Facebook Returns VR Drawing Tool Quill To Its Creator

Facebook has transferred ownership of Quill, a vr painting and animation tool, to Iñigo Quilez, its creator. Quilez has formed the company Smoothstep and renamed the app Quill by Smoothstep.

The new app is now available on Facebook’s Oculus Store, still for free. The original app will leave the store on October 18. It will no longer be supported by Oculus, and users will have to upload their work to Oculus Media Studio manually, not automatically. Quill content uploaded to Oculus Media Studio or published to Oculus TV (both before and after October 18) will still be available on Oculus for now.

In addition, Smoothstep has open-sourced both Quill Theater’s IMM immersive content distribution file format and an IMM player. Quill Theater will remain available on the Oculus Store for Quest and Quest 2, but it will be renamed VR Animation Player after October 18.

Quilez developed Quill while working on Dear Angelica, a 2017 vr short from the now-defunct Oculus Story Studio. Combined with a vr headset, the tool lets artists create and manipulate 3d assets in an unusually direct and intuitive way. Last year, animator Zeyu Ren told us how he created his short Light It Up using the software.

Prior to working at Facebook, Quilez spent five years as a sets technical director at Pixar, where he was responsible for creating detailed grass and wildlife for Brave and The Good Dinosaur.

For more information on Quill by Smoothstep, head to its website.

Quill artwork at top by Matt Schaefer.