into space is that you can play with movement, even if the image is totally still. A 3D artwork is activated by you moving around it. This effect is called parallax, which is a word to describe how objects seem farther back or closer in space, depending on how much they move in front of your eyes. The goal of this prompt is to add depth and parallax to your illustration. In your drawing software, create an illustration from scratch or modify a previous work to have some kind of border or frame around it and your imagery within. So this could be a simple picture frame, a notebook with a drawing inside, a window, etc. We will then recreate this in virtual reality. Since this is your first VR piece, this frame acts as a really simple way to create the feeling of depth in your work, in addition to the depth will create within your illustration. So this prompt simplifies the world that you'll create and lets you focus on one area. In this example, the outline of a notebook acts as a frame. A drawing on paper or in Photoshop has an end to it. But when you step into VR, there is no edge of the paper. But in the future, you are welcome to continue your drawing all around you. So to use this process with me, you will need a virtual reality headset and the software Google Tilt Brush. You can access Tilt Brush on a Vive, any Oculus Rift, the Oculus Quest, both one and two, Windows Mixed Reality, the Valve Index, and PlayStation VR. If you are using a headset that requires a PC, you will have to make sure that it has the right specs to run virtual reality. Many people have the standalone Oculus Quest. If you are one of those people, you will be happy to hear. You do not need a big, powerful PC to access Tilt Brush. It is a slightly lighter version of it, which we will get into. If you do have a quest, however, you will still need some kind of computer or tablet to get the files off of your quest. But it can be a Mac. If you do not have a headset, you can always follow along to learn more. But this class is geared for people who do have a headset and they're ready to jump in. 3. Getting Oriented in Virtual Reality: Even though virtual reality has become really popular and available in the last five to ten years, this concept has been brewing for longer than you may think. Photography was invented in the 1820s. By the 1840s, the stereoscope was invented. This is a device that held two photographs in front of the eyes. These photos were taken by two cameras about an eye-width apart, so looking at them this close recreates the illusion of depth. Then in the 1930s, Science fiction was talking about headsets you could put on and be transported somewhere else. Throughout the mid-twentieth century, people started making machines that held digital images up to the eyes or face for a whole range of purposes, from flight simulations for the military to creative multi-sensory filmmaking. The '70s, '80s, and '90s included several clunky, but very innovative early versions of the headset that we recognize today. It really helped me appreciate our tools to know that we're sitting on the shoulders of a lot of dreaming and a lot of hard work from people in the past. Even now, VR is developing at a crazy fast speed. Even while I was developing this class, a new headset came out in the fall of 2020, the Quest 2. Originally, VR headsets needed a chord that ran from your head to a powerful computer. Here's my Rift S that's tethered. The Oculus Quests actually contain a smaller and slightly less powerful computer in the headset itself. But that allows it to the untethered. No cord connecting you to a computer and a lot more inexpensive, basically because you don't have to buy that computer. But because that small computer in a Quest headset is weaker, there are a few limitations to Tilt Brush in the Quest versions. There is something called the link. This actually can act as a tether from your stand-alone Oculus Quest if you've gotten one, to a powerful computer if you have access to one or if you decide to upgrade. Then you will be able to access the full version of Tilt Brush. I haven't used this but it gets great reviews. This may be unlike any tech that you've ever used before. It attaches to your head and covers your eyes. This brings a few considerations. You got to know when to take breaks. I recommend taking a short break after every 30 minutes in VR. Take the headset off, walk-around, drink some water. It's definitely more physical than sitting and drawing in a computer. In VR, your eyes are very close to a screen, so when you take a break it's nice to go outside, look at a window, look at something far away. In terms of motion sickness, because this is such a physical and experimental process, there will be a rare case when someone's perception simply can't take it. But in my experience, the vast majority of people can. Even if you tried VR before and felt sick from a game, don't give up on art-making in VR. In many games, the world is moving all around you and that definitely makes people sick. It makes me sick. But in art making software like Tilt Brush, you have control over the movement of the world. Many times the world isn't moving at all, you're sitting peacefully drawing in space. In terms of comfort, these companies are trying hard to make the headsets comfortable and adjustable because everyone's head is different. If your headset isn't comfortable, there are third-party padding modifications you can buy and a lot of people love these. Straight out of the box, I find the Rift S to be the most comfortable. The Quests can be a bit front-heavy. If you're taking breaks often, that definitely helps to give yourself a rest from that fatigue, but there are modifications out there that supposedly help this front heaviness. I haven't bought any, but definitely shop around and read the reviews. This is a little cheat for those of you who also have long hair. I weave my ponytail to the back of the quest to anchor it. I know this is not an option that's available to many people. If you have glasses, the headsets should be able to accommodate you. I know the Quest 2 comes with a little spacer to give you more room for glasses and the others were created to accommodate glasses out of the box. I do wear glasses but I put in my contacts when I go into VR, it's just the most comfortable, if you have that option. To get your room ready, it's basically about clearing space. As you're setting up your headset, the software will teach you and walk you through an introductory program and how to prepare your space and use it safely. Make sure to follow these guidelines and please keep your pets away. This is more important when you're playing a game and jumping around but you will forget where you are in your room and we don't want a kitty or a pup getting stepped down or whacked. I actually have a pretty small studio so sometimes I use the option of creating a stationary place base if I'm just sitting and drawing with my arms and upper body. This is an option that's given to you during setup. We don't want to put young kids in VR because we don't know exactly what it does to developing minds and eyeballs, but so far so good with adults. But because we're still in the early stages of VR, especially with regular use, make sure to take lots of breaks, don't exceed three or four hours in a day. Some people are comfortable with more or less, but give yourself time to get used to it. Do your own research. There are people studying how VR can also help heal people and other studies about how VR promotes a flow state or a place where you can get in the zone of creativity. Luckily for us as artists, VR means an amazingly immersive experience where we can step inside of our artwork and escape. No smartphone, no outside world. I'm recording this right now during the pandemic. Have you ever wanted to step away from the world more? From this lesson, you're now more oriented to this brand new way of making media. You know how to take care of yourself, drink water, take breaks, and hopefully you can avoid ever feeling nauseous. 4. Warming Up in Tilt Brush: I wanted to include a word on why I chose Google tilt brush for this class. I use it equally with another great program called Oculus Quill. They're similar in some ways. You can draw in space. You can bring in reference images and color pick. You can take images and export 3D files. The principles I talk about today of my overall approach to bringing an illustration into 3D, will absolutely apply to Quill and other drawing programs that you want to use. But in terms of the software itself, Quill, the program we're not using has a timeline and allows you to animate, which Tilt Brush doesn't. Because of this, Quill is a much heavier piece of software and currently cannot be run on the Oculus Quest. Many people just have the self-contained Oculus Quest. Tilt Brush does run on the quest, so I knew this program would be way more accessible to people, especially to illustrators and painters who are newer to the VR world. I find Tilt Brush fun, and definitely simpler to use, so that's what I chose. Let's jump into the other side. Here's what we see when we first entered Tilt Brush. You're going to see on your left-hand, you'll have this menu and on your right hand, if you point, it'll highlight to interact with your left hand. If you happen to be a lefty, you can actually switch them by bopping them on the bottom there. I'm right handed, so I'll keep it the way it is. You'll see here some sketches that other people have done. We're going to look a little bit more at some examples of work in a future lesson. For now we're going to start a new sketch. Everything else disappears, here we are in the default world, and I'm going to go in and just get a smoother camera for you. We have this spectator mode it goes to, but actually there's a version for a head camera to. Many of these panels will be able to pop out, and that's great, they're useful. But when you're done with them, the way you get rid of them is by no joke, tossing them up into space. It's a fun thing. You'll see here the default brush is floating in your right hand. Just to show you a little bit what we have. On your menu hand, you can use the joystick to slide to the right and left to go through these options with your tools, your brushes, color, but in your drawing hand, we have this floating brush, and probably what you're going to see when you first come in is more limited. If you have over this book here, get these extra options, click on advanced mode and you'll get the full tool set. On our hands, we have these trigger buttons, which you can see trigger, trigger, and on your drawing hand, this trigger is what you pull to draw in space. Take a moment, go ahead and just have fun with the draw. Don't worry about staying too limited. Use your whole body. I know for me why I'm really interested in VR is because it's rare for you to be able to use your whole body gesturally in space when it's not just physical painting or drawing. Take your time, move around. Now. Let's say you fill your space and it's overwhelming, over on your menu hand, you can see I'm putting my thumb over it there. That is the Undo button. You can also above it redo if you actually like what you did. It goes brushstroke by brushstroke. Draw, undo. Let's say you want to make your brush bigger. On your drawing hand, you can move your joystick to the right, and it'll be a lot larger. This brush doesn't show that super well as an example. I'll show you. I'll do this with this marker. I'm going to push it all the way big, and then all the way small. You can see that difference there. Now I want to show you something really handy. On your drawing hand, you'll see this little dot here. I'm pushing this top button with my thumb. If you hold that down, you get this quick menu here. So with the option for the brush. We can also quickly grab the eraser, and these are some of the same tools that you'll see over on your menu hand, but you can access them more quickly. We can grab the brush. Now we can go in and erase just some of these marks, and you don't have to undo them in the order that you drew them in. Also here we have a selection