From the early brushstrokes of digital illustration to the immersive realms of Virtual Reality (VR) to doing most of his professional and personal artwork on a PlayStation, Martin Nebelong's journey in the art world is remarkable and unusual. Beginning his freelance career with LEGO in the early 2000s at the age of 20, Martin carved a niche for himself in digital painting. For years, he saw his future intertwined with illustrations, believing that was his calling.
In his talk, we'll hear about how that all changed with the advent of the first VR sculpting tools. As a curious soul eager to find new ways to tell stories through visuals, Martin became one of the first in the world to adopt this new way of creating immersive 3D art, which led to him traveling the world to talk about VR art and tools with the artist and artistic expression, at its immersive core. It even led to a stadium performance in front of a 40,000+ crowd, one of the more memorable events in Martins's career. Likewise, Martin has authored over 30 articles and tutorials about working with immersive 3D tools for various international magazines.
As much as he loved the freedom of creating in VR, Martin felt that all the steps around it abruptly ended that feeling of free-flowing creativity: Preparing models for texturing, exporting high poly models and optimizing them, lighting and rendering them in separate software, and waiting for shaders to compile.
Along came a very unlikely candidate for the most powerful tool that Martin says he has used in his career: Dreams for PlayStation 4. It is a tool marketed mainly as a fun and easy way to create small games, but under the surface, it is an incredibly advanced piece of creative software that, for the last 4-5 years, has been Martin's tool of choice for client and personal artwork. Dreams work with 6DOF (6 degrees of freedom) controls like we're used to seeing in VR, but in Dreams, VR isn't mandatory but optional.
Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO of Epic Games and the creator of the Unreal engine called Dreams, "Media Molecule’s high-end metaverse engine that’s disguised as a game with a content creation tool," and the tech in Dreams directly inspired the development of UE5.. and for very good reason as Martin will demonstrate in his talk that will be part talk and part actual demonstration of how Dreams works and of Martins work.