We believe that Virtual Reality is perfectly suited for creation tasks such as 3D modelling. Therefore, we have analysed how experts of mesh modelling applications, such as Autodesk Maya, Blender or Trimble SketchUp, work and interact with their tools and upon on this expertise we created a novel mesh modelling interface for Virtual Reality. Furthermore, we have considered research results of groups who have already created related applications and precursors in the field of Virtual-Reality-based modelling and we have incorporated their lessons learned into our system. The outcome is an innovative and intuitive interface for the creation of virtual 3D objects which can even be 3D printed.

ClayMore supports mesh operations such as selection of mesh elements as well as translation, rotation and scaling. Furthermore, mesh areas can be duplicated, deleted and extruded to new forms as well as be cut into separated parts. The application supports the Razer Hydra, Oculus DK2 and HTC Vive.

We have found in a user study that our application is as fast as the “big” modelling applications such as Blender and Autodesk Maya. Even the creation of complex models is possible as the figures of the bike and the sail boat shows. Our future plans are: We would like to take more advantage of the natural and fast interface of Virtual Reality and further increase the modelling speed and we would like to create a collaborative “multi-player” feature for allowing people, who are distributed around the world, to participate on modelling sessions.

Publications

  1. Best Demo Award GI VR/AR Workshop 2016: http://www.cit-ec.de/de/vrar2016/wettbewerb
  2. Full Paper: P. Ladwig, J. Herder, and C. Geiger. Towards Precise, Fast and Comfortable Immersive Polygon Mesh Modelling: Capitalising the Results of Past Research and Analysing the Needs of Professionals. In ICAT-EGVE 2017 – International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments. The Eurographics Association, 2017

http://www.diglib.eg.org/handle/10.2312/egve20171360

Contact

Philipp Ladwig, Jens Herder, Christian Geiger, Jannik Fiedler, Jan Beutgen