Analyses of Medium from Oculus

Another dimension to the screen

By utilizing the three dimensional tracking that virtual reality offers, Medium lets artists transfer a number of skills they may have acquired from sculpting clay to bringing it into the digital world to be animated and used for Movies and Video Games. What's important about this is that as the generation is currently shifting to a digital world, many sculpture that originally started with sculpting by getting their hands dirty with clay and silicone will now be able to ease into the digital format more smoothly

A step above the real world

In contrast to sculpting in the real world though, the artist have access to tool that they would never be able to do in the real world such as scaling the model size and rotating the model to get access to angles that would've been difficult if not impossible to achieve without damaging previous progress. By scaling the model larger, the user would be able to adjust and add minute details.

Compare and Collaborate

Developers appreciate the ability to even view the models immediately through their Virtual Reality headset as well as collaborate with one another in real time! This makes it easier to make sure the art design fits well with one another so that nothing is too out of place. By being able to put the model in their environment and walk around them, the artist can get an idea of what it will be like from the user's perspective ahead of time without the need to import it into the game engine.

By also being able to collaborate, the artist can give feedback to one another as they work as well as assist one another on the same model. The downside, however, is that as of their update 1.2, Medium only support up to two users at once to a shared workspace.

It doesn't do everything though

One of the most notable things to point out about the Medium is that there isn't a way to precisely line up and add constraint to the object like a Computer-aided Design software would such as Autodesk Inventor or Solid Works. Everything would have to be done by eye and scaled appropriately, but at least the 3D model is capable of being ported out to be 3d printed.

Another feature I would like to see that isn't in Medium is a way for the user to add skeleton and animate the models. As of now, this feature isn't apparent in any of the version and most users who do animation after sculpting their models in Medium would use software such as Torvi or Glycon.

Conclusion

Oculus's 3D modeling software, Medium, is quite impressive. There are a lot of benefits to sculpting in Medium that it shares with the real world. From the natural feel to the collaborate sculpting, sculpting in VR seems like it will be the mainstream way for 3D Artist to create models. It won't have the precision and accuracy of a CAD program, nor the ability to animate the models the user create but there's at least other program that can perform those tasks in place of Medium for now.