which you start. You could push it with the trigger finger, it'll start spinning and you just touch a mark and it'll become selected, and this is cool because I'm overlapping the little orb with the brush mark, and I'm pushing this grip button on the back, and that's how you can pick something up and move it. I'm going to push this top button again and just go back to brush. This trigger button is a draw, and then there this balance here more of a grab. If you hold these two grips at the same time, you can make the whole World bigger, and you'll see here this image in front of me. It's as if I'm a squirrel size or a dog or a person, and I can make it even smaller and smaller. It's a way to have more control over the way that you're drawing. It's also an interesting way to move around, and I'm just grabbing these two buttons here and pushing myself away. Moving towards. While we're talking about getting around, I wanted to show you another way of doing it called teleportation. This is really good for people who tend to actually feel a little bit sea sick, that there's no in-between of the motion. You can see these feed show up, and right now I'm not pushing anything, I'm just hovering my pointer mouse, and then when I click, you just teleport to the new space. I'll teleport back. It doesn't show any of this in-between time, you just move. That's a nice option. I end up using probably the grab more to be able to move around. Just feels more intuitive. I also wanted to show you while I have these two grip buttons pushed while I'm moving, there's a way to get back home. You can see here on my thumb, if I push that button, it takes me back to the original place and scale that I started out with. This is a nice way to have a home base. If things get crazy or you get too far out you can come home. These tools I'm just going to teach you as they come, as stuff is more or less relevant. We'll get a little more into the selection tool. The straight edge is a colon for you to know. Basically, if you have this enabled, you just draw a perfectly straight line. The mirror tool, it's fun to play with. By default, it comes in this space. If you want to move it, like I'm sitting down right now, so I want to bring it to me. I'm just using this grip tool, grab it and bring it down. You can see I still have my straight edge on. It creates this little compliment to whatever your brushstrokes are. I'm going to delete these two. Then if you turn the mirror off, these brushstrokes stay and you're able to select them independently. You can still change things if you want. They're not necessarily stuck to each other. If you want to save, you can just hover right here on the sketchbook, and then this disk will show up, and it asks you to actually take a little picture of what you've done. Cool. Now it's saved, and the way you can find that is by going to the sketch book and your sketches by default when you came in, it was on this star. Now we can go into your sketches. Onto the next lesson. 5. Looking at Examples: Let's take a look at some examples that I've done. Going into the sketchbook, my sketches. I'm going to start by showing you this little forest. It ask me if I want to load the sketch. I wanted to show you this because the way that I start my sketches off is by taking a flat brush and drawing the whole environment on. This is basically so I can have control of the exact color. You'll see how I drew the smoky smoke coming up from my little campfire. You can see here some sketch lines. I'm going to show you how I start out with sketches. I'm also going to show you how to make these brush strokes hug a shape like the way that these are hugging this tree. This's a cylinder shape. Something like this, if it's taking a while to load, it's cool to watch but if you want to hurry through it, you can push this left trigger and it's loaded. I'm going to talk to you more about, like we talked about, you want to do an image to prepare for a VR painting to make sure that it's as strong as it could be. This is the painting I did before coming in here, and you can see I got pretty close. It's just such a better experience. I don't have to come in here and now guess about composition and the color, and everything I can just pull things right from here and it does change a little bit. This tree here, it's a little bigger than this one. It's just a home based, an anchor for you to work from. I'll show you another one. It's not just one person who does every step of a project, from the ideation, to the drawing, to the building something out and animating. Often we're working as a team. Something I wanted to challenge myself to do was to pull in other people's work, and obviously when you're working with somebody else's ideas, in artwork you want to get permission if that's a living artist, and somebody whose work isn't in the public domain. This is by an artist, Juana Herrera, who I'm friendly with and got permission from, got her blessing. I just loved this image so much. Actually here's the original. It's still drawing on, but you can see this original, it's this lovely image of motherhood here. I loved how she blended these figures with geometric form. I was also really drawn to this challenge of how she used these blending modes. When these turquoise shapes interact with the figure, you can see they become a different color and that is not immediately obvious how you would tackle that in space. I went around and did it a little bit differently for each of these. For this circle, I imagined that it was projected onto her. How would that work for her leg? The shape was in front of her. Played with different ways that might work. On this one, you can just see the form. Probably I would have guessed would be in front of her, but for this when I tried, the turquoise is behind her and her leg was just painted that color. I also wanted to show you, I was really drawn to how she used pencil lines here. The way that I attacked that was by actually going in and pulling different colors from her reference to layer these different brush strokes and colors together, and then when you pull away, it has that same feeling to it. Let's see another one. This is probably my brushiest piece and this one definitely is heavy. I'm going to go ahead and click "Load it". Here's how it looks from afar, it's a little stage, little theater. Here are my images I painted in Photoshop ahead of time. I did do a second photo for this one, of second drawing. I wanted to thank Instagram followers. I hit 5K, so I wanted to show gratitude for those people hanging out with me. I thought VR is also a really neat way to play with storytelling and scale on this one. Here is an image where I've thought out the different ways that plants could be line drawing or filled in, and the arms come in and are holding something, but then you can come up to it and actually want to get in there to see what's in there, and there's some more detail, and there's writing on that moth. That's another way that you can use scale as a storytelling technique. I also wanted to just point out that when you move around these things, they falls apart and that's actually okay. Some people want to make a perfect 360 degree perfect mesh, but I don't necessarily feel too worried about that. I think you can decide which angles you need it to work from, to just be able to move around it and experience it. I'm going to show you in a future lesson how to come in and color pick these colors to create your environment. 6. Preparing Your Files: For this video, we're going to start in Photoshop or you can use any drawing software you like. I use Photoshop. I found that to make the best work in VR, I need to work out composition, contrast, value, color choices, textures all ahead of time. Because as cool as VR is, it's not going to give an image better bones. The stronger the image going in, the stronger the whole piece is going to be. If you've ever had the anxiety of a blank page, that feeling gets multiplied when you go into VR without a plan because you're stepping inside of the blank page. Illustrations that have a clear foreground, middle ground, and background will help you make decisions about where elements should be in space. In this case, I added a girl in the foreground. There's the book outline, which will probably be your foreground, and then the world inside at a farther distance. In this case, it's going to have its own steps in space. Definitely don't feel pressure to add a person holding your frame. At the drawing phase, don't hold yourself back from using whatever effects you like to use in your illustrations normally. In general, I think daydreaming as much as you want in this phase often leads to the most interesting results when you're moving into 3D. If you hit a wall later, that's fine. But don't limit yourself while you're still in the dreaming phase. If you want a scribbly texture or something watercolory, go for it. Since the brushes in VR tend to have sharper lines, graphic artwork is probably the easiest to recreate. But I love the brushy look and I'll show you how I approach that look in VR. Something I've never tried is a piece that's just purely abstract gradient, but anything is possible. Definitely try everything down the road. Here we are in Photoshop. Again for this class project, you're welcome to take an illustration you've done in the past and modify it to fit the prompt or make one from scratch. Because this girl's head is blocking the lake, I actually saved out a separate layer. We are going to save out a flattened image, PNG or JPEG, both were great. I'm going to do two, just again so I can see that detail I did behind her head. Now we need to get this image on your headset. I'm assuming, by the way, you've already gotten your VR up and running and install the program Tilt Brush. When the software is created, it's going to make these folders for you that we're about to get into. On a PC, you can find them in Documents, Tilt Brush, Media Library, Images. You can drop your image in there and it'll be waiting for you when you go into VR. If you're on a Mac, you'll have a couple more steps to take. I'm assuming you have a Quest if you're a Mac user. To be able to see your files, you need to download a program called Android File Transfer. It's pretty easy to use. It's free. You can find it at android.com/filetransfer. Get that setup, you can download this, and once that's on your computer, you'll see this little green guy show up. At first, it's going to say, "No Android device found." What you're going to need to do is plug your Quest into your computer, and if you're on a Mac, you probably need to buy a third-party cord. It's a USB-C to USB-A cord. USB-A is probably what you recognize as USB cord, and USB-C is what Quest uses. It's this tiny little round guy. When I plug that in to my Quest, at first actually I don't see anything. It still says no device found. You actually have to put on your headset and you'll see that there's a question there waiting for you. It's asking you permission. Go ahead and click "Yes". When I hit "Allow", all of a sudden this window comes up. You can see down here Tilt Brush, Media Library, and Images. When you go to File Export, Quick Export as PNG, you might not see an option here to just navigate to your Android file or whatever. You can just save it to desktop. I'm going to call mine Storybook. Here I have my image, my desktop, and I can actually just drag it into here. There it is, Storybook. While we're in here, while we're on our computers and looking into Tilt Brush's folders, I wanted to prepare something that's going to help us down the line. When you use Tilt Brush for the first time and record video, if you're on the PC version, there are a few aspects that people want to remove, and this goes for your snapshots on the Quest as well. The program puts its own watermark in the corner along with a dark vignette. Here's an early VR peace of mind before I knew how to take that off. It's like, great, thanks for making this, Google, but I don't need your name all over this. Here's how to turn it off. On a PC, this will give you better resolution videos and you'll get better snapshots