VARTISTE Tutorial #1

Hello folks! and I’m going to give you an introduction to VARTISTE go over some of the basic features and how to use the application. The application is still in development and so things may change around a little bit but the basics should be the same. Now you can see on your screen on the bottom right and left hand corners I’ve put these little overlay so you can see which buttons I’m pressing. If it helps you to follow along. And so the first thing you see when you put on your headset and start VArtiste is this big white canvas in front of you. You can see if you’ve got your touch controllers or your whatever kind of controllers you have, you move them around and you’ve got these lasers that point there.

If you pull the trigger that starts drawing right onto the canvas. You can use either hand or both hands to draw things and you can make the brush bigger and smaller by going up and down on your right controller. Makes it a bigger brush and that affects both brushes. You can also erase by pressing one of the buttons on your right controller here like that. The… The button configurations change from controller to controller so if you’re using an HTC vive for instance it might be a little bit different but you can find the controller mappings by coming over here to your left and clicking on this Help button.

So while we’re over here to the left you can see up here at 01:41 - the top you’ve got your color wheel. So you just point and then pull the trigger and you can select a different color. Once you find the color you want you can go up and down on the brightness slider over here. Again just holding the trigger. and left and right on the opacity. So if we put this all the way up and make it yellow, you can see we’ve got this nice yellow color. Or we can make it this green and very faint you can see it shows up faint over there.

02:12 - Some other nifty things if we come just a little bit farther we can see the brush tool shelf over here. We can pick a different brush. Maybe this round kind of one over here. Increase the opacity to get a better view of it. Just like that. And we’ve got some other cool brushes. We’ve got this one kind of looks like a paintbrush. Decrease the opacity to see it a little bit better like that. We’ve got dots. We’ve got all sorts of cool things. And one nifty thing you can do is if you hold the grab trigger you can start grabbing things and move them around. You can move the canvas around. You can move any of these shelves around. And if you use the joystick on your right control or on either controller while you’re grabbing, you can bring it forward closer to you or push it away.

03:16 - You can make it bigger or smaller, and if you push the “A” button you can even rotate it around. And push it again to make it not rotate anymore. So we can bring in the canvas over here and make it a little bit smaller, that way it’s closer. That might be a little bit easier to do a nice little detail work just like that. So let’s erase some of this. I’ll get a bigger brush and just erase erase erase erase erase. You notice while I’m erasing this though, it all goes back to the white.

That’s because over here to the right we have these 04:05 - layers shelves. And these work just like layers on other image editing programs. We’ve got this top one selected right now because of these yellow arrows. If we do this we, switch to that layer. So let’s just show you. We can draw something on the top. I’ll go with red. Draw this red line on top. And if we switch to the bottom there. Let’s draw a blue line. And seeing the blue line goes underneath, just like we’d expect. And if we move them around this whole white and blue layer goes right on top of this red one.

We can create any 04:48 - number of layers if we want to and move them around. This is a really useful feature because you can work on some things and overlay without disturbing the other layers. And we can grab this layer once it’s been placed there and move it around underneath. You can duplicate the layer so now we have two of them. And let’s grab this one again. And we can merge it back down, so now we’ve got these two things back in this layer down here. And delete the original one.

And we can even change the layer 05:34 - blend modes. And if you’ve ever worked with HTML canvases these modes come directly from the canvas global composite functions. So for instance we can change the hue. So it just changes the hue for the things that it overlays. We move it up so it now changes the hue for the red one too. And so this is pretty nifty because it’s a pretty powerful tool. Let’s just add another layer on top here like that. Okay. So if we go back over here to our brushes and go a little bit past our brushes, you see all of these pencil tools. So if you point and then grab it, you can reel it in using the joystick. Maybe it looks a little big to me, so make it a little bit smaller, and then we’ll unlock the rotation. And now it’s just like a pencil, so you bring it over here and you start drawing. Works just like a pencil.

You can press it to the canvas and if it’s got this triangle shape that 06:47 - means if you just do a little bit then it’s really small, but if you push it in then it gets bigger as it goes in. And the brush selection over here affects the pencil tool. You can see there’s the brush that you got selected. Same with the color and opacity and all of that. And the size of the brush on the canvas also makes a difference. So if we make this really big for instance–Let me bring this over here–see how big it gets when I push in. Or if we make it really small again, it’s really small. And so we’ve got that one. We’ve got a nice little detail brush. You can get little details. It’s a really easy to draw things. And this one doesn’t have an angle so it just draws at a constant size no matter how hard you push it. This one over here has kind of an angle and it’s also round which means that the opacity is also affected by how far you press, so this kind of gives it a like a paintbrush kind of effect. Lower the opacity; it’s a little easier to see. You don’t push very hard versus if we push hard. And these ones that stay white are erasers/ And it’s the same kind of deal so this one just erases a little bit the more you push it the more it erases. And this one erases more based on.. err… bigger and smaller based on how far you push it.

08:56 - And you notice that this only affects the active layer, so even if we erase something that’s not on the layer it doesn’t erase. If we wanted to erase it we would have to switch to the other layer. Let’s use this round brush again and now we’re erasing this layer. Make this a little bigger. And you’ll notice as I’m erasing this layer, you can start seeing through the canvas. That’s because it’s actually transparent underneath. So if we erase or delete the the default white canvas, you can see right through to the other side. So these other tools over there are a little bit more advanced and I’ll leave those for later. One thing to note is that even if you’re not actually holding on to one of the tools, if it comes into contact with the canvas it will start drawing. So you can see the marker over there is drawing or this over here is erasing. So you’ve got to be careful where you leave them. .