Google Inc.’s Tilt Brush virtual reality toolkit just got a lot better with the integration of the Unity Software Development Kit and the addition of a number of new scripts.

Tilt Brush is Google’s free-form 3D painting tool that allows artists using a VR headset to create unique visual content. The first iterations of the software only allowed artists to create static “sketches” that could be rendered into 2D snapshots or 3D objects.

With this update, Tilt Brush users can now use the software to create animations by adding sequencing and interactivity to art.

https://twitter.com/googlevr/status/822111842788995072

The search giant originally open-sourced the software toolkit in October. The toolkit is a set of scripts that allow developers to use, transform and export .tilt files—the graphical format for storing VR creations made by Tilt Brush. The toolkit was important because without it, creators could not use creations made with Tilt Brush in bigger projects without the ability to export.

This update also adds a number of Python scripts to the Tilt Brush toolkit for viewing, transforming file types and even compression for storage. The new Tilt Brush toolkit is accessible via the GitHub repository for the project.

The year 2016 was big for virtual reality expectations as the industry took off with the release of the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift as well as the mobile VR market. By May 2016, VR job offerings saw a huge uptick from 2015, going from 1 posting per million jobs to 19 postings per million jobs.

During upcoming years, the VR market is expected to continue to expand with a report from International Data Corp. citing a $162 billion market by 2020.

Adding Unity to Tilt Brush opens up the industry

The addition of the Unity SDK means that developers can now use Unity’s powerful graphical engine to access scripts, shaders and other tools for importing 3D information. With this, developers and graphic artists can import and manipulation Tilt Brush created content in Unity.

Developed by Unity Technologies, the Unity graphics engine and SDK is a powerful graphical framework used by everything from major gaming outfits to 3D business applications. The company boasts that over 34 percent of the top 1,000 free mobile games have been made using its software including 90 percent of Samsung Gear VR games and 53 percent of Oculus Rift games.

Unity’s software has a broad reach across industries that use VR, not just gaming. For entertainment, Unity has been used for the creation of art and interactive magazines. The software has been put to use in medicine and training applications, using 3D renders of human anatomy to train surgeons and visualizations of disaster sites to assist in the training of rescue workers.

With the ability to export to Unity, users of Google’s Tilt Brush now have a much easier time importing the work of artists and developers into the creative pipeline for all of these applications.

Image courtesy of Google