The VRChat world Suku took home the Best Art World prize at Raindance Immersive 2024, and it’s by Durk van der Meer who is a freelance digital artist, character artist, and VR world builder based in Curaçao. Suku blends together elements of Caribbean culture and geography with Dutch colonial architecture combined with a sort of psychedelic Studio Ghibli twist that gives the overall experience a sense of surrealism and magical realism.
I had a chance to catch up with van der Meer to speak about his 3D artist pipelines and workflows primarily focused on Gravity Sketch, but we also cover some of his other tools like Google Blocks and Adobe Substance 3D Modeler (formerly known as Oculus Medium). We also talk about focusing all of his creative artistic side projects into the process of VRChat world building within Unity as a vast open world that also leverages the World Creator Professional plug-in.
I also had a chance to go on a guided tour of the world with van der Meer where he added a lot of additional context for his creative process, some stories and myths about the history of Curaçao, but also other elements of the darker side of Dutch colonial history by featuring a slave house and plantation house that was transformed into an immersive art installation.
There’s also other elements of the Caribbean culture of Curaçao that van der Meer integrates that he himself started to wonder if it bordered on a form of cultural appropriation. His intention was to explore his own creative imagination, and he did not intend this world to be in any way educational or a historically accurate elaboration of the darker side of these colonial histories. He considered adding some additional context to the world, but ultimately decided to not add any other additional information about any of the symbols or architecture featured within the piece. Many of these aspects only came up within the context of the guided tour, which was part of the Raindance Immersive exhibition.
But the allusions by van der Meer to the dark colonial history of Curaçao was definitely a part of the experience that stuck with me, and we have a chance to dig into a little bit at the end of our conversation, and I dug into a few additional references at the end of the podcast as I was wrapping everything up.
Kirby Ferguson’s Everything is a Remix YouTube series is probably one of the more compelling counter argument to worries about cultural appropriation as he argues that the core of remixing is “to copy, transform, and combine existing materials to produce something new.” Ferguson argues that all art and cultural production is ultimately borrowing from a wide range of different sources from different cultures, and that nothing is actually truly original.
Legally fair use in copyright law dictates four different factors measuring fair use that including “the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the amount and substantiality of the portion taken, and the effect of the use upon the potential market.” That’s the legal side of the argument, but concerns around cultural appropriation are more ethical and moral rather than strictly legal.
I dug into some references on cultural appropriation from Google Scholar, which pointed me to this 2006 article titled “From Cultural Exchange to Transculturation: A Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriation” by Richard Rogers, which has over 700 citations. Rogers defines cultural appropriation pretty broadly by saying that it’s the “use of one culture’s symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture—regardless of intent, ethics, function, or outcome.” He goes on to define four different categories that include exchange, dominance, exploitation, and transculturation across a spectrum from reciprocal exchange all the way to transnational corporations commodifying cultural artifacts from marginalized communities. The category of interest for art in virtual worlds is cultural exploitation, which Rogers defines as “the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission, and/or compensation.”
Rogers points to Ziff & Rao’s 1997 essay titled “Introduction to cultural appropriation: A framework for analysis” published in a book titled Borrowed power to lay out four main concerns for considering the potential harms of cultural appropriation. I’ll include quotes from Rogers here who summarizes of these four concerns:
- “The first concern is cultural degradation.”
- Appropriation “can have corrosive effects on the integrity of an exploited culture because the appropriative conduct can erroneously depict the heritage from which it is drawn.”
- “The second concern identified by Ziff and Rao is the preservation of cultural elements.”
- “Arguments against cultural exploitation on the grounds of cultural preservation claim that cultural objects, symbols, and practices are best understood in their native contexts and that the priority should be preservation of the integrity of marginalized cultures.”
- “The third concern about cultural exploitation is deprivation of material advantage”
- “Cultural products, either of the past or of living cultures, are being “wrongfully exploited for financial gain””
- The fourth and final concern is “the failure to recognize sovereign claims”
- “Although Western legal systems and concepts of ownership support the widespread appropriation of elements of traditional cultures without remuneration, they also often prevent traditional cultures from blocking what they perceive as inappropriate uses or adaptations.”
