Over the past three years, we have grown an amazing community of professional designers, artists, and students. We work closely with the community to further develop Gravity Sketch to better fit their workflows. Every day we speak with customers and users to gain insights and a better understanding of how they work, what motivates them and what we can do better as a team.
As we expand our focus into the collaborative space and workflows which include a variety of roles from designers, to engineers, to clients; we are reaching out to key community members to gather insights and feedback. We are sharing some answers from a few typical questions about VR design we ask in our sessions – we are calling this the Five Questions series.
Today we are sharing answers from Lloyd Allan – Concept Artist at Guerrilla Games (see his ArtStation portfolio here)
Watch the video below to hear directly from Lloyd how he uses Gravity Sketch in his workflow.
How did you first discover Gravity Sketch and what drew your attention?
I was inspired by other concept artists using Gravity Sketch to define totally new workflows. I saw an incredible video done by an artist Min Guen making a sailing ship, as an entry for the Gravity Sketch Christmas competition, and it blew my mind. When I saw that something like that was possible in VR I had to try it out asap!
How did you integrate Gravity Sketch into your workflow?
Now instead of starting a sketch in 2d I can dive straight into 3d and start roughing out my idea just as quickly and intuitively as 2D sketching. However, everything is 3d so the information is much more exact and in line with what I have in my mind. Once I get something that works for me I export the model as an OBJ file and take it to the next step of my workflow for rendering in Blender. Here I set up cameras and frame the composition I feel is best to showcase the work. The great thing here is that because all of the work is 3D I can grab any angle or shot I want.
What excites you about remote virtual collaboration (Co-Creation) in this current work climate?
The ability to concept and create with another artist in real-time fills my mind with a lot of ideas and inspiration. Exploring collaborative workflows and the ability to review parts of a complete model stroke-by-stroke as the concept is coming to life can be an extremely powerful productivity aid, speeding up the workflow exponentially. This feels a lot like a brainstorming session in 3d. In addition to the creative gains, this will be a perfect tool for reviewing work with Art Directors and Clients at full scale. Being able to step into a creation and experience it together from each individual’s perspective for the early stages is something totally new. The ability to catch issues and address challenging areas of a piece of work that you may only catch once a lot of time and development has been done is a huge advantage to the workflow.
Where do you feel Co-Creation could have the biggest impact in the entire design process?
Co-Creation provides a platform for artists to develop unique workflows and new ways to discuss ideas or hold reviews. This will have the knock-on effect of helping artists grow faster and develop a richer understanding of the fundamentals of 3D. Artists will team up to help each other develop work, or deliver on a brief collectively by working on different parts of a piece of work simultaneously. This is a strong community building tool as well. Multiple people can review work together and give each other feedback at various stages of a project’s development.
What words of wisdom would you share with people who are considering diving into VR design for the first time?
Creating in VR is very different from traditional 3d software so don’t let the term ‘VR’ prevent you from giving this a try. Stepping into the 3d world, being able to generate strokes and polygons with the wave of your hand feels more like digital crafting rather than a conventional digital design with a keyboard and mouse. Being able to walk around something you sketch out at life-size or making it tiny and holding it in the palm of your hand is definitely something new and special. For this alone it is worth experiencing and now that I have there is no going back!
