How to Import Avatar Outfits Hand-Made in Tilt Brush to Wear in High Fidelity

I told you about that nifty hack for importing basic 3D objects created in Vive's Tilt Brush into the social VR world of High Fidelity, and now HiFi user XaosPrincess has gone the next step up: Creating a costume in Tilt Brush, then importing that to actually wear on her High Fidelity avatar. (And a pretty smashing ballroom gown at that.)

"I imported an object-file of my avatar's body into Tilt Brush and painted the dress onto it using the mirror mode," she tells me. "Then I exported the finished dress as an FBX and imported it to the Blender session I exported the avatar's body from. In Blender I adjusted the dress to the avatar making sure it's measurements, rotation and pivot point had the same specifications as the avatar. After a bit of cosmetic tweaking (deleting some vertices and bending others) I transferred the weights from my avatar's body to the dress. Then I exported the whole avatar including the dress as an FBX again and imported it into High Fidelity."

Whew. You can read her even more detailed and illustrated tutorial here. As with the 3D model created in VR and then printed in real life, this is another example of virtual reality technology reviving talents associated with old school, non-digital arts:

"What I really love about creating in Tilt Brush is the fact that with all this ever more advancing technology of VR we get back to working with our hands again," as Xaos puts it. "And of course the 'meta effect' of creating something to wear in VR within VR itself is quite mind-blowing too... it takes you back to working with your hands, to craftsmanship in its original sense.

"As in for instance goldsmithing or painting, also in Tiltbrush your main focus is on doing the perfect hand movement at the right time, is what makes it a kind of sensual experience and this is great fun.

"Also the outcome is a much more organic one than what you would get from a 3D platform. Say I'd done the contra-rotating waves of the dress' structured skirt in Blender, I probably couldn't have helped but let Blender calculate them in a very precise, symmetrical, re-occuring, etc. way. The result would probably have been very polished, but would always have shown that the dress in fact had rather been calculated than made by hand. It's precisely these 'flaws' of your body (as opposed to a robot) not being able reproduce calculated movements on the point that give these VR-creations a 'natural touch' and thus let them look very original and individual."

I'm still not convinced high-end VR is destined for a mass market, but I'm also fully convinced we'll see many more interesting use cases like this in coming years.

Hat tip: Michelle Osorio.

Comments

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[JohnC]

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