There’s no monetary exchange happening in Suku, and so it’s not really being exploited for financial gain. Suku is not intended to be a cultural heritage project of an educational context, but regardless there may be some compelling arguments as to whether this type of inclusion of cultural elements in this transformative artistic context has the effect of degrading the culture, not properly preserving it, or not having any formalized mechanism of consent for whether it’s an appropriate adaptation. This is not a judgement that I’m in a position to make, and is likely a conversation to be had with the citizens and scholars of Curaçao. What van der Meer told me is “Honestly, if I talk to white people from the Netherlands, they usually think a little bit more complicated about these things than when I talk to local guys or girls here on the island.”
Ultimately, I don’t have any clear answers about any of this, but I wanted to raise some of these questions and point to some references and frameworks to help explore some of the ethical considerations around all of this. There’s been many other VRChat worlds and immersive projects where I have also wondered about the lines between fair use creative transformation and remixing versus the thresholds of cultural appropriation. Virtual worlds can both replicate some of the existing colonial impulses and dynamics, but it also has the potential to create new dynamics and normative standards striving towards being in right relationships with others.
My direct experience of Suku was that it was able to create some really striking contrasts between the mundane virtual representations of the Curaçao and Caribbean geography while juxtaposing it to this more surrealistic, magical realism, and psychedelic Studio Ghibli inspired architecture. It’s definitely a world that filled me with awe and wonder, and it shows the potential of how far you can take a VR modelling program like Gravity Sketch.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So in today's episode, I feature Dirk Vandermeer, who's a 3D digital artist who works within virtual reality. He uses Gravity Sketch primarily to create these different 3D models. And in the past, he's also used like Oculus Medium, and he got his start with Google Blocks. But He created a VR chat world called Suku, which ended up taking home the winner for the best art world this year at Rain Dance Immersive 2024. And so Dirk is a 3D artist who the art that he creates, he ends up putting it within the context of a VR chat world. And so he kind of treats it as a living painting where he's able to experiment and create create an entire experience that is pretty vast and it's very much inspired by this kind of blend of the influences from curacao which is a caribbean country where he lives and also with this kind of imaginal magical realism surrealistic studio ghibli inspired psychedelia of architecture so It's a pretty vast world, but also creating these moments of awe and wonder as you go through and look at the contrast between the mundane-ness of the world around you with this magical, realistic, surrealistic architecture and immersive art exhibitions that he has throughout the course of this world. So we'll be covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Dirk happened on Friday, July 5th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:43.689] Durk van der Meer: My name is Dirk van der Meer. I'm originally from the Netherlands. I now live in Curaçao. And I started VR back when the first Oculus came out, the DK1. I started kind of modeling some 3D stuff there. And I was already building a lot of different stuff professionally. So I was building some installations, working on some small games, some animations. So I was already in 3D. Then when VR came, that's really when I switched over to VR modeling. And I think that's the main activity I do for virtual reality.
[00:02:22.985] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into working with VR.
[00:02:28.129] Durk van der Meer: Yeah. So my background is going really back as an art student, studied painting and drawing, didn't use any computers back then. Then years later, obviously, being able to get employed as an artist, I realized that the computer was probably a good way for me to marry being able to create visual stuff and make a living. So I kind of taught myself some Photoshop, some early ZBrush. Then after a couple of years, I kind of built this portfolio in the evening hours. Then I applied for a job as an architectural visualizer. So that was my first job, creating renders of houses, some animations of these building projects. That's really where I learned 3D and luckily picked up some knowledge about architecture and designing visual spaces. I did that for about four years. And then I really wanted to kind of expand and get into more creative stuff. Because in the end, you're always taking somebody else's design and making it look as good as you can. So that's when I started freelancing. And then I did all kinds of jobs, some of which I just mentioned.
[00:03:41.138] Kent Bye: Great. Yeah. And as I was going back through your Twitter posts and looking at some of the evolution of you getting into VR, I noticed that you had back in like July of 2019, at that point, you were using everything from Google Blocks, Tilt Brush, Gravity Sketch, Oculus Medium. Maybe you could talk a little bit about where did you start to begin exploring some of these illustration tools and 3D modeling tools that were within the context of being immersed within VR and creating VR. So I'd love to hear which one of those first came on your radar and the evolution of working with these different modeling programs.
