The average person, without knowing how to code, can still personalize their profile on social media with relative ease. This is obviously because social media platforms try to create easy to understand interfaces.
3D modeling on programs like Blender or Autodesk Maya aren’t exactly easy to understand. While you can learn with a bit of tinkering around and watching online tutorials, many won’t feel the need to get that involved unless it’s intuitive.
So what can tool developers keep in mind?
- In-World Creating
Being able to create 3D objects inside the virtual world allows the user to build things the way they would in the physical world. Instead of hitting various keys to create a ball or extrude a piece of a box or rotate your scene you can simply walk around it and push and pull on meshes with your hands to sculpt.
2. Automatic Retopology
3D objects are comprised of vertices – little points – that make up the shape. The more vertices you have, the more detailed your object is. The problem however, is the more detailed, the harder it is to load or modify your object. So getting rid of redundant vertices is key to making your design light and easily editable. Automatic retopology tools should be integrated so when someone is designing an object with their hands the vertices are automatically reshifting and deleting depending on which ones become redundant and what spots of the shape could be more streamlined.
3. Voice Tools
Users won’t want to sculpt everything though. Sometimes you do want to generate certain shapes or call upon certain shortcuts like an array modifier to quickly create several duplicates of an object. Instead of awkwardly learning a button interface, voice tools should be integrated so an artist can simply say “put a sphere on that right here” and one appears.
4. Shape Recognition
Artificial intelligence with shape recognition will be huge as well. If a user is designing a model and you want the arms to be longer, the user would simply have to say “make the arms a bit longer” and an AI would recognize what sections of the object are the arms and lengthen them.
5. Automatic File Conversion
3D objects have many different file extensions. There’s .obj, .stl, .dae, and more. Users don’t want to be bothered. In an interoperable Metaverse, 3D objects should be able to export automatically into the type of file it needs to be on a separate platform.