Bryant Koshu talked about creating concepts for the VR game Archangel using Oculus Medium and discussed the advantages of the program.
Bryant Koshu talked about creating concepts for the VR game Archangel using Oculus Medium and discussed the advantages of the program. More about the project you ca find here.
Introduction
My name is Bryant “Momo” Koshu, and I am a concept artist at Skydance Interactive. I’ve mainly worked on Archangel and Archangel: Hellfire concepting characters and environments. Currently, I am working on concepts for the upcoming Walking Dead: Saints and Sinners.
Archangel
One of the biggest challenges I faced during the production of Archangel was to create a 2D concept and translating that into VR view. Traditionally, I would concept out in Photoshop and flesh out the concept in 3D using other 3D programs. However, sometimes the translation from Photoshop to other 3D programs doesn’t quite look how I envisioned. On top of that, the time it took to paint a concept in Photoshop and build the model afterward in 3D took weeks and sometimes months. During the production of Archangel, I discovered I could use a VR sculpting program called Oculus Medium.
Oculus Medium
Oculus Medium is a voxelized sculpting program in VR space. You use the two Oculus controllers as a sculpting tool and sculpt whatever you imagine just like a traditional sculpture. Oculus Medium helped me visualize my concepts in VR space quickly. This became especially helpful when designing the cockpits. I was able to sculpt freely, using all the space around me, rather than sculpting with the constraints of a traditional 2D monitor.
The details of the models in Oculus Medium are not as refined as finalized models in other 3D programs. However, since I was freely able to sculpt in VR space, Medium was extremely efficient as a concept artist to sculpt out an idea really fast. Once I get the general form down in VR space, I would export the mesh into other 3D programs like ZBrush or 3ds Max, and flesh out the details.
Since the overall shape of the concept was modeled in VR space using Oculus Medium, the translation to detail out the model in Max or ZBrush was easy. I would make a high poly detailed model of the concept from Oculus Medium and afterward, hand it off to Nathan Lange who is our 3D Modeler and he would take care of the rest.
The advantage of using Oculus Medium was to be able to do concept in VR space. This approach was very efficient since we were creating a VR game. The only flaw to this method is that I would feel dizzy after wearing a headset for so long, so I end up having to rest every now and then.
Bryant Koshu, Concept Artist
Interview conducted by Kirill Tokarev