Building a Scene in VR Using Adobe Medium and Blender Eevee

Introduction

My name’s Andrew and I’m a Concept Artist from Toronto currently attending my final semester at Laguna College of Art and Design studying Entertainment Design. My training focused on traditional mediums and art fundamentals with classes like figure drawing, sculpture, and oil painting early on and moved to design, abstraction, and storytelling as I approached graduation. My work can be found at https://www.andrewtranart.com/

I learned Blender during my free time because of its ease of access and growing popularity since 2.8. Jama Jurabaev has in-depth tutorials on his Gumroad that go over how to use Blender as a Concept Artist. Youtube is also a great supplemental learning tool as most solutions can be found there if you run into any hurdles.

I learned Blender during my free time because of its ease of access and growing popularity since 2.8. Jama Jurabaev has in-depth tutorials on his Gumroad that go over how to use Blender as a Concept Artist. Youtube is also a great supplemental learning tool as most solutions can be found there if you run into any hurdles.

I had the opportunity to take Armand Serrano’s Advanced Visual Development Mentorship class this Summer, and he stressed the importance of having 3D as a tool in visual development and was one of the reasons why I jumped into VR sculpting. My training in 3D programs was minimal but the nature of virtual reality made the switch into 3D much smoother and felt more intuitive due to the added dimension VR provides. 

The release of cheaper hardware like the Oculus Quest 2 and software like Adobe Medium and Blender being completely free have really lowered the barrier to entry for students and professionals looking to start using this workflow.

About the Scene

This project was for my graduating senior portfolio class. I recently started using VR to design and was surprised at how quick and effective tool it was and wanted to explore it further with a challenging concept. With VR, I can simultaneously design as I model which speeds up my workflow. This scene, in particular, was inspired by the architecture in my hometown Toronto with a cyberjunky twist.

Sculpting in VR

I use Adobe Medium with the Oculus Rift for the sculpting process, export it as an .fbx into Blender for lighting and materials, and finish in Photoshop for touch-ups if needed. I spend 90% of my time sculpting in Medium.

I’m running this on a gaming desktop PC with an RTX 2080, an Intel i7 7700K, and 32 GB of RAM.

I start off the sculpt by blocking in the large shapes using the cube stamp. It’s beneficial to have some idea of what you’re building before starting by gathering reference and doing some sketches if needed. At this stage, I’m focusing on a good balance of big, medium, and small shapes. Much like a thumbnail sketch, it should feel good at this stage before moving forward into smaller shapes and details.

An example of how quickly you can do block-ins for similar scenes. The key to this method is to make use of angle snapping and stamp constraints so you get clean planes.

Medium has a single/continuous stamp functionality which allows quick stamping of shapes that come bundled with the program. Custom shapes are also possible by creating a sculpt on a separate layer and saving it as a stamp. I use the line constraint modifier to limit my stamp’s movements to one axis.

Cutting into shapes is very intuitive and is what I feel is the most powerful feature in Medium. Double tapping the gear icon on the right controller switches your current stamp into subtracting mode which allows you to effectively cut into or chip away at your sculpt. Using this method, you can quickly make doors, windows, etc. and open up large interior spaces which can be developed further if desired.

A benefit of working in VR is that you get an inherent sense of scale. Scaling your model up and down is done by holding down the grip buttons and moving your hands further or closer apart. This lets you zoom in to an area for detailed work or to zoom out for larger shapes and to assess the work.

Working on the Topology in VR

You can adjust the resolution of each sculpt layer within Medium. For this project, I used mainly one layer as I tend to jump around and this allows me to cut into any area of the model without having to switch to that layer. The final model is around 18 million triangles and can be exported as a .obj or .fbx.

Scene Assembly in Blender

The base model was done in Medium so there’s very little tweaking within Blender itself. The .fbx imports the layer information, so each layer can be adjusted to its own material if needed. I use the Extreme PBR Evo With 1100+ Materials addon for materials in Blender.

Rendering Setup

Blender’s Eevee engine allows me to see in real-time what the lighting scenario and composition looks like as I adjust and tweak as desired. I use a combination of a plugin called Physical Starlight and Atmosphere and HDRIs to light my scene.

I use an addon called Extra Lights that adds physically-based, photometric lighting presets to the Add menu. I move the lights to where I want it to be for the scene and adjust intensity and warmth.

About Blender Eevee

I love the real-time rendering of Eevee. It allows me to preview what the final will look like as I’m working on the scene. I also render the final image using Eevee as well because of the speed since I’m bringing it into Photoshop to either paint over or tweak anyways.

Andrew Dat Tran, Concept Artist

Interview conducted by Arti Sergeev