VR painting app Quill, which began its life as an internal production tool for Oculus Story Studio and was eventually released to the public, will see continued development despite the shuttering of the studio back in May. Former Story Studio members continue Quill‘s development under the banner of Facebook’s Social VR team.
Though Oculus Story Studio has shut down, Quill, which was originally built as a production tool for the studio’s ‘illustrated’ VR film Dear Angelica, former Story Studio VFX supervisor and Quill creator, Inigo Quilez, and former Story Studio Art Director Goro Fujita have found a new home for the tool as part of Facebook’s Social VR team.
That’s great news for fans of the app, and also a huge hint that we could soon see social / multi-user functionality added to Quill, as we recently saw with Medium, a VR sculpting tool also made by Oculus.
Marking the commitment to Quill’s continued development, the team today released a fresh update to the app, announced via Facebook, with several improvements and fixes, and brand new ‘quillistration’ by Quill maestro Goro Fujita titled ‘Left Brain – Right Brain’.
The changelog for the update follows:
We strive to make the Quill user experience as intuitive and efficient as possible, so this update includes a lot of UX and performance improvements. The Gallery has four new featured Quillustrations for you to enjoy. The 360 mono and stereo image import will enable artists to bring in 360 images that could be used as matte paintings. With 3D sound support, you can now spacialize audio by placing the sound sources in 3D space as regular wave or ambisonic sound files. The colorizer has a new opacity mode with which you can change the opacity of existing strokes. More updates coming soon!
Release Notes:
- Added 360 mono and stereo image import (with transparencies) in both equirect and cubemap formats
- Added 3D sound
- Added Opacity blend mode
- New gallery Quillustrations
- Fixed Line tool
- Fixes to FBX exporter
- Fixes to precision for expansive drawings
- More accurate color picking and autograb
- Joystick left/right is undo and redo
- Joystick up/down is new layer and merge layer
- Several other UX improvements
- Several other general fixes
In addition to hopes of social features, the team has previously teased unreleased Quill animation tools that could one day come in an update.
