VARTISTE Tutorial #2: Advanced Drawing

Hello everyone! Today I’m gonna go over some of the more advanced drawing features of VARTISTE. And so here we are once again at the the plain white canvas. I’m just gonna grab this and bring it in a little bit. Once again that’s grabbing with the grab trigger and then down on the joystick, and then left to make it a little smaller. And to rotate once again I just press the “A” button here and then it frees up the rotation.

And just a note you only need 00:33 - to press the A button to toggle it. You don’t need to hold it down. You do need to hold the grab trigger down. Alright so get a nice place where I can draw pretty easily and then I’ll come back over here and I’ll grab the pencil. And then again down on the joystick to bring it in and left to make it a little bit smaller and more manageable size. Let’s just draw something just to see that it still works.

01:01 - Oops that’s pretty lousy drawing and you know, over here if I press this bottom button, I think that’s the X button on the left hand controller, it undoes it. So it’s really handy. So let’s draw something we didn’t want again. Just press undo and it gets rid of it. So let’s draw something that we do. that’s oops it’s a smiley face there. There we go. So that’s the basics of drawing once again with the undo button thrown in there. You can also undo by going over here to your left and clicking on the undo button on the settings shelf. So that does the same thing. One thing to note about undo is that it affects a lot of things but not everything. And so you might want to keep that in mind and try it out on some test projects before you rely on it for anything really important.

So we can 02:11 - obviously undo drawing; we can also undo moving things. So I just move this over here and click the undo button and it goes back to where it was. And this also affects pretty much everything that you can move at the moment. This might change in future versions, but that’s something to be aware of. It doesn’t affect color changes however. So if I press undo now it gets rid of something that I drew.

02:37 - There is no way to redo so be careful! And now if we want to put that line back now we gotta draw our own line all over again. You’ll notice I just picked the color right out of the canvas you do that by pointing at the canvas and pressing the B button. And whatever you’re hovering you’ll see the color over here changes. you can pick the color right off of the canvas. One thing to know is that it picks the average color based on the brush shape. So if we make this big color, we get this kind of whitish gray; if we make this really small (make sure it’s right in the black line) we get the this nice black.

You can 03:24 - do that for averaging colors so we get this gray and can come in handy in a lot of places. Let’s go back to the black and we’ll draw our smiley face all over again. If you want to be sure that you’ve got pure black you can come all the way over here to your color wheel, and you’ve got on the quick palate down here. You’ve got the default colors of black and white, so we can pick black and make sure we’ve got it definitely pure black. Again erasing by pressing the A button on the right hand controller. And let’s draw the line and there it is.

04:08 - One thing to know about this quick palette is you can add your own colors. So now let’s say we want to start coloring in the smiley face, we’ll go down here to make a new layer underneath so it keeps our line and we’ll pick this yellowish color because smiley faces are usually yellow. And since we’ll probably need this color again, we can click this plus button to add the color to the palette. Now we come over here and start drawing (do do doo…) just like that. Now let’s say we come over here and add a highlight or shadow rather, might be a little easier.

Lower the opacity and add a shadow over here like this. But now let’s say now if we want this original yellow color, we’ve got two options: we can try and sample from the canvas, or if that’s going to be difficult we come over here and click on it and now it goes back to our original yellow color! Ad we can touch this up. Alright now we’ve got a nice shadow. Obviously we can make this better by spending more time and effort on it but I think it gets the point across. Let’s see so this is the quick palette it’s really handy. It only stores the the color; it doesn’t store the opacity so when you click on it, just pay attention because your opacity goes back all the way up to full opacity.

This is really handy if you need pure white or pure black because trying 05:50 - to mess with the slider can be a little tricky. You get close to the end here it jumps to the top or the bottom so that’s useful but the quick colors can be really handy for just jumping to that. And let’s see so if we come over here a little bit further we have our brushes again. Remember the brush selection? I’ll go into detail and some some more of them. And one really useful brush right here is this fill brush.

06:21 - So let’s say oops let’s come back over here and there’s some graphical artifacts we can worry about those later. If we come down to here and see it draws this X across the whole canvas. That’s because it’s going to fill it in with this blue color and it just fills the whole canvas. That’s really nifty. If we come up to this layer.. This other fill brush will just fill in what’s already there. So we pick this green color. Now our smiley is green. We can undo this obviously. And it’s good to note that the opacity affects these brushes too.

So if we just come and do a little bit you can see it goes based on 07:16 - how much we press. It can be pretty handy. And let’s see… Some other features are if we come over here to the brush shelf you’ve got this these wrapping options. This is really handy if you’re trying to draw some kind of tiled texture. These are toggle buttons so if you clicked them they turn on; if you click them again they turn off. Right now we don’t have a highlight color for it. I’m sure that will come someday. Let’s just add a new layer here so we can work with it underneath. Let’s pick the red color. So we start drawing. That’s great.

