Creating Hand-Drawn Animation in VR Will Soon Be Possible with Animvr

Google Tilt Brush has normalized drawing in 3D space, so the next obvious step is animating drawings in virtual reality.

While multiple people are working on tools to enable classical animation on vr platforms, the furthest along might be Animvr, developed by Milan Grajetzki’s Nvrmind. (The National Film Board of Canada has an advanced stereoscopic 3D tool for hand-drawn animation called SANDDE, but it is not commercially available.) Animvr, currently in development, allows users to draw and animate in vr by providing a set of tools based on traditional animation concepts like frames, onion skins, and timelines.

An alpha release of Animvr was made available to testers this week, and a publicly available release on SteamVR is expected in early 2017.

Animator Paul Zeke, one of the alpha-version Animvr testers, just posted a time-lapse video of himself animating a flaming skull, which showcases some of the software’s tantalizing possibilities.

“It combines the freedom and life of classical animation with the instant feedback power of working on a computer, all while making use of the room-scale presence that the HTC vive delivers,” Zeke told Cartoon Brew. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever used—incredibly freeing to play with.”

A more detailed look at the Animvr interface can be found in this video posted by its developer Milan Grajetzki:

To stay tuned on the development and release of the software, visit the Nvrmind web site.