[00:04:21.308] Durk van der Meer: Funny thing is, when I bought my first Oculus DK1, as I mentioned, I really thought I was going to play all these games and do all these experiences. But when I got it, I realized that I'm not really a gamer. So I wasn't really doing any of that. And it was kind of sitting on the shelf. And it wasn't until I found Google Blocks, which is kind of the early poly modeling tool you had in VR. Of course, I had to wait for the controllers to come out because they weren't even part of it for the first release. But as soon as they got out, I really got into Google Blocks. And I was also very inspired by somebody that I worked with in the past. His online name is Nam. His real name is Bastian Heumeyer. And he also does a lot of cool VR stuff. And I think, especially in those early days, I did learn quite a bit from him because he had this philosophy where If you're building for VR, you should build inside of VR. And because Google blocks was really the first software that you could create these models that were performant enough, because when you do poly modeling, you know, you have much more control than a lot of these other sculpting models. software like Oculus Medium, for example. That was really the first software where you could make some 3D model that you could then put in a VR world quite effortlessly. So we built a couple of worlds. We built one world together for a platform called Sumerian. They do VR in your browser. They were acquired by Amazon. We made a cool little demo for them of this mysterious garden, all made inside of Google blocks. But there was some limitations. It was made by Google, obviously, but it wasn't really supported. It wasn't really being updated. They were not adding any features. Gravity Sketch was already out at some point, but it was really waiting for them to add what you call subdivision modeling, where you do poly modeling, but that you can then turn on and make it a denser and more high quality model, but you can still model in the low poly form. So it's very, again, you have a lot of control. As soon as they added that, because I knew it was coming. So as soon as they added that, that was like my go-to. And still to this day, for me, Gravity Sketch is really the software where I'm freest and I have most control. and still be able to output very performant models directly without later having to go back and rework things and re-topologize. And it's a workflow that I also have done for some models, and I know how that works. But that directness and that control that something like Gravity Sketch gives me, that's really the reason that I still really love that software. And I think I spend about most of my time in VR, I spend in Gravity Sketch. So about like two to three hours a day. And the cool thing is that I've worked with the guys from Gravity Sketch to actually the scene that I usually build in, the warehouse scene, that I also help them build that. So fun fact.
[00:07:20.222] Kent Bye: Nice, and I know that Tilt Brush is a little bit more painterly and doesn't, at the end of the day, produce models that are optimized, but sometimes can be good for some artists that I've heard will use it to very quickly sketch out ideas and get a special context. I noticed in your tutorial video that you were using very simple shapes to kind of flesh out something and maybe give you a sense of an architecture that you want to then go in and refine. And then Oculus Medium was another BNVR and sculpt And I think it eventually ended up selling to Adobe. But again, maybe this trend of these big technology companies producing the software, but not supporting it up to a certain point and then offloading it into another entity. But it seems like Oculus medium was able to, again, have a very high resolution model, but may not be optimized for even having it in VR, but that there was like a tune shader, a vertex and color tune shader that you had discovered that allowed you to give this aesthetic that allowed you to explore a little bit more of what was happening within the context of Oculus Medium. But I'd love to hear how both Tilt Brush, which now is called Open Brush since Google stopped supporting yet another one of these programs, but also Oculus Medium and how that played a part in your evolution for creating art while being within VR.
[00:08:39.048] Durk van der Meer: Yeah, and I definitely played around with a lot of these types of software. In the world I built a couple of years ago, Moranga is really, you'll find something from every tool in that world, because that was really the time where I really wanted to experiment. And then Moranga was the place where I put those experiments. Oculus medium, I played around with it and they had some really cool features. For example, you could kind of film yourself in VR with an extra camera. You know, you could do like tutorials in there. There was a really well thought out things where you could capture footage in an interesting way. You get several ways of positioning your camera, but yeah, they're functional based. So they give you models that, um, Not only are they high resolution, but they don't have good edge flow. 3D models consist of little points and they're all connected with lines. Ideally, you have a model where the lines flow in a natural way according to the shape of whatever you were modeling. Oculus Medium got acquired by Adobe, as you mentioned, and it turned into Substance Modeler, which is interesting software, and I'm using it a little bit because there is something to sculpting. It is a very different thing than moving polys around. And they added auto retopology and auto UV mapping in their export settings. So I have done some fairly successful tests where I do create this high-res model, and then on export, I export a lower version of that That's automatically retopologized, so fairly clean geometry. Then I load that into Substance Painter, where I then use the high-res model to bake in all those details. There are still some kinks, and it works better for these types of models than for other types of models. But whenever I want to do something where it's really about something very organic, and it has all these little bumps and little folds and stuff like that, then it's definitely a consideration to get into Substance Modeler. And