Artist insight - 10 TIPS TO GET STARTED IN QUILL

Director and virtual reality creative Dan Franke shares his advice for sketching, storyboarding and painting an animation project in VR

- Dan Franke

Artist PROFILE

Dan Franke

LOCATION: Germany

Dan is a director and VR artist based in Germany. He’s the co-founder of Studio Syro, a virtual animation studio with an international team of artists. He’s working on the second season of Tales from Soda Island, the world’s first VR series that’s entirely created in VR. studiosyro.com

When we came to make our new VR animated short Namoo, which we call a narrative poem brought to life, Oculus Quill was the obvious choice to achieve the painterly look we wanted. Quill is a VR painting and animation software created by Smoothstep, which enables you to make art in a virtual space, in 360 degrees. It’s quite amazing and not too challenging to pick up and begin having fun with.

Imagine not being limited to painting on a 2D surface such as on a drawing tablet, but in 3D and all around you, and then taking your creations in your hand and moving them through space to animate them. This is what Quill offers, and while we’ve used it to create our movie, it can be used for all sorts of VR art and animation projects.

In the following 10 tips I’ll walk you through some key capabilities of Quill and the things to keep in mind when creating a VR film like Namoo. We’ll look at sketching in a 3D space, using the software to storyboard, animating frame-by-frame… all sorts of tips and techniques to get you started.

1 SKETCHING IN QUILL