Custom VR Modeling Tool

Timothy Johnson is working on a new tool for modeling in VR that can drastically improve developer’s life.

Timothy Johnson is working on a new tool for modeling in VR. The artist wants to take the low poly modeling process from 3DSMax and implement it in VR. The goal here is to start and finish an entire model inside one VR app, then export it straight to any game engine for immediate use. Tim primarily focuses on the mesh tools right now and then he’ll start dealing with UVs and texturing.

The other extreme is something like Google Blocks, which can give nice low poly meshes that could fit right in to many current low poly styles. The tools it offers though lack many ways 3D modellers are used to interacting with meshes, quads and n-gons get triangulated the instant they become non planar, there’s no edgeloop selection (because everything is triangulated), the poly splitting tools don’t appear to work like any I’ve ever seen before and to top it all off if you extrude two faces that share a common edge, they’re extruded individually instead of as a group, arrg!

Starting my own is something I’ve thought about since I got my Vive back in 2015, I just always thought that some big company with a full team of 9 to 5 workers would produce the tool I wanted faster and better than I could. But here we are, mid 2017, and VR modelling still lacks somewhat.

Timothy Johnson 

Timothy is constantly sharing updates on his progress, providing details on the tool’s possibilities. Here is his journal from Polycount:

Aug 03:
Vert / Edge / Face selection all in, vert welding, deleting & removing, extrusion, collapsing

Aug 05:
Tools palette, rudimentary mesh grabbing, welding extended to verts on borders
Aug 07:
Multi-selection, edgeloop and border selection

And here are some of his future plans:

  • Capping borders and inserting edgeloops
  • Grid snapping
  • Selection scaling
  • Mesh saving/loading
  • Smoothing groups
  • Colour palette picker instead of random

You can follow the progress here

Join discussion

Comments 0

    You might also like

    We need your consent

    We use cookies on this website to make your browsing experience better. By using the site you agree to our use of cookies.Learn more