Jan 20, 2017 | By Benedict

Giovanni Nakpil, a character artist who has worked for Valve and Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), has used the Oculus Medium VR sculpting and painting tool to create an incredibly detailed 3D ogre. The ogre was later 3D printed in full color using a Stratasys 3D printer.

Napkil's ogre, made with the Oculus Medium VR sculpting tool

High-quality virtual reality, as evidenced in devices like the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, may be relatively new, but that hasn’t stopped a handful of digital experts getting to grips with various VR tools in lightning-fast fashion. Take Giovanni Napkil, for example, an expert character artist, who has just made a shockingly detailed 3D sculpture of an ogre using the Oculus Medium sculpting and painting tool. The beast is in fact so “lifelike” that some viewers had trouble believing it was made using only virtual hands.

While most casual Oculus VR users will have nowhere near the same artistic skill set as Napkil, the expert sculptor did share a snippet of information about his process to give Medium users a starting point for recreating his work. Napkil noted that, to achieve the rich color textures evident on the 3D model, he first layered in a light wash of warm tones on the ogre's face, before painting the crevices and recessed areas a darker tone of brownish red. Variations on the broader surfaces were made by adding some thin spindly patterns that ended up looking just like veins.

The 3D printed version of the VR-made model

Oculus Medium, the VR software used to create the 3D ogre, is billed as an “immersive VR experience” that lets users sculpt, paint, and model tangible objects in a VR environment. The software uses Touch controllers that provide artists of any skill level with a natural, tactile creative experience. The tool is designed to be used on Oculus VR hardware such as the Rift and smartphone-transforming Gear VR.

Back to the matter at hand, and what’s perhaps most impressive about Napkil’s 3D VR creation is the fact that the immersive colors have so successfully transferred onto the 3D printed version of the model. This, according to the artist, was largely thanks to a Stratasys J750 3D printer, a full-color printer capable of producing up to 350,000 colors. And while the high-end 3D printer did not emulate some of the digital model’s “wet” appearance, the model did not require a single lick of additional touch-up paint after printing, nor any other post-processing steps like sanding.

Another of Napkil's 3D creations

Napkil’s 3D printed beast may be spectacular, but when you consider the fact that the artist has worked on characters for movie franchises like The Avengers and Star Trek, it’s easy to understand why.

 

 

Posted in 3D Design

 

 

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