It’s only been 18 months since VR big name Oculus released its immersive creation platform Medium, but a new version of their flagship sculpting tool is now out, offering artists some of their biggest wish list requests.
The latest update offers core sculpting features like increased layer limit, grid snapping and multiple lights, helping to solidify Medium’s position as both a powerful and professional creative tool on the VR market.
There’s also good news for users of the Oculus Rift Core 2.0 headset, with the Rift’s customizable user space of Oculus Home now being able to include sculpts created in VR via direct exporting. A great chance then to show off your interior design skills for those decorating their virtual Home with the headset.
Medium 2.0 also introduces a new file management system, scene graph, and a major UI facelift that allows for faster and more intuitive navigation of Medium’s tools, settings and options. What this essentially means is that artists can spend more time in creative flow, ideation, and production.
Beyond new tools and improved integration with artists’ existing production pipelines, Medium 2.0 has an increased rendering horsepower for improved performance among professionals and novices alike. Also on offer are new tutorials to help you adopt the new tools like Layer Resolution Visualization and the new Elastic Move tool as part of your workflow, all of which can be watched here on the Oculus site.
The creative community played a key part in developing this new update, thanks to Oculus’ Featured galleries and active forums. Moreover, the Oculus Medium Artist Council — a group of over 100 professional artists from the film and games industries— were tasked in providing feedback and helping Oculus guide development to make Medium a professional art tool for the VR design community.
“A lot of work on Medium 2.0 was based on data from real-world usage of Medium,” explains Graphics Engineer David Farrell. “For example, the improvements to memory usage came from careful analysis of sculpts that people had made, and then improving our data structures to better support those sculpts.”
Oculus Medium can be purchased for £22.99 on the Oculus site; users should note the new update requires Windows 10 as part of the Rift’s newly updated recommended and minimum specs. And if you’re looking for other VR-based creative apps, check out our marketplace where you can find cool 3D models that can be used in VR.