they're supporting it, and they're really rolling out a lot of new features with that. And also, they've really done the switch between VR and desktop really well, because there's always a part in desktop. I'm not one of those people that like, oh, you have to put everything into VR mode. No, no. Keep the VR mode pretty lean and clean. Don't overload the UI with all these buttons. And in Substance Modeler, there are some things you can only do in desktop. because they don't want to clutter the UI in VR. And I love that kind of commitment, where it's just one button you click, and then you're in desktop mode. You click the button again, and you're in VR. Under the hood, that's not as simple as it sounds, because this is sometimes a feature that I miss a little bit with Gravity Sketch. but yeah so that's i think that's one of the most interesting besides gravity sketch like creation uh softwares that i know of until brush is great and it's really great first introduction for people because it can be fairly lightweight you can do it on a mobile headset and it's really drawing and drawing is very different from modeling and most people i mean every person in the world started drawing as a kid some people just stopped drawing So I do think tilt brush, if I ever give like a kid a headset and try to explain what I do, I'll turn on tilt brush and they'll immediately start drawing. And funny thing is that like adults will usually just draw in front of them kind of constrained to what's in their view. Well, I've seen kids immediately start to walk around and like draw around themselves. And like that spatial nature of it is so intuitive and, for them. So yeah, I don't really use it myself because the problem with Tailbrush, it's much more reliant on what kind of shader are you using? And that usually doesn't translate all that greatly into Unity or whatever game engine you want to use it. But then again, I mean, creativity wouldn't stop you from finding a use for it because it's its own thing and it should not try to be that other software. So I think there are several lanes and that's a very good thing.
[00:12:40.350] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like with the Tilt Brush, like you said, it's a lot of not only drawing, but also painting and illustrating that I feel like it's really leaning upon those disciplines. And then Oculus Medium is much more like sculpting, like you said, where you're starting with these primitive shapes and molding clay in a way. And Gravity Sketch in some ways is a little bit in between those where you said it's more 3D modeling, but it can be creating these large shapes, but move the points around to be able to sculpt it I don't know, it feels like a little bit of a hybrid or maybe it's something completely different when you think about constructing a 3D model through building these planes. It's kind of like a very unique to VR type of experience to do that. So I don't know how you start to think about how Gravity Sketch is blending together all these different affordances for the workflow.
[00:13:26.778] Durk van der Meer: I think for me, sculpting is very different from what you can do in Gravity Sketch. In Gravity Sketch, you can make big block out shapes. You can sketch. You can do the poly modeling. So it's kind of a collection of tools. But the sculpting for me is really building. layer by layer, the way you do it with clay. And it's actually a way to kind of slow down your process, which is sometimes hard for me to going back to that because I'm a bit impatient and Gravity Sketch just gives me the results so quickly. But sometimes it's good to go to the sculpting because it forces you just to start with the sphere And to start seeing the shapes and carving out what you don't need and building up clay where you need it. There is something about slowing down that process, especially when it comes to faces and adding a lot of character and things like that. I think the workflows for me, it's either I do that sculpting-wise and then use that, as I mentioned earlier, like the new exports you can do in Substance Modeler. Or I find a way where in Gravity Sketch, I can already get to a fairly high detail. And then in Substance Painter, where I draw all my materials and I apply my textures, I then add those details. But that transition point, like big shapes and that whole spectrum to where those small details are, I'm still figuring out like there's no software that does both things like immediately. There's still this moment where I have to jump off and import it into some new software. And I don't know if that's a bad thing. As I mentioned earlier, you could be the kind of software where you're like, we want all the features. But then you end up with something like ZBrush, which I've tried to get into numerous times, but it's just so overwhelming for me that it never becomes fun. And I think this is where gravity shines because it knows kind of what it is. And it's optimizing for that. Having said that, if you go to the website of Gravity Sketch or look in their socials, you're going to see cars, shoes, planes, industrial design type things. And I do think that like out of the box, that's probably where it's best for. But I immediately saw like you can do so much more with Gravity Sketch. So I really love to do like the kind of low poly modeling that you'll find in some of my worlds. And that's the kind of stuff that I never used to do when I was just on a pancake mode in 3ds Max. Because the added feature of in-gravity sketches moving all those points by hand, scaling and rotating as you're moving it, it just puts so much extra information in there, where it really feels like it's handmade. I mean, some of the models of myself that I like the most, they have that quality. But you can see it's not perfect. And nothing is perfectly level. There's no straight lines. Everything is a little bit, yeah, you know, as I said, it feels kind of natural and organic. And I think those are elements that I don't really hear people talking about that being such a great feature of VR because people think they want perfection. If you want a shoe or a car, you want perfect symmetry. You want really straight lines, right? But there's this whole other world out there that maybe a handful of people kind of play with. Yeah.
