?? Storyboard Studio // Virtual Storyboarding

???Story is everything, and virtual storyboarding is a powerful thing for virtual production. Advised by Andy Schuhler of DreamWorks, we pushed the boundaries of what storyboarding means in VR and the results are ??

To do this we need some new hardware, the Massless Surface, and new software, Massless Story Studio.

Massless Surface

To bring the highest precision for both 2D and 3D drawing we adapted the Tracker for the Massless Pen to integrate it into the Massless Surface, a Tablet for Virtual Reality.

Seeing drawing in both two and three dimensions produces some magical results

Massless Story Studio

We developed Massless studio to explore the interplay of creating scenes through the camera viewport and by directly interacting in three dimensional space. This blurs the lines between storyboarding, pre-visualization, and even production. This can allow a story artist end-to-end creative control and unlock huge efficiency and cost saving gains. Realtime rendering allows the artist to naturally benefit from materials, lights, shadows, and cameras from the outset giving something closer to the final output.

Storyboards are drawn from the point of view of a camera. “?????Camera Paper” takes this concept to the next level by placing a camera and a drawing plane in the 3D scene. This allows the artist to create content from the point of view of the camera ??

Drawing on the Massless Surface with the Massless Pen draws through the camera viewport onto the drawing plane. Polygon outlines can be extruded to give 3D form.

Professional artists use a keyboard in their off-hand for shortcut keys and a stylus in their dominant hand for drawing. We tested lots of UI/UX - but this is the winner. The virtual keyboard could be grabbed to overlay with the physical. Looking at the keys shows tooltips.

Pre-defined color palettes/swatches tend to be used by professional artists on their projects. Photoshop ACO files could be imported to define the swatch. I loved the transitions on this pallet.

Once a polygon region has been extruded into a 3D shape the [B]rush tool can be used for texturing. This was actually really challenging and required a custom GLSL shader to be developed that dynamically updated the texture map.

The camera translation and rotation could be controlled while looking through the viewport and simultaneously seeing the 3d representation of the scene. Here the camera is rotated around the vertical axis.

The drawing plane could be moved forwards/backwards from the camera to allow other objects to be easily drawn at different depths in the scene. This is a powerful feature for set design that can benefit from 3D lighting, shadows...etc.

This shows another camera movement moving towards the scene objects. It so easy to setup shots this way.

The controller could be used to grab-translocate yourself through the scene. I loved these mixed modes of interaction taking the best from 2D and 3D in a single experience.

Individual objects could be grabbed for fine tuning of the layout. This allows the artist to give some more character to the scene.

Even the camera could be grabbed for free hand filming or to set control points for path animation. This breaks down the boundary between storyboarding and previsualization!

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As ever, please share your thoughts and comments!

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