VR Art Tools for Environment Blockouts?

jStins

So one annoying aspect of creating environments for VR is not really knowing how a space will feel until you're in the headset. This means that periods of quick iteration involve a lot of moving in and out of the headset. Make a change, check it in VR, adjust, check again. Repeat until your perfect hairdo is ruined and you're annoyed that iterating is slow and clunky instead of fast and creative. 

My studio is considering developing some in house tools to alleviate this, but I want to do my due diligence and see if there's already something out there that works well specifically for environments. I have tried Tilt Brush, Medium and Blocks so far (only a few hours each so please let me know if I'm missing something). The main issue I'm encountering is that these apps are mostly focused on creating objects, rather than spaces. Scale also seems to be a bit fuzzy. I'd love to be able to specify an overall area in real world units, create a few landmark pieces of geometry at specific sizes, locations and orientations. From there, being able to navigate through a space rather than around an object while placing, scaling and rotating primitives would be ideal. So, any recommendations? 

I think I recall seeing 3DSMax coming out with a VR mode. There is also this for Maya, but we only have Maya LT at the moment. We're using Unity so anything on the Asset Store that fits the bill would also be great. 

Thanks!

musashidan

Max' s VR mode is just a bridge to Stingray which, not surprisingly, was killed by Adesk a few months back. What DCC are you using? Surely Unity has some sort of VR editing like UE4 does?

jStins

Thanks @musashidan . Most of our artists are on Maya LT with one on 3DSMax, but it sounds like the Max solution is a non-starter. We use Unity and it looks like there is an EditorVR package out there. I'll set that up today and report back. Cheers.

jStins

Hm, so I've been trying to get this working on various versions of Unity with no luck, but it looks promising. https://github.com/Unity-Technologies/EditorXR

There's also this tool on the asset store that looks like it could work: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/cinext-vr-runtime-editor-104328 anyone have experience with it?

/Edit: OK, I was being stupid and missed something in the EditorVR from Unity and it's working now. First impressions are good, but I need to give it some more time and practical world building to say for certain. It would be nice to have this released as an official package or part of the native Unity install rather than an 'Experimental' feature. Hopefully soon...