[00:16:51.740] Kent Bye: I wanted to ask around the workflow using those subdivisions because we're talking about these different programs of making these 3D sculptures and drawings and models within the context of these different programs. And each of them have their drawbacks when you start to export them into a VR native experience because a lot of times they weren't built for optimizing it to be performant within the context of these virtual environments. And so the low poly emphasis of gravity sketch and also Google blocks that, you know, like you said, really started this very simplistic, you know, starting with building out these shapes and, and having the spirit of that Google blocks into much more of a fully formed program within gravity sketch with much more detail and control. to create these different objects. And so in your tutorial, when you're building the snail and gravity sketch, you are making these blocks and then you turn on the subdivision model and then it makes this really smooth curves. And like you were saying, a lot of the demos that you're seeing on the gravity steps website are these cars and these shoes, which they look great, but they may not be as performant when you start to export it because they have all these additional geometries. And so when you do the subdivision modeling, is there a way to decimate it back into something that's more performant? Or once you turn on that subdivision, are you then at that point realizing that whatever I'm creating is not gonna be really all that performant because it's gonna be a lot more complex than if I were to just leave it in the low poly mode?
[00:18:20.578] Durk van der Meer: Well, when I used to do animations for 3ds Max, then you would use subdivision in a way where you could animate the low poly model. You could do the weight blending there. It's much easier to control. And then you turn on the subdivision. And then when the render time comes, it's looking much better. so you know there are sometimes software where you can send over or export the low poly model and the other software adds the subdivisions kind of for you but working with game engines that's not really a thing there has been some like things like that but i i don't really think any of them have been really successful like adaptive resolution on a certain model you know you come closer and automatically adds resolution So for me, it is really just figuring out what's the purpose of the model. And that really depends on how visible it is. How close are you to the model? And it's more about thinking in terms of resolution. If I make a spaceship, but it's going to be flying overhead, then I can look at it. And because I'm modeling in VR, I'm looking at it in VR. So I get a good sense of where do I need the subdivisions. There's a round thing there. It needs to look really round. I'll add some subdivision there. But I can sneak off a lot on the area that is not that visible, for example. So it's really knowing what you're modeling and then adapting to that. The other thing is that... Starting in VR, especially in the early days, it was really two things that make something performant. It's the poly count, how many points is your 3D model made out of, and draw calls, which just means how many textures are you going to show. These days, software has gotten a lot better. The way it's rendered has greatly improved. I mean, I won't be able to tell you exactly how that works, but what I do know is that poly count has become much less of an issue. The bottleneck now much more is texture memory. So you still want to reduce your textures. You want to have several objects share the same texture, you know, bake things into one big texture. So when you copy them, it doesn't add those draw calls. And this is why in my recent work I did for the rain dance, I wanted to test that out in terms of doing a much bigger world and also having a lot of the objects much more high poly and more organic and smooth. And yeah, I think performance wise, it's much less of an issue now than then. So those are all things you take into consideration. It's still the case that if I have to make something, for example, recently I made something for a company that does real time in your browser, which also just like VR needs to be very, very performant. There is a cutoff point where I'm like, all right, let's not go for realism because you won't get there. But let's lean into the limitations we have and lean into this low poly style. Again, that first world that I built, Maranga, that was the principle it was based on. Let me just figure out this aesthetic that marries very well with very low poly models, meaning that I can just put them in the world. And I don't really even have to create what you call LODs, like low density models that you would see in the distance, because they're already low dense. So I think that's also one of the considerations that I have, like lean into the style that marries best with the kind of performance you're expecting or you're building for.
[00:21:55.222] Kent Bye: Okay, and so I'd love to hear some of the output contexts that you have with whatever you're creating in these 3D programs, because I imagine that you're doing everything from putting these models into game engines like Unity or Unreal Engine, or you mentioned the web, and so WebXR or other web-based mediums you're likely having these different 2D renders that you're not as concerned with some of the different complexity of the models and you just want to be able to have it so that it renders out to a final image. And so I'd love to hear how you start to think about all those different output contexts that you're creating.
