Designer and Creative technologist Dong Yoon Park has painstakingly recreated a Star Wars battle scene inside VR with Google’s Tilt Brush. Watch this beautiful digital art come to life in this walkthrough and speeded up realtime recording.
Virtual reality artistry really has exploded since the HTC Vive gave the world room scale VR and tracked motion controllers, making the VR art application Tilt Brush possible. We’ve already seen examples of real artists embracing the new medium as a way to explore different forms of creative expression and now an artist with a penchant for doodling has painstakingly recreated an authentic looking Star Wars space battle in VR.
The scene, which includes ships from the lowly X-Wing all the way up to Imperial Star Destroyers, is strongly reminiscent of the jaw dropping final act of the 3rd film (the prequels didn’t happen OK!?) Return of the Jedi (1983). Take a look at the video below, where Park first walks you through the battlefield, then shows you how he created it all. I was particularly taken with his use of neon to depict the ships’ glowing engines, and the way he’s suggested a panelled, metallic surface through meticulous layering.
“I love doodling and sketching things. Especially I like three-dimensional perspective drawings such as skyscraper and big mechanical objects,” says Park in a blog post about his work, “I love the feeling of creating the world of illusion on two-dimensional paper.” The artist then got a chance to get his head and hands into VR and take that doodling urge into three dimensions via an HTC Vive.
“Now with AR/VR/MR devices, drawing experience is being changed dramatically. Since you can literally draw in 3D space, you don’t have to create the ‘illusion’ because it is real 3D drawing. You just need to think a little bit about how to express volumetric objects in space with dots, lines and surfaces.”
One of the most fantastic things about this form of digital media is that, now that the piece is complete, the artist can not only share 2D facsimiles of his work, but the entire VR scene – for anyone to download and experience themselves (not to mention potentially add to it should they feel inclined). You can do that by grabbing the Tilt Brush file right here.
