Painting on a flat surface, etc

aleph 2018-06-01 03:29:15 UTC #1

I am just beginning with Masterpiece VR, but I would like to have:

A way to paint on a flat surface (a canvas, for example). This may seem odd, but now that VR allows me to paint as a real painter do, with bold strokes, it would be nice to do some “traditional” painting.
More brush shapes, and perhaps a way to import custom brushes. The current offering is too limited.
The same with inks. None of the few options available look like real painting material (oil or crayon, for example). Have a look at Tilt Brush and you will see what I mean.
A way to resize your material without resizing the brushes or sculpting tools, in order to do fine details. I noticed that brush size also changes when you resize whatever you are working on, which makes the whole exercise almost pointless.
Some sort of knife or sharp tool to cleanly cut and puncture sculptures. As far as I can tell, there is no way to make, say, lips or eyes.
A way to close and reopen the large left-hand “palette” to get it out of the way without having to do that individually with each section.

Morganicism 2018-06-04 14:22:24 UTC #2

This is understandable, and it’s something we may work on in the future.
There could be some improvement here, though we do want to keep the selection here minimal (because we want to keep our focus on sculpting). Importing would be a possibility.
We could have more/better brushes, I agree. Again this wasn’t a focus. We’d likely revisit this if we worked on 2D painting.
I understand where you’re coming from with this, but I wouldn’t say it makes resizing pointless. The tool sizes are relative to the sculpture size. The size limits are in place to avoid performance issues or making the tool too small.
I think what you’re looking for is the etching shape. It’s alongside the other sculpting shapes like cube and sphere.
You can detach the palette from your left hand by selecting the button on the right side of your controller. Once you’ve done this you could scale the palette down so it’s out of view.

This is all great feedback, thank you.

aleph 2018-06-05 02:00:52 UTC #3

Thanks for the prompt and detailed reply. I bought MasterpieceVR because I thought it could both painting and sculpting with a greater level of control than, respectively, Google’s Tilt Brush and Blocks. It does offer both activities, but in a very limited fashion. For painting, at present Tilt Brush is clearly better. For sculpting, I’d say the two are comparable. I do enjoy the program and I understand it’s not my place to point the direction it should head, but I believe if you are to compete with Google’s offerings (and they are known for doing complex things with a simple interface), you should offer something they don’t. In my view, a flexible and full-featured art program would be just that.

Concerning my issues:

When the tool resizes with the sculpture, you can’t do fine details - say, a large sculpture with thin lines drawn or cut into it or the eyebrows in a painting. As to making the tool too small, you could just set a lower limit (which could even be a dot). In Tilt Brush, for instance, you can expand a lifesize face to gigantic proportions in order to paint small details and then reduce it back to the original size. Would that make the object too complex to handle? If so, that must be a feature of VR, not of computers, which can handle objects with many vertexes. Perhaps there could be a warning with an option to simplify it visually or reduce supersampling in order to preserve performance.
Concerning the cutting tool, the problem I am facing is that sculpted objects are “soft”. Whatever you do affects and deforms the rest, as in wet clay. I would like to have a tool that allows me to do a clean angular cut, as if the object were made of stone. Perhaps there could be a setting to define, before you start, if what you will be sculpting is “soft” or “hard” (meaning non-deformable).
Detaching the palette, just like closing its windows, is much more complicated than just clicking on a button to close it completely and then opening it again in the same place.

TheSpiritAmbassador 2018-06-07 18:11:07 UTC #4

Hey Aleph, just another user here however I have about 160 hrs in the software. Ditto on most of what you’re suggesting. In the beta tap, top right of the guides menu there is a draw on a plane feature which doesn’t quite lend itself to traditional painting but allows you to restrict your work to a flat plane.

You can also alter the shape of your tools in sculpt mode by shooting the beta button on your dominant hand with the laser from your menu hand.

Check out some of the work from Ian Crighton or myself. Both of us stuck with it and reached a certain level of detail using the tools so far presented.