Ways to display Tilt Brush sketches outside of the HTC Vive
Google has some documentation and some more indepth release notes on how to export files from Tilt Brush. The file types are:
- Video's
- GIF's
- 2D pictures
.fbxfiles.objfiles- Tilt Brush's own JSON format file
Google's documentation doesn't say anything about the amount of information stored in these files. But I found that there is no .mtl campanion file with the .obj file. However, when exporting it does also export textures in the form of .png files for every brush (that has texture) used.
Video's, GIF's and pictures are fairly easy to display in a lot of environments. However, they don't capture te full experience of Tilt Brush art, because you can't interact with them in 3D. So I will try to give a better representation in the following ways.
Sketchfab is a website for sharing 3D models. It has a great viewer for exploring 3D models and embed code to display models on other websites. There are two options for uploading:
- Just the
.fbxfile - The
.fbxfile together with.pngtextures in a zip folder
The latter will render your model with textures. However it applies one texture to everything, so it only really works for models that use one brush.
Here is an example I made, trying out all the different Tilt Brush brushes.
Importing an .obj file is fairly simple, but it doesn't have a texture. According to the OBJ Wikipedia page it stores UV mapping information, so it should be able to get a texture when we add one. However, there's a problem in Processing; you can't apply textures to loaded shapes. Forum thread about the problem that might be useful.
There's also the option of using the shaders Google provides in their release notes.
However, I don't think figuring more out for Processing will be usefull, as I imagine using Unity or 3D modeling software like Blender will be more practicle for most cases.
Blender will take either the .obj or the .fbx file. But the .fbx file has to be converted to binary FBX (Google's python script create ASCII FBX). Luckily there is some free Autodesk software for doing just that. I haven't tried adding textures yet.
As mentioned in the release notes, you can import the .fbx file in Unity. Adding the shader and the textures created on export is also possible. Appearently a good way to do it is to first import the files in Houdini, see this tutorial.
Google recently released their Tilt Brush Unity SDK! Following their documentation, you can import sketches into Unity and they'll look just like they did in Tilt Brush!