Kitbashing in VR

A Senior 3D Artist Stefan Wacker gave an overview of his workflow for creating quick concepts of 3D assets and environments in virtual reality.

What is it all about?

VR sculpting has become much more than just a fun gimmick.
Right now it can be a powerful tool in pre-production and in the concept phase for games and films. Chances are high that it will be ready for full production soon.

For showcasing this I created a few 3D concepts in Oculus Medium setting myself a time limit of one hour per concept, including kitbash asset creation.

Why VR?

In VR you can perform various operations like placing and rotating at once while checking your results instantly.
Since you have got such a strong presence in the three-dimensional room you will get more rewarding results in a much shorter period of time than sitting in front of a two-dimensional screen.

Oculus Medium (as most of VR sketch and sculpt tools) is easy to pick up and I have seen newbies creating great art with it.

How to import kitbash assets in Medium

Oculus Medium comes with a large library of assets for sculpting, so-called stamps.
To create custom stamps for Medium you can use every software that can export .obj or .fbx files.
It is recommendable to use waterproof low to mid poly meshes which are pre triangulated.

Here I exported a .stl le from fusion 360, opened it in Zbrush and converted it to an .obj file.

Open Medium, browse to the stamp reference menu and press the import button in the lower right corner.

Or…

… create your stamps right within Medium:

Show the results

Once you have finished your masterpiece it is time for exporting.
Since Oculus Medium is a voxel sculpting tool and we need polygon meshes for further usage we need to export it as .obj or .fbx.
Be sure to export with the highest resolution to get the best results.

Working with layers in Medium is crucial for splitting up your mesh later.
A layer in Medium becomes a polygroup in Zbrush.

Next, I split these polygroups in Zbrush into subtools, decimated these subtools using the decimation master (for a better render performance) and exported everything as .obj or .fbx files. I chose Marmoset Toolbag to render out a turntable.
The subtools from Zbrush serve as our material slots in Toolbag. 

Conclusion

You can get highly detailed 3D models in minutes to hours that can be shown to an Art Director, handed out to the modeling department or even being used for set dressing in a film.
You will nd interesting forms and iterate over them much faster than ever before.

It is time to uncrate your VR headset and jump down the rabbit hole of sketching in virtual reality.