on the Quest or any PC versions. We're actually going to look for down to the Tilt Brush root. Everybody's going to have this Tilt Brush.cfg file. It's called a config file. If you just double-click on it like normal, it actually says you need to move this to your computer first. Go ahead and drag this. When I open that up, you can open this up with Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac. These curly brackets are going to be containers for information that we can put in to specify what we want to happen in here. You don't actually need to learn exactly what's going on with all of these. I'll show you a little bit, but I'm actually going to give you this text that you can just copy and paste into your config file and it'll just bring everything over. This stuff up here is pretty generic. You just want to make sure that you get these curly brackets as well, and don't mess with the spacing or anything like that. What that's changing here is this snapshot width, 1920 by 1080. This might have been smaller by default, and here where it says "ShowWatermark" false. When that says true, Google is adding its own watermark on top of it. Then if you're on a PC version and you're going to have the Camera tool, this is a way to make that resolution higher on your video. You can also make the frames per second higher, and I actually like to have this be 30 for your video because you don't really need it to be 90 frames a second, at least for what I do. If you wanted to be, then, now you know how. We want to save this, and I'm going to delete this old one. I'm going to drag the new config file back. You want to make sure that you just have one of these, and then it's named exactly Tilt space Brush dot cfg, and this is just a file that's easily replaceable. If you messed with it, don't worry, you can just create a new one, paste in this text I'm going to give you, and it won't hurt anything in the software. We're ready to jump in. 7. Brushes: Back in Tilt Brush. Now, I wanted to start out by talking about brushes. There are tons of brushes in here and they are a lot of fun. I definitely encourage you to come in, play with these, this one's called neon pulse. Some of these actually respond to music that you might have on, which is cool, hyper color. Definitely absolutely fun to play with, but remember how we were talking about your artwork and keeping the look true to you. I'm going to guess that your artwork doesn't actually look like this necessarily. A lot of these brushes, I'm going to call gimmicky and that sounds like there's a lot more hate behind that then there is, I do think they're really fun and they brought me so much joy. But they're not necessarily serious tools towards recreating a look that you want to create separate from being in Tilt Brush. There are a couple of brushes that I do really like. I'm going to show them to you but first, I want to show you some brushes that I was so hopeful for in the beginning that I don't actually end up using very much. There's one called ink and thick paint. I'm a painter, I want it to look painterly. You would think that these would solve that issue for me. But again, these are making a lot of creative decisions for you. They just look very particular, and also when they layer on top of each other, they create what looks like a pile of belts, like a pile of leather belts which is cool but you'll notice if you look around, sometimes a lot of Tilt Brush work looks like this. You'll also see this shadow coming. Certain brushes cast and receive shadows, but others don't. These three here are flat, tapered marker, regular marker, and pinched marker, I love. But let me show you again what's happening with this light. Back on this tool area, we can hit lights. You can actually hover and move the sun. Isn't that trippy? It might give you weird dreams, and it is cool that you can also change the color of this. This fill light, I can make warm and change the main color of light to be light green. You might see this and think, this is exactly what I've been looking for, this is exactly what I want my work to look like. If that's true, more power to you, that's not what we're here to work on today. I'm going to grab this light. Thank you for your service. Toss it in the ether. Related to that, we have this Environment panel. It also looks promising at first, but it actually already made too many creative decisions for you, I think as well. Space is fun to get into, especially because there's this moon right in front of you. You could draw little aliens on if you want, but it's already done. All the creative decisions are made here. There's address form if you want to draw on something, which is cool, little snowman you can decorate. Here, there are a couple of colors that actually seemed like, I'll just choose illustrative, but like you noticed in my drawings, this is not exactly the color that I chose. Since I worked out my color palettes ahead of time, that's not what I want. I want to be able to do my own. You can see here how these brushes look different in these different areas. With blue and black, there's this pistachio one. Just to show you again what this backdrop is doing. This is a way to come in and control the color so I would say going into this pistachio world, and then being able to control. This is probably the closest thing I get to, maybe I would use this. But the problem is here, I can't color pick from a drawing to get this color. I can choose something fun in the moment and I could even save what I do here to refer back to it but if I'm bringing in a image and I know what color I want it to be. It's actually hard to be precise. I'm going to delete these. I'm actually going to go into Environment and choose black. This one I find changes the look of my brushes the least. Sometimes the illustrative one, it gets foggy if you zoom out too much. We're going to stay in black, a little bit of a void. Now, I'm going to show you which brushes I do like. We talked about the marker. This is blunt on the end, in both ends. Tapered marker starts out blunt, ends up pointy. Pinched marker, pointy to pointy. Soft highlighter. Sometimes I actually do like the soft highlighter. A trick that I found with it is to make it as dark as possible and then it just becomes the subtle glow, that does actually multiply on top of itself, which is really neat if you actually want to do a haze in the distance. Another one I really love is the unlit hull. I'm going to start out with this matte hull first just to show you what it does. I'm still on a really dark color. If I hold my trigger down, it starts following what I've done, but it's actually filling in this three-dimensional space. It's a really neat way of making like a rocky form, but also just filling in volume without having to make a ton of brushstrokes. Now, you can see how that fills that in. There is a diamond hull if you want to get fancy, but really, if we're trying to fill in a space, this unlit hull is a really nice way to fill in a leg or something and just draw it in. I love the unlit hull. Then also this wire brush. It's just a nice flat brush, but it also has roundness to it, so what's nice about that is, I can go in and select and if I want to turn it in space, it keeps some volume as opposed to, if I want to turn one of these guys, it gets flat. 8. Colors and Reference Images: Let's talk about color. As you've seen, the biggest thing that I rely on for color is the reference image that I've already prepared. So to bring that in, we want to go into more options, labs, I know this is a little buried, local media library. We want to go to local images. Now we can see some of the ones I've done from previous work, and let's bring in our storybook. Now, here's this little image floating in space, pretty cool. When I move my hands over it, you can actually feel a little bit of haptic feedback, a little vibration. Now I'm pulling down this grip tool and I can make this bigger. This is not making me bigger right now, it's just making the image bigger, big and beautiful. Now, I'll show you how I color pic from these images, which is pretty simple. I'll also show you how to riff a little bit in here with the color picker. So we're going to go to our quick menu, there's a color dropper. This is also a tool you can get to here, but I love my little quick pilot. When we move close you can see it's previewing. I'm not hitting anything yet, but it's showing me all of these other little images that I've used. It's previewing these colors for me before I hit the trigger to confirm. So let's grab this pink from the sky. Now I have it in my hand. After I've gotten that color loaded, I can still go in and change my brush and it'll be the same color. I can change my brush again. So going into this dropper, grabbing the color I want. This is pretty much a large part of how I grabbed my colors and bring them on in. Now, I'll show you this, especially in the demo, but you remember how I was showing you how I got those pencil lines in the beautiful figurative drawing, what is it that defines texture in an image? This slight variations of color really take you a long way in creating something that feels really textured and unique, then even the small of color on top of the blue, they sort of mixed to create even more variation. You can see how these variations come in. Another way to modify color that could be useful to you is within this color picker. So let's say I was working in this area of the drawing, so I can color pick from the piece, but if I wanted more variation, it's not there to pull from. Let's say I have this mauve color. Now on the default color picker, we can see saturation from left to right, value from top to bottom, and then hue on the side over here. We could actually grab slightly different colors from this color picker, and you can see that builds the same varied texture feeling. Then let's say you actually want to grab slightly different hues where you can push this button down here. Let's start from the original one that color picked again. Now, if you actually just click around, you'll see this is also another way to add a neat textural effect. Already this looks like a neat cloud. You can decide how far away you want to click, how tight you want to keep it. But so these are just two different ways of varying the saturation and value, varying hue. So what if I want to color pick from marks that I've already made instead of my image? You can absolutely do that. I'll go on with this dropper, grab this blue. Now, you'll see my brush takes on the brush type and the size of whatever you color pick from. I can drop from over here all of a sudden now it's big again. Dropped from over here, it's large and it's just the more blunt edge marker. This is cool, but it might be annoying if what you want to change is just the color, this is a little bit of a limitation and tilt brush. The way that some people get around this is by making a floating palette for yourself. So let's say that I'm working in this and I know that I want to use this tapered marker for most of it. Well, I can actually go in and prep the main colors that I have in here with a tapered marker. Just depends on how organized you want to be. I could even label this if I want tapered. Those have the taper, and you can go through and you can create a whole palette for then the pinched marker and so on. you could have this floating color palette, and now you'll know if I always want it to be taper, then I can grab my red there. Honestly, when I'm in the zone, the thing I find the most intuitive is to just come color pick from the image I'm using, and if the brush really needs to be changed, I'll just go ahead and change it here. That's a benefit of actually working from such a limited amount of brushes, is that it's not like I'm going to be necessarily always going back and forth. Sometimes I do come back to get that unlit hole. There's also an option. Let's say that I've done this and I love how it's looking except now I want this color to change. There's this re-color tool. Right now I have this red loaded on, you can see if I start to push this trigger button down, it'll spin, bloop, if I touch it, that will change colors. I can undo that. Let's say I wanted this to be a slightly different purple, I just have to grab it, it won't be recolor yet. To go on my recolor and then change it. I think we are ready to get into some sketching. 