[00:22:30.356] Durk van der Meer: Yeah, and again, it's like, what are you optimizing for? I think that's always where it starts, but in a creative way. So I'm working currently on some projects that I can't really, they're not out yet, so I can't really mention them. But a lot of the browser-based stuff now is all GLTF or GLB-based. I actually went into the NFT space a couple of years ago and I sold some NFTs when I figured out I could actually do 3D NFTs in the forms of GLBs. I think that's the latest thing that I've discovered, that new format and what goes into that. There are other limitations. The cool thing about a GLB, for example, is it contains everything. It has the textures, materials, everything translates. It uses PBR. for its rendering technique. So it translates fairly well across all these different platforms. It's kind of this universal standard for your browser. But what it doesn't do, for example, is, well, let's talk about this. Like one of the big things for performance is instancing. So you have a 3D model in your scene, you copy it, and then it will copy it as an instance. It means that the computer will render it only, it's only one draw call. It only has to kind of render it once, although it will show it twice. And it can be scaled, it can be rotated, it can be in different location. You want to do that instead of like exporting the model twice and importing it twice, because then it will be double the cost. When I create a GLB and I create it, for example, in 3ds Max, inside of the GLB, instances can live. So let's say I create a scene with a thousand teapots. If I instance them in the scene, that GLB is very small and it's really only the one draw call for the teapot. But as soon as my GLB is in the world and I'm copying it around, And maybe somebody that knows more about this technical stuff can correct me. But as far as I've noticed, I've seen, it does add a draw call every time. So it can't really pick up that these TLBs are using the same texture and then only render it once. So it requires a completely different way of... setting up your scene. The cool thing about working in these game engines, it's really set up to be very modular. You try to create, and this is true for game design in general, you try to create as little amount of models as you can and get as maximum mileage out of it. You want to create like three different rocks, scale, rotate, position them so you can make it look like it's these rocks that are going on forever, but you don't kind of see that repetition happening. I'm now in the process of figuring out what's the best way to still work modular, but then with the GLBs and still be very performant. I think that's one of the latest things that I'm now diving into. I'm working also with some developers who are on the front line of GLBs and creating that technology in real time. which is really cool. And it's the same with VR. You're right there at the edge where you're literally waiting for a feature to come out. And then four weeks later, you already know, this means that I can make this with it. So that's some of the background on that.
[00:25:42.665] Kent Bye: And so if you were trying to create a 2D flat image of a render of some of these 3D models, what program do you go to to be able to render that out?
[00:25:53.504] Durk van der Meer: It depends. If I want to do a 2D render, and for one of the projects that I've been working on for years, it's called Aku. I work on it with Micah Johnson. I still do a lot of these renders, 2D renders with 3D models. Then it's 3ds Max with the V-Ray render. And you might think, oh, you're so much into real-time rendering. Why wouldn't you use that? Because you can do really high-quality stuff now with HDRP Unity or Unreal Engine, which I also work with. But I do feel again, there's still a little bit of that extra quality with these old school renders. And I think also kind of slowing down your workflow, you know, treating it like a photo studio, positioning your camera, putting in your lighting and then kind of seeing the render happen and really making up your mind about what's the best composition before, you know, It takes an hour to render a really high res scene with all its effects or even longer. So I think V-Ray 3ds Max is still my go-to for those types of images. What I also really like is in Substance Painter, where I do my materials, you can do also a quick render. So you can load a HDR, HDRI, you can rotate it, you can put a simple floor underneath your model. When I want to just show people quickly some progress renders, you can even add a little bit of depth of field and you just like do a screenshot. I mean, that's just super, super fast. And people get immediate sense of like... what it looks like with some proper lighting. If I then do the final pass, I'll probably still export it, and it'll end up in rendering it out with V-Ray. And I've been playing around with Substance Stager, where you can take your models from Substance Painter, put them in Stager, and there you can do simple renders like a quick turntable animation. There you also have the option to do it real time, which is with PBR lighting, which goes really fast, or like pre-rendered, which then you'll have to wait a little longer. But sometimes you need a quick turntable animation because somebody needs to review a 3D model, but they're not as well versed enough to actually check out the FPX or a 3D link. Sometimes that's the solution. So again, they all have their qualities. And I think the fun thing is figuring out where to go for what.
[00:28:16.601] Kent Bye: And so after you have a model within Gravity Sketch, I noticed that you have some very simple base colors to differentiate the model. But when you're exporting it, do you carry in some of those colors and put it into something like Substance Painter to be able to do all the textures? Or maybe talk about your workflow of once you're done with the modeling, then what do you do?
