Weekly 3D And VR News: The Week Of June 8-14

New rendering tools, VR versions and more come at us on the week of E3. Of course, E3 is more of a matter of game news anyways...

VTime, Social VR With Any Hardware

VTime is a virtual reality app that lets you hang out with your friends. The latest update introduced support for Oculus Rift. Previously, you could "only" use it with Samsung Gear VR and Google Cardboard - so basically, with easily accessible, relatively cheap options. Now, basically everyone can hang out as virtual reality avatars! People select the location of their hangout - cliff-side, Paris, whatever - and sit down for a chat. They can take VR selfies, too! And while you can't craft your own rooms - yet - there is the possibility of uploading your own 360 degree photos and even regular 2D backgrounds. Bit by bit it's starting to feel like you're in the Jedi council chambers. That's probably going to be licensed expansion in the future!

Lumiere, The Blender Lighting Setup

Cédric Brandin has created a Blender add-on for for speeding up the creation of lighting setups. Lumiere allows you to control the position and adjust lights - directly on the model and with the mouse! You can also tweak the energy and scale interactively. Blender lamps, panel lights, HDRIs and background skies can also be use. If you want, you can add gradient textures and in this way mimic a professional light panel. See more on GitHub.

Evotis Sub-pixel Sample Composing

Go Ghost has developed what seems to be the first sub-pixel sample composing system. It brings entirely new stuff to the field in which processors grind away calculating renders of rays & samples, all in order to give you a filtered pixel image. Evotis wants to make use of these rays instead of discarding them. An entirely object-aware pipeline, it manipulates samples instead of pixel. It provides accurate post-render mattes, high quality image resizing, render accurate relighting and more. The plug-in currently works with Maya and standalone versions of Arnold and V-Ray on all operating systems, and all versions of Nuke on Linux or Windows.

Fallout 4 VR

E3 is the place to make great announcements. One of them would be that you're working on a virtual reality version of Fallout. Yes, Bethesda is aiming to make a VR version of Fallout 4 for HTC Vive (to serve that over 50,000-user install base and to capitalize on Steam). "If you thought that survival mode was an intense way to experience Fallout", Bethesda marketing chief Pete Hines said at their E3 press conference, "you ain't seen nothing yet." And you will see nothing if you don't get yourself a Vive. Bethesda also had a VR tour of Doom, but that was more likely a showroom than a VR version of the game.

Music Videos In (VR) Space

Now that we've established that VRis going to be a Big Thing, everyone wants a piece of that action. That includes singers, too. Dawn Richard might not be the first artist to produce a VR music video, but she's the latest. And she takes us to space, too! This (Google Cardboard-enabled) video starts with a blastoff from a planet (you can watch it get smaller down bellow) and continues with a trip through some trippy stellar phenomenon with stars and planets flying by. The artist herself is present in a tiny screen that's showing her sing, and there are tiny holographic dancers, too.