9. Dimensional Sketching: Earlier on I used the term dimensional decision-making. This is basically talking about making creative choices about what parts of your illustration to put where in space, and I just wanted to say there is no one perfect correct way to do this. I think of it similar to translators, where taking a poem and translating it from one language to another. We have our own unique understandings of meaning, form, nuance. So if two translators were to translate the same poem, there would be different choices of words, different shades of meaning in the end, if two VR artists made their own 3D versions of the same illustration, things would not end up in exactly the same place and that's what makes this really interesting. Since we try to divide up how much we have to think about at one time, there is a whole stage just devoted to where things sit in space that we're not thinking about color or composition as much necessarily. I wanted to go back to an earlier stage, of when I was drawing quantize piece in space. Because these figures in geometric forms are a really nice clear way to show you how that process works. I like to use a nice blue color for this. You want to choose a color that isn't really your main colors in your final piece and you just start guessing where things are going to go. Bring my drawing in. You can see at this stage, guessing where her arm would be. I really like the selection tool to help out in evolving these choices. Let's say I drew out this arm. But I feel like, I could play with the depth a little bit better. I'm going to turn to the side so you can see this. Turn it maybe a little bit like that. So I would probably make that from this front view. I just want to make sure that you can see what I'm doing here. Turning it so the elbow is a little bit more towards me in space, and I bring this drawing back to always make sure that it makes sense with the original drawing. That's cool. There's also this deselect mode. Let's say that I selected too much. You can go in. It's almost like an alternative reality. Select this and deselect. Then it's just as a way of subtracting, deselect her hand and go back. When you're in selection mode, there's also something that comes up. You'll see this new button that looks like two pieces of paper. You can copy things just with that easy button. So I have to have something selected. Move my hands so it's intersecting and once it intersects, you'll see this copy button come up. I don't really need that at this point, but I just wanted to show it to you. I also wanted to show you a neat little trick. There is a way to make a perfect circle, which I found by accident and then a marker tool go into the straight edge. So we've seen that, which is pretty cool if you want to make a circle. Did you see that? Look, it's actually a little bit hard to do. Usually you pull it out and then you start making a circle and you have to go back through the beginning. It's giving me a little trouble now. You start from the center, pull it out, and you go 1, 2, 3 through the center again. See even that time I didn't get it. Pull it out 1, 2. Maybe you have to slow down a little bit. Now you know it's possible, straight tool, and back through the beginning. That's fun and it was helpful for things like this. We got some perfect circles in here that I wanted to use. Another quick thing about while we have the straight edge on, if we have a line going here, let's say I want this to be a perfect 45-degree angle. You see this lock comes up while I have this, I still have this trigger button holding the edge of it. If I hit the lock, it'll snap exactly to I think in 45-degree increments. It's still move it forward and backward in space. But it snaps up and to the side. That's pretty useful. Think I might have used it for this leg. Just a couple of ways to use this sketching. I'm going to now build from scratch our storybook piece. Let's bring in our storybook drawing. Go into media library, Local Images. Have our storybook. I'm not going to bring in our second one just yet. Now, with these, I also wanted to mention that you can see there's a lock that you can put on them in space, which locks them so they're straight along the ground. There's also this option to pin that I haven't talked much about. But you can see I just accessed that through my quick menu and here's this option pin. Now when I did that, this huge pin comes and just slammed into the thing that I pin. But now if I go into like selection mode, it just keeps telling, me like no, basically it's a way of keeping that totally still. Right now I'm still scaling, but I can't actually move this image. When I'm going to start out just sketching this out, I think I'm actually going to use the mirror tool because I did use a mirroring tool when I drew this out in Photoshop. Since we have that option in Tilt brush, I might as well use it. It's coming in really high. Holding this mirror you'll see again, I have this lock option. So I'm going to lock this straight on here. Awesome and just do the best I can to get this in the center. But now it's locking and it's not twirling this way, which is nice. At this point, I actually I'm going to unlock or unpin this image, but I still like it being straight. Now, let's go into the Brush tool. You can see just like we played with at the beginning, I have this mirror option, and there is one part of her back and head area that's generally on the same plane. With this image it is close, I can actually use it to guide almost like a tracing of her. Now I'm starting on this flat plane, but thinking about how this might come back in space, or that might sit, maybe her ponytail comes out like this. It's just about moving back and forward, checking how things, whoops, just do my Undo button, line up, and her shoulders are still on the same plane. Now with this pretty much roughed in, I'm going to grab the image and pull it back. I'm just guessing about where I would want it to be in space. She does have these long stylized arms, and I guess she could reach about this far back. You can see now her head is smaller, and the book is smaller, everything is because it's a little farther away, so when I push my reference image back in space, I'm going to scale it up a little bit. I'm still matching. My mirroring is still on, and I can use that for the book as well. I'm going to turn on the straight edge, and just guess, maybe it comes like this, and I do want it to still come forward in space. I am just holding my trigger down to decide where that end spot will be. Right now I'm actually closing my right eye, just to figure it out. I'm pretty happy with that. It's a little floating to the left here, but I'm going to lock. That's close enough for me. I'm going to turn straight edge off, but still have the mirror on. If you're working with something like a book, feel free to turn on this mirror and they'll help you out and save some time. I'll talk more about this, but this hand coming in behind the book, I want this to be a little bit flat. That will make sense later, but this thumb can still have some dimension. This arm, this is a funny thing because the top of her wrist is connecting to the bottom of her arm. Just a stylized way that I'm doing this. A funny little coincidence. Maybe a little strange. Her elbows isn't really turning in the right place, although she does have very strange arms. Little bit of an Escher drawing. I'm going to add some shoulders in here. Think about where [inaudible] here we go. I'm not going to turn around, I'm not actually going to show her face. I decided there's already enough work to do in this piece, but maybe just the side of her cheeks matching her pretty well. For the sketch phase, that's absolutely enough. Now I'm going to think about where this other stuff would be. I'm going to turn the mirror tool off. Now, looking at her from above here, I think this arm is just so funny, I'm going to guess that, we have this layer of plants then we have this lake, row of trees in a couple of mountains and the clouds and the stars. Again, I mentioned this, I did make this a little more complex, just so you all really feel like you got your money's worth, and you can really watch me problem-solve. But again, any section of this, even if you had three layers of this, that would be absolutely plenty for you to tackle when you get into your project. I'm just going to guess, rows of plants, come like this. I'll have that tall guy here, and don't worry, don't be shy about going off the side of the book because I want this to hold up when you turn to the side like this. I'm actually going to be extending the scene out on the sides. Here's our foliage. We want to be able to see the right silhouettes. Then this comes down. The next thing that we encounter is the lake. I want to show you now something called the guides. This is a piece of geometry that will come out, you can resize. Again, we have this lock, so I can lock that to be perfectly flat. I'm going to actually use this to make our lake because especially for a body of water, it's really nice to keep this consistent level. Your pointer or your paintbrush will actually snap to the surface if you get close enough and the brushstrokes stick. I love that. We're going to decide where the light goes and then I can turn it on and off and work from there. Let's undo these marks. Also, I mentioned in the campfire scene the way that I did those trees, I made a tall capsule like this and then was able to make those extra marks by using this guide. They're really useful. You can see it creates a neat form. Like I made part of a boat once by using just the bottom half of the sphere. Just like the other things, you can just neat them into space if you don't want them. Now, she's looking out. I did hold down the lock to make this go perfectly flat and that is nice in some cases. I'm wondering, because it's an illustration, there's a stylistic interpretation of space in the world, if maybe it is actually tilted a little bit towards me and that's actually how the lake functions in this perspective. That's actually what I'm going to go with here. My little creative decision, looking from above. Maybe I'll make this pull out a little more. It's a funny interplay between the far the back things are, the more you're going to get parallax in movement. But there's also this dance between like you being a physical being with limits to your arm length and just like scaling back and forth, checking things out so you can play around with it and see what's right for you. I'm just looking at the edge of this water here. Actually, I'm going to try to extend this a little bit more. You can pin guides as well. Now, let me move that, which is really useful. You can extend it a little bit. I did shifted up a little bit before I pinned it. Just fine. I'm happy with that. Turn that guide off. Now the mountains. I'm just going to treeline here. I can make the world smaller, so I can actually reach up a little bit, which works a lot of the time. You can't get the brush as small and delicate. I'm going to turn on the straight edge, I'm just going to make another line here. Let's see what's going on. That should be fine. Now the mountains. I'm going to say this, this one is, I think the lead mountain, the leading lady. I'm just thinking about where are the main lines of where it breaks and maybe changes direction. This actually goes backspace. It fit pretty well. This other one comes up here. We will be able to change these a little bit, but it is really nice to have, like we've talked about, stages of decisions being made because there's so much going on in VR. Be nice, just have the mountain place maybe done. I do want to make sure I'm taking advantage of the deep space here. I just got to look further back. This little distance, little friend back here. I'll select this part, make it a little smaller so we can see the peak a little