Trying out Tilt Brush with Oculus Quest 2!

2 weeks ago, I made the decision to purchase a VR headset, Oculus Quest 2. It was quite a difficult decision to make, but I finally went through with it. The reason I wanted to have a VR headset, was to get familiar with this new piece of technology that I’m still very unfamiliar with and to try out painting in VR.

One of the artists I follow on Instagram apparently uses an application called ‘Quill’ to paint and animate 3d objects or characters. I was going to try out Quill initially, but in order to use Quill with the Oculus Quest 2, I needed to attach a link cable, which I don’t have and must additionally purchase. Luckily, there is another VR painting app that I was interested in and recommended previously, which is an app called ‘Tilt Brush’. It lacks animation features, but as a newbie in the VR and 3d world, I won’t mind using a simpler tool to work with.

I’ve started using the app just a few days ago, and here are my 2 attempts so far :

Obviously, I did do a few rough and bad sketches before getting to this point. But now I’m already quite confident with my way around the app and knowing the available brushes. It’s nice to slap digital oil paint around and see it float in space. It’s also very easy to resize your work, and it’s quite fun when you notice that you are painting inside your own painting, if that makes sense. You could start drawing in a standard size, and then blow it up to create a large painting that could even be an environment all in itself.

There are quite some options of brushes in Tilt Brush and not all of them are static-paint-like brushes. Some of the brushes have movements or some kind of glowing effect on them. As for someone who doesn’t really like to work with many brushes, this could get a little overwhelming. I decided to try and stick to the paint-like brushes that are available, and that gave me peace of mind while painting. Another way to learn to utilize the available brushes is to open a featured sketch from the available gallery. There are amazing artworks made with Tilt Brush in this gallery, and studying these sketches more closely might give hints on how to use the brushes, especially the special kind of brushes with glow or movements.

Mixing and working with colors is a bit of a struggle for me. You see, I really like using photoshop to work out the colors of my illustrations, and one of the best parts of coloring in with photoshop is seeing how colors will change when you put a slightly lower opacity color over another one. I was fascinated by this technique for a very long time and viewed it as a unique part of my illustration style. Unfortunately, there is no opacity setting for brush in Tilt Brush for now. In the end, I concluded that I won’t be able to replicate the way I color in Photoshop and must find another way to work out my illustrations with this app.

I’m someone who is not very comfortable creating things in 3D. A lot of the art and entertainment world nowadays always has some kind of 3D technique going into it, and I think I may have been avoiding it for some time. With Tilt Brush, I could recreate a 3D piece with the motion of drawing like I always do, and I think that really help ease me stepping into 3D.