For years I drew monsters on restaurant menus.
I sketched them quickly: big eyes, big teeth. I’d incorporate elements of the menu, even stains. The monsters were always causing some kind of ruckus. When I was done, I’d give the drawing to someone on the staff.
They were small social objects. A drawing would start a conversation or pass from the server to the kitchen. Sometimes a free dessert. Sometimes a drink. Once after a particularly good menu session, the entire check disappeared. I would always carry an alarming amount of pens with me: brush pens, gel pens, Copic markers, etc.
One of my favorite exchanges happened in Japan in 2009. I was traveling alone and arrived at my hotel after a long flight at about five in the afternoon. The bed was beckoning me, but I resisted. I asked the hotel to find me somewhere to eat. Across the street, there was one seat left at the sushi bar at Nobu.
I had never heard of the restaurant. I looked at its website, saw a photograph of Nobu Matsuhisa, and walked across the street.
While sitting at the bar, I began doodling on coasters. The staff noticed, and I gave some of the drawings away. Later, I heard someone behind me ask, “Who is the artist?” I turned around and recognized the man from the website.
I gave Nobu a drawing, and Nobu bought me a whiskey at Nobu.
The drawings were made to be given away. They were quick, informal exchanges that happened to leave a small piece of evidence behind.
I spent a lot of time on the road for work, by myself, so I got a lot of practice drawing on menus, and I got fast at it too, which meant leaning into imperfections. A five-minute drawing leaves no time for perfectionism, and because these are monsters, they aren’t supposed to be perfect.
You might wonder, what did any of this have to do with my job, Pixar, or RenderMan?
Nothing.
That was about to change when I put on a VR headset.
A new tool for doodling
In 2017, virtual reality had become difficult to ignore. I was dubious. The headsets looked strange, and most of what I had seen seemed more interesting as a demonstration than as something I wanted to do. Eventually, I bought an Oculus Rift to find out for myself.
Most of the demos did not change my mind, but then I found Oculus Medium.
Medium let me sculpt directly in the space around me. Learning a conventional 3D program usually begins with learning how to navigate. How to orbit a camera, zoom, select an object, or perform the correct Vulcan death grip.
In VR, if I wanted to look at the other side of an object, I moved my head. I already knew how my head worked, and once I understood the basic tools, I could concentrate on making a creature instead of operating a camera. Working in VR was much simpler and more intuitive than I had expected.
My first sculpt took about thirty minutes. It was a long orange creature with tiny arms, uneven horns, large teeth, and yes, it was a monster.
It looked like Play-Doh, but it also looked like mine.
That was unexpected because I did not know how to sculpt. I had years of experience drawing monsters, but I assumed sculpture would require an entirely new set of instincts. Instead, much of what I knew transferred almost immediately.
My drawing style was fast, imperfect, and kinetic. I used a brush pen to draw big. All of a sudden the rhythm, gesture, exaggeration, and asymmetry of doodling all worked in VR as well.
I could import a drawing into Medium, place it beside me, and use it as a reference without treating it as a blueprint. I could pull a jaw forward, push an eye back into the skull, or turn the creature around and decide what the original drawing had neglected to explain.
I began making more creatures. Some were built from existing drawings, while others began directly in VR. I entered live sculpting battles in front of audiences, complete with theatrical lighting and smoke machines. I won some and lost others. The smoke machines performed flawlessly.
Previously, my doodling was unrelated to the sophisticated 3D tools I used professionally, but now … I had a 3D model. My next question became, could there be a route between them?
Into the pipeline
The real test was not whether I could make a monster in a headset. It was whether I could bring the model into the rest of my production workflow.
The route eventually became Medium, a polygonal mesh, Substance Painter, Maya, and RenderMan. Medium gave me a direct way to make the forms. Maya let me organize, adjust, rig, and pose them. Substance Painter made it possible to explore surfaces quickly. RenderMan brought all of the materials and lighting together in a photorealistic image.
Then I noticed something interesting … the imperfections of sculpting in VR added character to the models. They didn’t look “3D” … they looked handmade.
I had learned how to make 3D imperfect, so it would look more natural and real, but here imperfection was free, and a result of the process.
The doodle was no longer static; it had become an object with dimensions and character.
The pipeline preserved the wobble.
For a while, photoreal rendering seemed like the natural destination. The creatures could look like clay, painted toys, brass objects, or materials I had never imagined when I drew them. Then the route changed direction again.
Drawing with RenderMan
By 2020, RenderMan was being developed with a system for nonphotorealistic rendering called Stylized Looks. Stylized Looks raised an interesting question: could the VR sculpt become an illustration?
The VR creatures were useful test subjects because their geometry already contained a handmade rhythm. Their surfaces were uneven, their proportions were exaggerated, and their silhouettes carried much of the same character as the drawings.
For one experiment, I used a drawing from my 2019 Inktober series as the target. I brought it into Medium, placed it beside the workspace, and sampled colors from it while building the scene. The VR sculpt was not an attempt to reproduce every line. It was a way of reconstructing the drawing as a place with volume, depth, and light.
I then moved the scene into Maya and RenderMan. The final illustrative treatment combined geometry, materials, lighting, line work, and graphic controls.
The important part was that the result remained interactive. I could move a light and watch the drawing change.
This was a different way of drawing, using form, light, material, and a renderer alongside the instincts I had developed with a pen.
The resulting images looked like my line drawings, in large part because I had modeled them using the same gestures and techniques I brought to doodling. The underlying model itself was stylized.
For Inktober 2020, I decided to try doing a stylized render the first couple days, and it went well enough that I ended up being able to complete the entire month. The VR sculpting was about as fast as drawing.
A drawing had become a sculpture. The sculpture had become a convincing object. The object had passed through RenderMan and become a drawing again.
A practice that had nothing to do with my professional work had found its way into it. That connection did not come from sitting down and deciding to combine doodling with rendering. It came from trying a technology I did not yet understand and discovering that it allowed me to work in a way I had not anticipated.
The first orange monster still looks like Play-Doh. The wobbles and imperfections became an essential part of the way I model and create scenes.
I admit the headset still looks ridiculous.