more. The mountains. Feeling good. You can feel that parallax. Now for the clouds, I really want to make sure these do feel like they're far away in the sky although I know sometimes clouds do form around mountains, just the way weather patterns work. That one feels fine. A couple of other ones farther back. The way that this camera is recording, it's a little higher than what I'm seeing, so I want to make sure that it's showing you the right scene right in here where the book is. These clouds are a little staggered in space which I think feels good still. We can come in and add a couple more, so we're going to be able to see around the corner. Last but not least, we have these falling stars, and these I would love to feel really far back. Right now I'm just guessing. This is feeling pretty good to me. Let's go ahead and move on to filling it in. 10. Blocking in Forms: Let's get this filled out with some color. We're going to go into brushes, and I'm going to start out with this wire brush. When filling in this girl, I'm actually going to turn my mirror back on, so it'll cut the amount of work that we have to do in half since she does happen to be a perfect mirror image. I have a lot to fill out here today, and I think I'm going to absolutely talk and show you the tools that I use, and then when it comes to something that's just more repetitive, I might go ahead and speed up the video. I promise I will not use anything new without telling you about it out loud. Now, for the ears, even though they are going to be different colors, I'm going to keep the mirroring on, so the form stays the same. But then if I take mirroring off, I can still grab that color and recolor just that side. I'm just guessing where that face would go because I want to be able to move a little bit this way and that would maybe see the side of her cheeks. I'm going to come back for this line work and just keep blocking in these major areas, we're still in the wire tool. I want this hand to have some thickness there. I'm just trying something out, maybe deleting it if it doesn't feel totally right, and definitely don't be shy to go ahead and zoom in and get precise. Now, we talked about how you can go ahead and sketch pretty far, but in order to get this parallax movement and actually create this frame that we talked about, we want to be able to block out everything else we're seeing out here. I'll show you that little secret. I'm just going to get the regular marker here, and we're going to grab this background color, and it's really just a mask. It's going to be lines that are this close and they just block everything out, and because we're using this bright flat color, you can do this little trick of the eye, and it blocks everything out nicely. When we zoom out, to be able to get this background color, I'm going to fill in everything around and also the pink, but then we make almost this little miniature theater around where you view everything to be able to block all of that out. Sometimes I like to use a slightly different color because I'm going to be coloring this white also all around us, just to see where this mask is in space. I am going to recolor this. Notice the recolor just goes brushstroke by brushstroke also, instead of being mirrored. It just helps with the orientation to see where this is, and then it's super easy to recolor again at the very end. I'm turning on my straight edge tool here to get some detail with the edge of the book, so you could see how that parallax is starting to come together. Now let's block in the rest of the colors. I'll make this larger sort of theater, bring this way underneath. We also have this pink to contend with, and let's grab this pink. Now, we're in this totally different feeling world. I'm going to go ahead and start blocking in all of this foliage and then back to the line of trees and the mountains, and I think a perfect brush for this would be our unlit hole. It does work. Let's say I make a bump here and another bump there, it's going to connect to the top. This is especially good for the mountains and it is good for the foliage too, but I have to draw, release, draw, release. But that way can still control that its wide enough from the space. Looks like it's time to turn my mirror tool off. I'm going to bring this into my scene. It's a little bit of trial and error to figure out how far you want to go on the sides, and that's something you can always come back and add to later, but you can already see how the world inside of the book is tucking inside of your frame. This looks like some slightly tighter brushwork, so maybe I'll grab the wire for this. The wire sometimes can have that very sharp rectangular edge. That's the biggest downside to it if you make it turn a corner too quickly, so I'm going to see the same marks with my marker. It is flatter, but it has a slightly more rounded edge, which I like better right now. It looks like her head is starting to get in the way, so I'm going to go ahead and bring in the image I prepared without her. I'm feeling good about this. I'm going to go ahead and save the sketch. Since I've already saved it, I can overwrite last save. If it's your first time saving, it'll prompt you to take your little snapshot. Now you can see how that's starting to build out. Let's fill in some of the space back here. You'll notice under here, I thought it was blue at first, but it is green with blue sketches over it. I'm going to do this edge as a green first. Now I know that this is on the water, this is the water's edge here. Let's pull our guides back out and turn this back on. I'm going to go ahead and delete these guys as I go. I'm just cleaning up this edge a little bit, I'll come back to make sure that I like how it's looking. Now, these mountains. Like I mentioned in the beginning, this whole tool really is a time to shine for mountains and rocks. I'm going to grab this mean in-between point, or this in-between color and get started there. I'm clicking and dragging, and let's say I like this shape and I want to continue here, I have to let go of the hole or else if I keep pulling, it's just going to create a straight line, so there is a technique to use it and then release. I want to keep this main shape, but I'm just using the selection tool, I use that if I'm not sure, if deleting it would get rid of some big amount of space that I liked. I don't want to get rid of volume around there. Right about now, I'm actually feeling a little bit of fatigue in my arm from holding this up, so I'm going take a little break. As always, we want to save our work. Okay, that was good. I like to get out and stretch my back, sometimes do a little bit of yoga. I actually requested from the YouTube, amazing yoga artist, Yoga with Adriene. I asked her to do a VR specific yoga video and they were very nice, but they didn't totally get excited about that. They do have some exercises for people that work at an office, like at a desk all day, so maybe that's pretty similar. I'm going to show you my special little trick. If you happen to ever come across a reflection, or some kind of reflective glass or water. I'm actually going to copy this mountain. This is something that exists on both the Quest and the PC versions, I can group this selection. Now, when that happens, let's say I click a half of it, it's a group. All of these marks are now together as one object. Now, when I overlap my brush with it, I can duplicate it and there's actually this flip selection that also exists on the Quest, and it flipped it. Now, I can make a mirror image with this. That's mimicking what happens when you look at a reflection of water. It's almost like there's a copy of that thing down below. It's also a totally legit way of working if I just want to grab what's there. Of course, like we talked about, since this is an artist's rendering of space and not a perfectly realistic mountain, sometimes the artistic license means that things don't bend exactly to how it would realistically be. Maybe this mark here is a little more steep then it would be. On this third mountain, I actually went with a mauve color, which is not following my rules here, but I think it was just for kind of color balance and keeping things interesting. I can also just mark where I feel like that would reflect. Since I copied this one, I'm going to grab this color and recolor all of it. This is a heavier way of doing things, it'd be really cool if it was a lot of detail that you really want saved in a mirrored in the reflection. My reflection is a bit different than how this looks, so it's not totally necessary. Now, I also see a dark red reflection of these trees. This is quite a bit different, so I'm going to go ahead and draw this one out by hand. I think that's a pretty fun effect. You'll notice this pink in the reflection looks similar to this above one. Maybe you'd want to extend that, but I actually didn't notice it is a different pink, it's a bit darker. Just looking down, I can see that it's a bit darker pink. Look I got the light too on. It's a funny phenomenon about VR and I feel like in my little lake, like I have my stuff all around me. I can see that reflection, it's working pretty well. Lets finish coloring in the distant and the clouds. Great, so let's start marking up where the media shower would be. I'm going to grab this lighter pink color here from these large swoops. We don't want the hole for that, you can see because it's drawing a straight line between my marks and I want to be able to keep an arch, and have it feel archy. I'm going to have one come back here. Actually these can come up higher. I am going to redo that. There's something nice just about the gesture, the one component stroke. With these, I know you might feel a little bit like, if you we're doing something like this, "I got to make it right." Instead, just hoop, try swoop, if it doesn't feel right, you guys got your undo button, you can do it as many times as you want. Feel free to practice. That's the whole reason I love being in here too, it's because you can draw with your whole body. In the physical world it takes a lot more work to do that, you have to get a huge piece paper and a big paintbrush, which is totally fun. It's definitely more work and a lot more expensive, I have to say. Sometimes if I could make this world really small and if I could reach all the way back, that's a fun way to draw really far away is by playing with that scale. It's hard to get it small enough and still be able to see. I'm looking through the book and when I draw, it's not quite as far back as I want. It's real look back, let's see how this is feeling. I'm excited about this. Looks like we've got some foliage peeking through here, it happens. Okay. 11. Final Linework: Now I'm going to come back and clean up the girl so we don't have to worry about her and we can just disappear into linework for our world. This part, to get these lines, it's going to be similar to what we were just doing with the falling stars lines. There might just be quite a bit of trial and error to get this line correct. I'm just seeing little places where I want her arm to be filled in. I'm going to turn the mirror back on because that is very useful for this. We're going to go back to maybe just the plain marker for this. When we're sort to the final stages of something, I do take the time to zoom in, really clean stuff up, make sure things come together, hide what you want to hide. In the reference drawing, it does seem like the pink creates more of a diagonal line this way, a little bit more of a shadow. Since I color picked from her neck, it also picked the brush type. So I'm going to go back to the marker. When we get to these tricky areas, we want the strokes to fold into the right place. I find it useful to have these flat markers. Now I'm underneath here just close up to the back of her head. It looks like this ponytail tail not perfectly symmetrical. There's actually some little bit more heaviness on the right side. I'm working in 3D programs like Cinema 4D, that's what I'll use. At the same time, you could see the side view, the back view. It's really useful in moments like this, especially with this luminance