[00:28:35.106] Durk van der Meer: Well, I didn't really do this in the beginning, but I've kind of learned to use those colors in Gravity Sketch for two things. Either it's already figuring out a color palette, and they're just kind of simple, flat colors, no textures, but that's fine. Sometimes it can really help you kind of see it clearly, especially because it's very simple lighting, and it can help. It can kind of inform the design, depending on what you're doing. So sometimes I'll use it for a color palette, Once I export it, there's no real way to use that, except from the reference that I have and the idea that I now have in my mind of what kind of color palette to use, because every color will be a different material. And that's not how I want to export my models, because then I end up with all those extra draw calls. What I do use sometimes also is use the colors as a way of kind of grouping. So I'll have a big 3D model, and I know that I can't put it all in one texture, because even sometimes a 4K texture, if it's a really big model with a lot of detail, it sometimes just isn't enough. So then I know I'll have to split it up into like three or four different materials. And then also because sometimes you want to have like one 4K material in there, but the others, maybe they can be a little bit smaller, or you want to have that freedom later on in Unity as you're exporting it, and you're kind of lowering the resolution to see where does it still look good. Oh, I needed a little bit more in the tiny details because they just kind of break, but this big surface, oh, it's actually fine with a 2K texture. Then I'll use the colors in Gravity Sketch to create those groups. And then that's just an easy way in 3ds Max to just select by material. And then you'll end up with three automatically created material per color. And then you'll have just an easy way of exporting this model with those four sub-materials. And it's also a good way to, because as I said, you want to divide your model up in several textures if you need to. But you want to kind of spread it out. You don't want to have a really small model and a really big model. You want to have a sense of how much surface is there, how I'm going to kind of evenly divide it. And then when I color it in Gravity Sketch, just spatially, I have a good sense of this big thing is about the same volume as these four smaller things, if that makes sense. And then I always sometimes use a tool in 3ds Max where you can actually immediately see the volume of a shape to give me a sense of like how much texture space I'm going to use. Yeah, and as I said, because I have then still the possibility later on to kind of lower it or make it a bit higher and I have some freedom there. But yeah, so those are kind of the two ways that I use colors in Gravity Sketch.
[00:31:21.633] Kent Bye: Okay, well, I have one more process question abounds going from Substance Painter into Unity for a project like Suku. And then I'd love to chat a little bit about the Suku project itself. But going into these VR chat worlds, you have the capability of experimenting and prototyping and having all these smaller projects and experiments that you're able to then translate into these big, vast worlds that you work on for a long period of time. And so I'd love to hear, like, what's the process that you take some of these incremental models or ideas and then start to put them into the VRChat world? Like, where do you start to begin with that process? And what's that workflow from going from the full pipeline from Gravity Sketch to Substance Spader and then all the different considerations for adding it to a much bigger project that has to be performance and all these other considerations for making it look good within the context of VR and be able to be performance enough.
[00:32:17.351] Durk van der Meer: Well, that first world that I built, Moranga, that was really me starting to model in Google blocks and later Gravity Sketch and having all these 3D models and being like, all right, this is cool. I can make a 2D render. But what I really should do, just create a world in Unity and put them in there. So this is why also the nature of Moranga is kind of all over the place. I think in a fun way where you kind of look into my creative brain at the time, and it's really like a conglomeration of all these different things. They have different styles. They're made with different types of software, but you put them all together and there is something like a connective tissue, which I guess is me in that case. I did want to, for this world, Suku be more methodical and really have an idea of where I went. Um, But what I did say to myself, I'm not allowed to have small, independent, creative outbursts or experiments. Whatever I do, besides my normal work, it has to go into Shuku. So if I want to do a little substance model or experiment, then I got to figure out like something that would actually fit this world. So I was a bit more methodical, but again, I do allow myself a great deal of freedom in that sense. What I wanted to do with this world, again, I'm going to keep referencing Moranga because that was really the first time that I really got into, put it in my mind how much fun it is to create a virtual world as an art piece, as a living painting. For Shuko, I wanted to have a bit of that psychedelic weirdness, funness, but I wanted to ground it a little bit more in reality. That's why in Shuko, for example, you will see semi-realistic green trees and grass and Because I do feel the way that there's a different kind of impact when you're walking to a familiar surrounding, but then you come upon an unfamiliar thing. Then your brain starts to create stories. You know, why is this here? I think that that's the thing that I really love most about this kind of storytelling, spatial storytelling. Yeah. So let's go back to Shuko and the inspiration for that. I wanted to kind of marry this Studio Ghibli aesthetic that I really love with this summer day, beautiful blue sky, green grass kind of feeling. But I