Virtual Materiality: Realistic Clay Sculpting in VR

Art is a creative, intuitive process which engages us on an emotional level. It involves experimentation, spontaneity, and play. Just as a painter may use the same brush with different mark-making techniques on the surface of their canvas, a clay sculptor may use one knife to scratch, texture, slice or create bas reliefs. To an artist, the tool and the medium as a whole are subject to spontaneous, nuanced decision making and use in multitudinous ways which are core to the art. In this work-in-progress paper, we hope to inspire renewed interest in intuitive digital art creation. We argue that the modern state-of-the-art 3D creation software fails to recreate the tactile feeling and complexity of the real-world tools because they treat their ‘tools’ as rigid operators. To explore ways to better accommodate the creative process, we present a Virtual Reality (VR) application, titled Virtual Materiality, that provides a set of digital sculpting tools that feel more like traditional analog tools. In this work, we generalize a ‘physical sculpting tool’, enabling users to deform our virtual clay in a more realistic, mass-conserving manner. Future work is planned to incorporate more interactions that one might expect with real clay, and to evaluate the efficacy of this new digital sculpting modality.