type of texture where you can't quite see where the boundaries of things are. It helps you do something that doesn't look awesome in one angle and totally stupid in another. That's feeling like I'm seeing the side of her head. Now we'll turn mirroring back on and get back to cleaning up these lines on her shirt. I might try a little bit of a straightedge on some of these marks, let myself have some confident areas with some straight lines. The wire tool is going to be nice for parts of this where this line needs to turn but keep its thickness. But for this, and I have a little bit of the straightedge tool and I'm using the marker because I do actually want the line weight to stay consistent. When this curve is really subtle, I'm actually getting away with just using the straightedge. If I use smaller increments, I can turn it a little bit over time. A nice way to get some control there. This is a funny thing because there's outlines, but then we have 3D filled up space. So just a little bit of interplay of how much I want to see the front of her arm, and maybe this line actually moves forward and skids along it a little bit more, or maybe her arm muscle comes in a little bit. We have mirror on. I'm going to go ahead and give this curve a try. So I want the straightedge off, and here's the wire. This one is a little tricky. It is kind of a funny turn on her arms, but that's how I drew it. Put the time in to go in, play with your negative space and positive space. You can use the white maybe to cover up a little bit. There's this dark-colored line along the thumb that I think we can just recolor our sketch. It works pretty well but it's actually not the shape that I want anymore, so I'm going to delete it. Let's grab the marker. Straight here and then curves around on the edge. To clean up the sleeve. I'm fine with leaving this pile of marks because it is kind of a sketchy look and I love having lots of marks with slightly different colors next to each other, get adds to that handmade feeling. But we do want to make sure that the main silhouettes are getting hit the right way. This elbow lines, I will use the wire for this. You guys want to remember we're coming back to look at it from back here. So I'm mark-making with some detail brushwork. To start on the back of her head. We can get this shadow on our hand and get the edge of the book working. I'll turn the mirror back on just so we don't have to do this twice. Again, sometimes it is really nice to redraw everything. This drawing it does happen to have a lot of symmetry in the original. So for this, I definitely would just get up close. In a flat drawing, it's very easy to just draw something right over what was there. In VR, we absolutely can recolor things, but I didn't already have marks that were exactly where I want this to be. So this is dense of me creating the illusion that it's sitting flat. It looks like on the top it's just straight white and the bottom, but then we have this extra line on the side. I'm going to grab our mask color, and just recolor these marks on the top. Just go ahead and fill this in. I'm going to do the same thing on the bottom, the recolor. It looks like I was pretty close with my original lines. I'm just going to get in close, so I can make this sharp. On the side, I'm going to select this and duplicate it. This purple line here is a bit thinner, but it's just so tempting that this is already at the right location. It's at the right angle and everything that I'm just going to copy it and see if I can get away with reusing it. I make the close one white and then let's grab this color, and recolor the next one as it's purple. I still want it to be inside of that hand shadow. Let's get into this world and add some detail, some linework. I would say the linework is the time, turn the mirror off, that you really want to enjoy the fact that we're in VR. Drawing in 3D like this has just never been so gestural before, so it's almost like linework especially when I like to use it sketchy and fun. It's a celebration of how physical this experience is. For me, it's part of why I fell in love with this and chased it down so hard. To do these little guys, I'm just getting loose having fun with it. Since we are extending a little bit, I'll add that in. Let's check to make sure that scale was okay. I'm going to take another little rest and stretch my back. We are on the home stretch here, let's get these special marks going on our mountains. We fill in the reflection and the stars. Thinking about this mountain like we talked about in the colors, we want to go in and really enjoy this color picking and let those marks become more special and different. Here, I would probably take a lot of time to color pick from these slightly different blues. Since this is on a plane, something that might speed it up too, we'll try this again, is to make an extra little guide that I can sketch on more quickly and know that I'm going to move. Again from here, I think the magic really happens in the color picking and the layering. I'm pretty much just using these markers now. For the sake of time, I'm just going to keep cracking on this, and I'm going to speed it up a little bit. Now approaching these stars, I'm just going to go back and start making my marks and I can always move them if I need to. Over here on the left, I'm going to use this regular marker to mark this red guy. I'm actually going to use this straight edge, make room for white also. Here's a smaller little friend next to him. I couldn't get that mark big enough at the scale that I was, so I had to move in a little bit. Now, let's see where those hit. They're a little low. I'm going to move them up, and maybe make them a little smaller. Now for the tails, it's going to be that same kind of trial and error. Still, my straightedge on making these in the right place. The style is pretty hand-drawn, but I really actually need to get close in to get that brush to go small enough for what I want. I can also select, move, and duplicate. I'm actually going to copy these and duplicate them for this red guy too. Well, I find that it's funny because we do need something to be on the surface to keep that feeling of water, but we also want to move down these reflected mountains we make and vary the marks, so I like to do both. Here's our surface. Actually, that reminds me there's a couple more of these green marks that we want to make on the surface of the water while we're here. I'm trying to do this also with the wire because those hold their shape. Let's see when I look at it from the side. It might work a little better for these, so they don't go totally flat on us. I just made a really tiny wire brush, and I can move it back and forth. Now it doesn't get too much bigger or smaller on either side, so I'm just going to speed up a little bit again. This is really just the marker tool and taking the time to let this painting work its magic with its own varied colors and bringing that into VR with taking the time to color pick. Now, I'm just going to go back through and do any little final touches that I see. Now, I'm going to go ahead and recolor our mask area. Hopefully, it shows you how you can really get pretty close to an original style and get that space moving. Let's talk about how to take videos and photos, and show off in your work. 12. Sharing Your Work: Video, Photo, Gifs, Uploads & Exports: In this lesson, I'll show you how to record video of your piece. Since you've now created your illustration in space, recording it is basically an act of cinematography. You can think of cinematography as a wordless way to tell a story. Let's say you're focused on something, but the cameras slowly drifting to the right. It's as if you're saying, here this is, but then something may happen over here. Sometimes the cinematography of a VR illustration is just saying, look, this is 3D, and that's okay. Like this short looping GIF is basically saying just that. It can be a really effective and simple way to show off your skills, and beckon people to come look more closely. I use this as a cover image of this project on my website to entice you to click through to a longer video of the project. As you continue your journey of illustrating in 3D, keep that in mind as a storytelling technique. Now that you've done your masterpiece, let's talk about how to share it. We're going to start out on the PC version. You'll see right here, there's a camera option, and we see a live preview of a snapshot. I'm using my right thumb to swipe right, we got this auto GIF, five-second GIF, and then video. The snapshot right now, the field of view is decided by the FOV in your CONFIG file. If you felt like playing with that to make it more of a telephoto lens or like a wide-angle lens, you play with that number. Make it higher to be flatter, and lower to be more like Fish Islands. But for now, we're going to take a couple of pictures and then I'm going to show you where to find those. It's a new thing for us, to be able to do a drawing once, but then be able to take photos of it from a different position, just like it's a sculpture. We'll also take a GIF here, just click for the auto-gif and it'll record that quick parallax. Then with the five-second GIF, you'll direct the recording. You can make your own sway back and forth, you can have it a bit slower. This one's still going to feel handheld. Now let's go into the video version. This would be nice to do if you want to have just a handheld camera look. I'm going to hit the ''Trigger'' button with my right hand, and that's going to start the capture. You can see the time elapsed on the bottom and you move around. This feels a lot more handheld and a little more personal, and hit the "Trigger" button again. It'll say video captured. I'll show you in a little bit where to find that. Let's look at something really neat called camera paths. This says, "Add Anchor Point" and we get this new little cube here. I'm going to click with the trigger and drag it out. You might recognize this from using the pen tool in Photoshop or similar programs. I'm just going to create a really simple arch around her. If I stay close by, I'm not holding anything down it's asking, you want to make another one? I don't. If you move far away enough, it gives up on that. Let's hit "Play". We're going to see here we have this window with a preview of the camera, and this actual little camera that's popped up now, as if it was going to be moving along a track. That's basically what we're playing with here. To adjust the position of these keyframes, I just come close to it and then it highlights. Then I push the "Grip" button down and I can adjust it. If you want to adjust one and the camera's sitting on it, sometimes it's a little hard to grab. You can actually scrub along the bottom here, and then when it's free, you can grab it a little more easily. I'm going to pull, you can do the same thing with these Beziers-handles. You can hover to readjusts these. Let's press "Play". This is cool, but it's very small. It's not really seeing any of the actual mountains and the things that we want to see that we spent so much time on. My first thought is let's make it higher up. I'm going to make this even a little crooked, again just using the grip tool. Now, we have along the bottom here this add direction point, add speed point, add zoom point. I'm going to start by grabbing the zoom. This is a point where I can click my ''Trigger''. I'm still holding it down and I'm pulling this up, and it's playing with whether I'm zoomed in or zoomed out. This is something you can set once, or you can add a couple of these points and it'll animate in between them. Let's press "Play". This is closer to what I want, but then it gets away from us. It gets really far away, so we could bring the points a little closer. We also have control of this direction point. It looks like a camera, snaps down to your path. I'm clicking and holding the trigger, and I can choose what direction it's pointed in, which is really fun. It looks great at the beginning, but then once it gets to the end, it needs a new direction point. I'm going to click and hold this down. There we are. Now