This aint really Medium exactly but I figure since Medium is kinda the reason I found myself wrestling with fistfuls of sticky mud last night it would make sense to post about it here. So, yeah, last night I began meatspace sculpting classes. What a trip! Over the next few months I shall use this thread to compile an in depth review of meatspace.
First thing I noticed about meatspace - Gravity is a constant. Sticky mud is not! When I put clay somewhere (proper Medium clay, not this weird meatspace equivalent) I fully expect it to be there when I come back to it. This is not the case with sticky mud which will droop and flop and generally just conspire to gamify the whole - applying mass where I want it to go - business. The mud had me pwnt for a while. Never play against an opponent who's dictating the rules.
Fortunately sculpting teacher was armed with information on how to combat sticky mud's obsession with the centre of the earth and told me to build a little column out of more sticky mud and use that to prop the first bit up. Using the sticky mud to police its own unruly behaviour? I admired the deviousness of this approach, anticipating the feeling of frustration the mud must be experiencing. "Drat. Foiled again. Judas!"
Second thing I noticed - Having a live model on a turntable in front of you beats a hundred-odd shades of shit out of any reference image. No more trawling through a pile of photos to find the right angle on the bit I want to look at, just move my head a couple of inches in any direction and the reference updates in realtime. Six degrees of freedom, full immersion. Meatspace compares favourably to VR in terms of resolution and there's no screen door effect.
Is early days and I could well grow to hate it but so far so good. Turns out you can have fun in meatspace after all. It's still not ready for a production workflow, tho. It's missing so many features that I take for granted in Medium. Zooming and scaling, undo, mirror plane, duplicate, flip... I have a list as long as your arm and it's anybody's guess when (or even if) these might appear in an update given that the devs totally neglect to engage with the community in any way shape or form. Which is a shame cos it's got some real potential.
Some screenshots of my WIP. All of these were rendered in meatspace, using the internal engine. Sorry about all the junk in the background but I could find a setting to turn off background images or even change the colour of the sky. Couldn't even find a settings panel, tbh.
First thing I noticed about meatspace - Gravity is a constant. Sticky mud is not! When I put clay somewhere (proper Medium clay, not this weird meatspace equivalent) I fully expect it to be there when I come back to it. This is not the case with sticky mud which will droop and flop and generally just conspire to gamify the whole - applying mass where I want it to go - business. The mud had me pwnt for a while. Never play against an opponent who's dictating the rules.
Fortunately sculpting teacher was armed with information on how to combat sticky mud's obsession with the centre of the earth and told me to build a little column out of more sticky mud and use that to prop the first bit up. Using the sticky mud to police its own unruly behaviour? I admired the deviousness of this approach, anticipating the feeling of frustration the mud must be experiencing. "Drat. Foiled again. Judas!"
Second thing I noticed - Having a live model on a turntable in front of you beats a hundred-odd shades of shit out of any reference image. No more trawling through a pile of photos to find the right angle on the bit I want to look at, just move my head a couple of inches in any direction and the reference updates in realtime. Six degrees of freedom, full immersion. Meatspace compares favourably to VR in terms of resolution and there's no screen door effect.
Is early days and I could well grow to hate it but so far so good. Turns out you can have fun in meatspace after all. It's still not ready for a production workflow, tho. It's missing so many features that I take for granted in Medium. Zooming and scaling, undo, mirror plane, duplicate, flip... I have a list as long as your arm and it's anybody's guess when (or even if) these might appear in an update given that the devs totally neglect to engage with the community in any way shape or form. Which is a shame cos it's got some real potential.
Some screenshots of my WIP. All of these were rendered in meatspace, using the internal engine. Sorry about all the junk in the background but I could find a setting to turn off background images or even change the colour of the sky. Couldn't even find a settings panel, tbh.
@DreamShaper Going to meatspace from VR is like doing the same thing only without all the magic stuff like undo and pinch-zoom. All the theory stuff I've learned through Medium is totally the same just with this technical aspect that needs to be figured out and managed. Kinda like how I'd imagine oil painting would be if you could already paint in photoshop.
For the record I find plasticene much easier to work with than clay which evolves as it dries out. It starts off as almost a liquid, that wants to settle into a fricken puddle then gradually turns into stone and point blank refuses to be manipulated. Plasticene just behaves consistently unless you really heat it up then it gets a bit melty.
Sculpy is the other thing I've tried and it's really sticky but pretty similar to plasticene.
For the record I find plasticene much easier to work with than clay which evolves as it dries out. It starts off as almost a liquid, that wants to settle into a fricken puddle then gradually turns into stone and point blank refuses to be manipulated. Plasticene just behaves consistently unless you really heat it up then it gets a bit melty.
Sculpy is the other thing I've tried and it's really sticky but pretty similar to plasticene.
DreamShaper said:
Thanks, think I'm going to have to give that a try, as soon as I can rip this headset off my face... well, put it on my to do list anyhow. Looks fun
What I did was score a bucket of plasticene and some sculpting tools then, whenever I have to spend a couple of days away from my Rift and Medium, I take the plasticene with me and it takes the edge off the withdrawal symptoms 😄
