Google's open-source Tilt Brush: Now you can create 3D movies in VR
Google's Daydream VR headset could benefit from more 3D content. To fill that need it's released a new toolkit that helps artists bring their 3D sketches to life as games, music videos and stories.
Google has been showing off a number of 3D art and animations created with its Tilt Brush app, such as this undersea clip, and another peeking into a gnome's living room, which Daydream users can immerse themselves in on YouTube.
The company released Tilt Brush 3D sketch program last April and is testing the tech with dozens of established artists via its Tilt artists in residence program.
The new open-source Tilt Brush toolkit can help artists create their own immersive scenes, storylines, tours or, for example, animations that react to music.
"We're sharing all our brush shaders, our audio reactive code, a streamlined Unity import pipeline, file-format conversion utilities, and several great examples so hobbyists and professionals can showcase their Tilt Brush art in new places, on new platforms, and in new ways," says Google.
As noted by UploadVR, Google open-sourced this toolset last year, shortly after announcing the Daydream headset. It has now updated the kit on GitHub with an SDK for the popular Unity VR/AR game engine.
The documentation offers a number of examples for how it can be used to build out sketches by adding interactive storylines, a sequence that moves to the beat of music, or enable a controller to navigate through a scene.
It also has a number of reusable scripts to create looping animations, teleport between places in a sketch, and timeline animation.
The toolkit should help Google's ambition to bring mobile VR to the masses with the $80 Daydream headset. So far, only its Pixel phones and the Moto Z work with Daydream, but other phones will support it soon, including the ZTE Axon 7, the ASUS ZenFone AR, and the Huawei Mate 9 Pro.
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- Google Daydream View VR headset available in November for $79