let's hit "Play". It's fun to actually see this move through space. Great. There's our girl. It's showing a lot of what we like, although it's a little fast, feels a little hyper to me. That's where our speed point comes in and like the others, you could add a couple of them throughout the piece if you wanted to change the speed, or you can just do it once, and then that's just setting the speed for the whole thing. This is a nice lush pan to show off what you've done, which is fun. I think at the beginning, it's a little bit high. If I want to move, thinks I'm setting the direction point. I just want to move this down a little bit so I can see in the preview, how that would adjust. If you ever feel a hitch when it's playing, if it feels a little jumpy, it's not really doing this now, but if you ever come across that, you want to pull these so they're actually on the same point. I'm hovering until it glows, clicking with the Grab tool, and then pulling them on the same point. To export a video from camera paths, simply push the "Circle" button in the top right, and it'll export a lovely smooth video. If you have a PC, you'll be able to find your photos and videos in the Tilt Brush folder. Snapshots, here are your all your pictures. Also in the snapshot folder, you'll find GIFs. Here's that auto-GIF and the five-second one. These are 600 pixels squared from both the PC and the Quest version in the video folder. Here you can see our handheld one, and here's the smooth one we did on camera paths, nice sharp resolution. Here we are on my Quest 1 and I wanted to show you how to record photo and video. Unfortunately, we don't have the same camera of paths tool here, but we do have in more options, lab cameras. We can see a camera option here. I'm going to take a couple of snapshots here. If you're curious what else is here to swipe, we have the snapshot and the five-second GIF. In terms of recording video, what we do have is the built-in gameplay recording on the Quest. If you push a little ''Home Oculus'' button, it'll bring up a screen that has the option of this little arrow here, which is a ''Sharing'' button. Right now I have it recording so I can show this to you. But basically to start recording, you just hit this button. What you'll see is actually a little red dot in the right-hand corner that'll show you that you're recording. When we're recording with this, we can actually see parts of the interface of the game. It's not clearing everything else out like it did in the PC version. That's just something to be aware of. Now, I used this technique to record a couple of different pieces like the swans that I did and also my first notebook, which is a piece by the designer Joey Yu that I recreated in VR. I have my hands behind my back and I'm just rocking to actually use my head as the video camera. This has worked for me before. This is definitely the easiest way to do video on the Quest. About this video recording on Quest, it's recording at 1024 by 1024. Just about the same as an HD square format, which would be 1080 by 1080. If you have no interest or ability to get to a PC, you can use a program called SideQuest to bump up your resolution to 1920 by 1080. I personally never found it quite worth it. But that's also because I had the PC version, which does the type of recording that doesn't show your hands. It's not a gameplay type recording. The 1024 by 1024 is so close to what would be an HD square, that I never quite felt that it was worth it for me. It's this whole extra piece of software that's also a way to side load or add experimental apps and games. Now note they're not pirated. They'd just maybe were rejected by the Oculus Store or maybe there's still an early experimental stages. I haven't used it. I can't troubleshoot with you, but I will link to two really thorough tutorials. The first one is a really in-depth look at how to actually get SideQuest working on your Quest. You have to go into developer mode. There's a bit of steps. But the second one is actually a guy showing specifically how to make that resolution bumped up. You should know that you actually have to go through these steps each time that you turn your headset on. When you turn your headset off, it'll forget these settings. You'll see there is a way to do it is if it's worth it for you, absolutely go for it. If you think this is maybe where you're heading professionally, a lot of people are just going ahead and upgrading to a tethered version on a more powerful computer. Unfortunately, there is also a bug that I wanted to show you that when you're pulling up a snapshot on the Quest 2, you can pull up this camera. Here we go, we can see it. Take a photo. Now, if I switch to the five second GIF and switch back to the snapshot, I've lost my live preview. If I take another shot, I'll show you half the time that looks just like a black and white bar and half the time it's still working. I think I might have been one of the first people to poke the developers about this. Hopefully they're working on it. Unfortunately, if you want to take more than one picture, you have to actually leave Tilt Brush and come back in again, but you'd get one the first time. I know it's not ideal. Hopefully they fix it soon. Now once you connect your Quest, we're looking in the snapshots folder. I'm going to drag this to my desktop so we can view it and now this image is actually pretty high res and that's the benefit of messing with the configuration file even when you have the Quest and then videos. We don't have anything in here because the video that we took was not through Tilt Brush. But if you go into Oculus video shots, you will see some of the videos here. There is an old bug where if you just dragged one video on the desktop, it wouldn't play, it would be corrupted. The trick to that was to actually just drag two at a time and then it worked just fine. But it looks like they might have actually fixed that. Now I have connected my Quest 2, and I want to take a look at this snapshots issue that we were talking about. Here are the two snapshots that we took today. Here's the first one we took, which is looking good and fortunately, here is the second one we took. I'm not sure what's going on with this. It is a known bug, so people are working on it. But I guess to get around this unfortunately, you might have just restart Tilt Brush and then with your first snapshot, you should get a good one. I also wanted to share a few other ways of sharing your 3D sculpt. I'm breezing through this a little bit because I wanted to focus mainly on photo and video for this course. But I wanted you to know you have some more options. There is a Cloud-based way of sharing your sculpt. Both on PC and Quest versions, you'll have this ''Upload'' button and you'll see a sign in for Sketchfab, this blue one and Poly, the little pink one. Poly is a library of sketches run by Google. That's actually really helpful. It's a way to look at other people's work and upload your work to the Internet. The work you see when you first open Tilt Brush is actually from Poly. Also, if you go to poly.google.com, you can browse through other people's work. If you like it with the heart, it'll show up in your gallery. To upload your own, there's a simple sign-in process and it'll take you to a page where you can name and publish your work. Although I have to tell you we're heartbroken, because Google is actually discontinuing it in June of 2021 with upload stopping at the end of April 2021. But if you're watching this video before then, you still have time to use it. But some good news. There's a team working on an open source replacement for Poly called Icosa. It's not ready yet, but they hope to launch around the time that we lose Poly. You can follow along here on their Twitter for more information. We'll still also have the option of Sketchfab. If you go to sketchfab.com/tags/tiltbrush, you can look through things that other people have made and uploaded here. It's not integrated in a way so you can easily jump into each other's work like Poly and also like Icosa hopefully will. But it's still worthwhile to upload 3D files and share them online. From there, you can actually download a 3D file. If you drew on the big background, the theater like I like to do, it'll upload also and you don't need it anymore here. Say about another version of your sculpt first and delete the environment before publishing. You can also export 3D files off of both the PC and Quest versions of Tilt Brush, with a few more file types coming from the PC. On the PC, you'll see an ''Export'' button. If you hit it, that's it. It's pretty simple. Then on your desktop, you'll go to the Tilt Brush folder, exports, and you'll see it kicks out an FBX, a JSON file, a GLB, and a USD file. The FBX and GLB files will both have vertex colors. On the Quest, you can go to more options, labs, and hit the ''Export'' button. Then back on the computer, we're going to look in Tilt Brush and your exports folder and you'll see just the GLB file. A GLB file is a 3D file format used in virtual reality, augmented reality games, and web applications, because it supports motion and animation. It's basically like a lightweight 3D JPEG. Another advantage of the format is its small size and fast load times. It can be imported into a few programs like Blender and converted into an FBX. If you're not advanced into 3D stuff, that'll have no meaning to you and that's okay. It doesn't matter with this class. Since this isn't the focus of my class, if you want to go deeper than I can show you here about how exactly to take Tilt Brush into Unity, Gravity Sketch, and other 3D software, I highly recommend this video by Danny Bittman. So that's as much as I'm going to go into 3D stuff because this class is long and we're really focusing on photo and video. But I wanted you to know that this is here. 13. Wrap Up: Congratulations for completing the class. You have now been initiated into the very exciting world of making art in virtual reality. You've learned how to approach the creation of the illustration, making decisions on how you're going to bring it into space, you've gotten oriented to Google Tilt Brush, gotten comfortable with how to use symbol brushes and color choices to get complex results. I hope you feel empowered right now because you've gotten past the learning curve of bringing your work into a whole new technology. It wasn't that bad? Please upload your project here. You can take a look at the project description. I outlined a couple of different ways that you can share your work. If you're totally new to time-based media and would like some help, check out the bonus video I made. I'll show you how to make a GIF in Photoshop, how to edit video in Photoshop, and how to even make a GIF and after effects if you have access to it. Also please reach out to me with any questions. I hope it's obvious by now, but I love VR and I love seeing how different brains approach these crazy tools. Please keep in touch with me. I'm pretty active on Instagram, my handle is @collinleix. My website is collineix.com. 14. BONUS: Basic Video Editing and Gifs in PS and AE: As a bonus, I've made this video for people who are truly new to making any time-based digital media. A lot of people have Photoshop, and not everybody knows that you can edit video in here. We are going to go Open, and then we're going to open a video. This is one we just made in the quest. Now it pops up and it's going to open with this timeline, which some of you might not have ever seen before. Photoshop has this work bar. Wherever this begins and ends. Once we hit render on the video, this is where it's going to begin and end. We can hit the spacebar and it'll play through your video. Every once in a while this doesn't work. Who knows why? You can hit play and stopover here on the left, first off, and this one's easy to forget. We want to set the frame rate. Over here with these four tiny little lines, hit this button and we can say set timeline frame rate. You can see that 35 frames a second. That's pretty high. That's how these quests videos record. Gameplay recordings can have a high frame per second. I'm going to hit that 