Now you’ll notice as we get to the edge it wraps 08:04 - around. And you get the draw all the way on the other side. Obviously wrapping X does the horizontal direction and Y does the vertical direction. If you go to the corner it does all of it. That’s really handy if you need to draw textures that will tile easily you can use these features. And we can turn them back off. Let’s see; what else do we have over here? You can toggle brush rotation. So if it if you want your brush just to stay in the same direction, now it doesn’t move. Let’s put up the opacity. Now it doesn’t move as we move our hand around. This can be handy for different effects. And see, it affects the the pencil tool as well. So we just get this one direction and if you want to turn it back on you come over here and now we’ve got the directions again one thing you’ll notice is that on here on the back of the pencil you have the currently selected brush, and you can see as we rotate the pencil it changes the direction.

And let’s see if you push it in while it’s in this direction, hey look 09:18 - at that it matches! And if you turn it then it matches again. So this is pretty nifty if you want to see how it’s going to come out, you can look at the pencil over here see. This is more useful for drawing on 3d models, but it just…no it doesn’t do anything right now. You can toggle the rotation lock from the button. See it’s locked again, and now it’s unlocked. This is useful if you don’t have a controller with buttons on it if.

You just have something like a Google 09:56 - daydream or something that you can really only point, that will let you unlock the rotation. And same thing for increasing/decreasing brush sizes. These are all just different kinds of brushes and you can experiment with them and see which ones you like the best. You get lots of different effects. And one thing to note about these brushes is that some of them like the default smooth brush are connected. So if you draw really fast, it draws a straight line but some of them like this other circular brush are not connected.

10:42 - So if you draw really fast you can see there’s gaps between them. And so you have different effects. So you can try it out and use the ones that you like the best for whatever you’re trying to draw. And so that’s the brushes. If you come over here a little bit farther, we’ve gone over some of the pencils and there’s also these really interesting pencil shapes, and they’re kind of fun to play with. You can see that they put the brush everywhere that there’s the pencil tip. So you can you can get some interesting effects by playing around with this. Same thing with this grid of pencils.

You can draw just like that and 11:53 - you can get some cool effects by doing different brushes and different opacity levels and things like that. There’s also this hammer tool which is very experimental but if you tap on the picture it starts to draw the harder you tap the more that it goes. This is kind of fun but it’s kind of hard to make useful at the moment. But it’s there if you want to play with it. So those are the tools; the erasers we’ve been over in the previous tutorial. The next thing to know about advanced drawing is this 3d shading option.

So if you 12:51 - click it you can see that now our canvas responds to lights. And you know there’s no shadows and in here. but it responds to lights. And now if we come over here to our layers and we add a new layer we can add all of these 3d material modes. And so if we add for instance a metalness map, the layer will map the grayscale intensity of this layer into the metalness for this material. So let’s just fill it with black to start with no metalness and come over here it’s not metal.

And let’s go with white here, let’s get a big brush and 13:48 - just for fun let’s use this guy and look at that! Now it’s really shiny wherever we’ve painted. And you can do that—let’s duplicate this— you can do that for metalness, let’s add roughness. oh now it’s really rough where we’ve drawn. We can set some of this back to black so it’ll be smooth, and there you go! And now you got some kind of nice funky metal material going on there. So those are most of the drawing options. Some other things that are useful is if you come over here you can change the project name. The default is just vartiste-project. Let’s call this tutorial.

And now if we save the 15:05 - project, the composition we’ll get a file called tutorial dot vartiste, and every save that you’ll need to down you’ll need to take off your headset to actually get the file, but it should either download it automatically through your browser or open a pop-up linking asking if you want to save it. Once you save it, to load it again you just go to your file browser and drag and drop the vartiste file back on to this browser window. It’s a lot easier to do if you take off your headset to do it. And you can also export the canvas as a PNG. If you have these material layers they’ll export separately. That way you can plug it into your favorite 3d rendering application.

You can export it as a GLB 15:55 - file (that’s a 3d model file) ready for you to upload into your favorite game engine or 3d renderer. You can toggle the 3d shading back off and it goes back to flat. Some other useful drawing options are the stabilization. So by default we are at this medium stabilization option where it kind of smooths out some of the controller movement a little bit. We can turn it off entirely and now it’s very responsive to what you do, or we could turn on maximum stabilization where and it kind of slowly responds to what you do. It averages your movement quite a bit.

It’s going to be useful for trying to draw really straight lines or 16:43 - something, or if you have really unsteady hands and you just want a nice steady movement. Of course turning it all off is helpful too if you want it to be really responsive to what you’re doing. Uou can go crazy like that. If you’re having difficulty with the performance of vartiste in your browser or your PC, you can change the quality options. It defaults to full quality where the canvas gets rendered at the full resolutions with a full pixel resolution, but if this is causing problems you can turn it down to medium quality. You can see it in lowers the resolution of the canvas. Or low quality which lowers it even further.

As you draw you’ll see a 17:37 - little bit of a lower resolution image which sometimes helps speed things up. But it’ll still draw and save in the full resolution so you can draw things and then come back over here switch to full quality and it comes comes right back to full quality. So if you’re having trouble with performance or it’s really choppy or lagging then you can try those options. All the way at the bottom here you can change the resolution of the canvas. So you can change it to whatever image size you want.

Let’s say we want 1024 by 2048 you can 18:20 - either create a new composition with that size or you can resample the current one. So resample it resizes all the layers to your new size just like that. And if you do a new one it erases everything and starts you fresh. See it got rid of all the shelves over here. And that’s about it for advanced drawing with vartiste .