24. That's more of a standard frame rate. That's going to help with file sizes on the export. It's going to keep things from being too big. We're also going to make a GIF in here. I'm going to show you how to make a GIF. For that, we might even set that frame rate down to 12. If you just really wanted to cut off the awkward beginnings and endings here, and just have a video of you walking around, upload this to Vimeo or YouTube, then that's how you do it, dragging these work bars. You can also, towards the end of a clip you can see my icon changes. You can use this to roll the clip back. When you let go, everything hops towards the beginning. I'm going to hit undo community. I wanted to show you also if you wanted to, let's say edit out a little bit in the middle of it. There is this pair of scissors on this icon. Let's say I wanted to cut up it out here. You hit that and then it actually cuts. You can see up here, Photoshop treats this as a video group. It has these two different layers. If you wanted, you could role that same clip in like we did earlier. Then that all just hop to the left. I find you have a little bit more control. If you put this new cut layer on a layer above visually, let me show you what I mean. Going to hit command Z to undo. Now with the second clip, I'm going to drag this up and out of that video group onto its own layer. Now I can play a little bit more with where I want something to go. This new layer will completely cover the one below it. I can pull it up here. Maybe even make another cut. They're both highlighted so they both moved, Undo. That way you can see where things are. I find this a little bit nicer to edit with. Now also remember we are in Photoshop and we can alter maybe the brightness and contrast. Let's say we want to change the brightness. As long as the brightness and contrast bar goes across each of your clips, it will affect them all the same. Now let's say that we're happy with this and we want to render out our video. To render this, we're going to go to File, Export, and Render video. We want to change the name of this because we want the name to be different from the video that we're editing and here. Otherwise, the computer could get confused if it seems like we're trying to replace that file. I'm going to call that 2. Here, I can see the path it's going where I want. If you want to change that, you can hit Select Folder, change where it's going to go, and 1024 by 1024, this is what the quest puts out. That's the highest we're going to get from it. 24 frame is a second. You can also go up here and change the format. H.264 is another good one that keeps things lightweight. We can hit render here. Now let's say we wanted to use this to make a GIF. Again, the benefit of doing the GIF in Photoshop is that we're starting from an image that looks nicer than the GIF that the quest put out. Also, it can be longer or shorter than five seconds. Let's say I want to choose a part that's going back and forth. Movement work but to begin here and [inaudible] here. Hit play to test this out. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. This is a little bit longer. Let's see. It's with gifts, It's nice to try to be as concise as possible. Try to make it as short as you need it. Go to the right and goes to [inaudible]. Now I'm going to show you the file size of a gift. If we rendered at 24 frames a second versus 12, to make a gift, we go to File, Export, and Save for Web Legacy. This will bring up a new window. We can see here, it's saying, it's assuming that we want to make it as the same size as the video, which we don't need. It's showing us here right now. It would make a 9.8 megabyte GIF, which is definitely on the big side. Right now this would actually be too large to upload to your skill share Project 8.4 Megs is the largest those can be, but luckily, we definitely don't need it to be 1024 by 1024, it could be, let's say, 700 pixels. You don't want to hit Enter right now because it actually might start rendering out. After you type in a new size, just click into another box. It'll now it's thinking and updating. If it's only going to be 700 pixels across, it'll show us that new smaller size. Then it would only be 4.8 megs, which is a big improvement. Right now this is also using 256 colors. We can experiment with that, a 128 sometimes might be the most that you need. For this, It looks pretty similar. It's not that big again in terms of size. Probably could get away with it. You could do some tests. I'm going to keep it at 256. But so we can see here at 24 frames a second, this will be almost 5 Megs, which is still large. I'm going hit cancel. Now, we're going to change this framing to 12, 12 is still a totally acceptable look for GIF, going to push play. We use 12 frames a second. A lot at work, it's a nice stylized look. Let's see what we have going on here. Now we have half of the frames. It's trying to squeeze into the GIF so you can already see off the bat. It's under 5 Megs and that still at the 1024 by 1024 resolution. Let's see if we want to make this one 700. Now, this is down to even two-and-a-half Megs, which is great, much nicer. This is something you can play with the settings. There's no exact pixel size that I would say. Sometimes we like to do. 800 is still actually on the larger side for gifts, if you want to show off like a nice, beautiful image. This is coming 3.1 megs, which is totally acceptable. With 128 colors, if it looks similar, we can even get this to two-and-a-half. I'm going to choose that and I'm going to just do this 12 frames a second. That's another way to make a GIF. If you happen to have access to After Effects, you can have even more control over how the video plays in time. Now, in my project description here, you'll see this GIF, and I wanted to show you exactly how I got here. You can see there's a nice softness to the way the motion comes in and out, and I made this in After Effects by manipulating keyframes. I'll show you from scratch how I did this. I'm going to bring in my video. This is a video that's 2,048 pixels by 1,152. This is the video that I made with the camera paths on my PC version of Tilt Brush. Now I'm going to drag this into this icon here with a little red square, your green circle, and this creates a new composition from the video, and it's going to take on those specs. If you hit "Command K", that brings up these composition settings. So you can see, it took on the video's width, height, and frame rate. It's a little bit different coming from the camera path tool. I'm going to hit "Okay". I'm not going to make this lower right now and I'll show you why. Now you can hit "Spacebar" to play through your video and decide the area that you want to loop. Similar to Photoshop, there's a work area bar across the top. You click and drag this in, and this is going to decide what's rendered out. If you get to a point you like, you can hit "B" to move the beginning there, and "N" to move the end. I want to cut here, I'm going to hit "Shift Command D", or if you're on a PC, "Shift Control D". I don't need these bars here, so I'm going to get rid of that. Since I want this gift to play forward and backward, and I want that movement to ease, I'm going to use something called time remapping. You can go up to Layer, Time, Enable time remapping. I'm going to zoom in here a little bit. You can zoom in with the plus and minus keys on your keyboard. Now over here on the left, over by time remap, there's a place where you can add a keyframe, and I'm going to add a keyframe at the beginning and the end. I'm going to select my two keyframes, you can just mark key select by dragging, I'm going to hit this button here that goes into the graph editor. This is a place where we can visually play with how keyframes are going to work. Right now, we can't see much. So to see things better, I'm going to hit this button here, fit all graphs to view, and now we can see all of our keys in our graph editor, and this is a straight line because normally time just moves linearly through our video. But if we select both of these keys and hit "F9", that just did something called easy ease on these keyframes. If F9 isn't working for you, I'm going to toggle out of here, you can also highlight these and then right-click, go to keyframe assistant, and get easy ease right here. I'm going to go back into our graph editor. Now I'm going to hit "Play", and you can see there's a little bit more of an ease there. The way that this works is that the steeper this line is, the faster movement happens, and when we have this flatter slope, it's going to play more slowly. If you highlight this, you get these yellow bars and you can actually keep pushing this and manipulate it so that this basically makes us feeling more extreme. You can see now it starts up slower, gets faster for a second, and slows down at the end. Now that's just basically how to manipulate time a little bit with this time remap tool. We're going to get out of the graph editor. Now, I want this to play forwards but also backwards again. To do that, I'm going to duplicate this clip by hitting "Command D" or "Control D" if you're on a PC, then I'm going to move this afterwards, except I want this one to play backwards. We're going to go up to Layer, Time, and then Time-reverse layer. You can see this little bar across the bottom that indicates that it's now moving backwards. Let's see how this feels, and it's going to have that same ease because we just copied the same part. Now, I feel like it's getting a little bit too steepy here in the middle, so often, I just end up playing with this a little bit, maybe we don't want to have every single frame. I'm going to zoom in here. Maybe you can push this back a little bit, you don't need it to be sitting for quite as long, so if I'm going to drag this time reverse layer back a little bit, I just need to make sure to bring in the end of the work bar. Hitting "Play". That is basically how I use timer mapping to make that feel a little more eased. Now, after fixed animators, I love this plug-in called GifGun. You can get this if you're interested at aescripts.com/gifgun. It is $30, but if this is going to be part of your regular workflow, it's totally worth it. So if you buy it here, they'll give you instructions on how to install it. It comes in and it's pretty simple here. We have a Make GIF button, but before we push that, we want to go into these settings. Now from here, we can actually decide what the frame rate will be, so I'm going to do 12, which is why it's okay that we didn't set it before in the composition settings, and choose the width we wanted to reset it to. Loop GIF is going to be on by default, and then we just want to choose where it's going to go. Now, I want to note that the way GifGun works is by creating a video first, and then it creates a GIF from that and deletes it. So you want to make sure that you either are saving to a new place from where this reference video is or that you change the name because otherwise, it might try to delete your original video. I'm going to call that 2, then I'm going to hit "Make GIF". Now you can see here, it's still thinking. It made MOV storybook 2, and then deleted it. It wouldn't have been a problem because this is an MP4 file, but just something to be aware of, you don't want this GIF to have the same name as the video that came in if it's a.MOV. There we go. You can see here, it's 2.8 megs, which is a decent size. I would call this a beauty GIF, it's not meant to be a small little meme online or something. If you wanted to really show off your artwork, this is a great way of making a nice looking GIF, and the 12 frames a second is totally plenty. Now, if you can't access GifGun, if that's just not possible, you also can render out a video from After Effects and then just use that Photoshop process to make a GIF from Photoshop. The way you render a video is just composition, add to render queue, then you can go in here, choose your settings, good time is fine, hit "Okay", choose where it saves. So that's two more ways you can make GIFs to show off your work online and in your class projects, and I really hope this was helpful.