marry it with some of the Caribbean influences. I live in Curacao, so they are kind of all around me. Some of the architecture, some of the kind of landscapes you find here. In my mind, that's always been an interesting mix. I would love to see like a Studio Ghibli movie based somewhere in the Caribbean. That's just kind of thought that never left my mind. And then added some kind of sci-fi elements in there as well. Again, just to give myself some freedom. And then I don't start out by planning it all out because it can be very daunting to be like, all right, I want to now create a really big world, right? Where do I start? And I feel if you look at the real world, you know, it wasn't planned. The real world is almost like a doodle. It started somewhere. And then the stuff that got added kind of adapted to it. And then some other stuff got added. So one of the ways, for example, that I now do my landscapes is that I used some external software called World Creator. where you can really create these realistic terrains. You can add parameters like water erosion, wind erosion. You can create virtually any type of landscape you have. Then you have to export that height map. You load that into Unity. Now they have a very easy way to actually sync your world creator model in Unity. and then still requires a lot of hand painting. But that's a really good basis for your landscape. But then what I do, because by that time, I haven't thought out where the center of it is going to be. I haven't thought out where you're going to start, because I really love to have the landscape dictate that to you. Years and years ago, I was envisioning building this world, this big rocky landscape with this pathway. And I was kind of sculpting the mountains as I was sculpting the pathway. And it just looked terrible. It was like felt not real, not realistic. There were no, it was not surprising. And then I just decided to first make the landscape and let the landscape be what it wants to be. And then literally just go into VR and stand there on a flat surface where you can easily stand and look around and be like, all right, where would the natural path be? And then you very quickly figure out the parts where the water erosion happened, for example, the lowest parts, they already provide these natural pathways. So that's when I start to follow and I carve them out a little bit more and adapt them a little bit more, started painting the floor. And the cool thing is then you get all these happy accidents. Then the world is really kind of telling you what it wants to be. That sounds a bit ethereal, but that's really what it is. So you have these kind of natural curves, these natural meandering pathways. Then once that pathway is there and you kind of have this natural flow to the environment and you feel like, oh, this is kind of a way you would go, or this is a loop you would make in this environment. If you would go for a walk here, this would be a nice walk. Then it's very evident where you want your big objects. You go around a corner and you're like, oh, this is a great place for like a reveal of this thing. You look down in a valley and you're like, oh, then you can already immediately see what you would want there. And your brain starts to project that in. So that's kind of how I think I let the landscape kind of dictate where these things are going. And then still you add some things like I love to add a gate. There's a big wall with a gate in here as well. They're super simple things, but there's something magical about a gate in VR. I have a couple in Moronga. I don't know what it is, some subconscious psychology, but for example, in Zuko, I made this gate where you kind of go through it, and as you go through it, you're kind of triggering some audio, which then coincides with you seeing what's on the other side of the gate. It's a very simple way to create a little bit of an elevated experience. And then again, that was also kind of dictated by the landscape because, you know, you want the big reveal of your main attraction to be maybe halfway during the walk or in the center of your environment. So that's why you didn't start to plan out like, all right, this would be a nice place for like a gate because the house, maybe you want that to be a reveal, but the gate, you want to see it coming because you want to build an anticipation of like, oh, I can't see what's behind it. There's no point in revealing a gate all of a sudden, you know, the fun part is that you're actually walking up to it and you're like, you can already see some things like above the wall. So you already have a little bit of context, but you don't really know what's going on and it kind of pulls you through. And then, yeah, you create this little, little experience.
[00:39:13.945] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, it can really see a lot of that early exposure to architectural visualization where some of those insights around architecture, but also world building, like building the entirety of the landscape, but also these surrealism, magical realism, otherworldly taking that type of context of these models that you're building, but setting it within a very mundane environment in the sense that it's very much inspired by where you're living there in Curacao and a lot of elements of the culture that you're also weaving into the architecture and having this blend of that Caribbean architecture with the other Dutch colonial influence in that area as well. And so I'm curious to hear a little bit more about your insights from both architecture and architectural visualization, where a lot of that is working with 3D context, but again, rendering it out into a 2D render where you're not actually having an embodied first person experience. And so there's a kind of a trend with VR of now really focusing on what it actually feels like to be immersed and embodied in a space. And then as you move your body through the space and building with the contrast of mundane and to surprise and novelty, but also transcending expectations for once you go inside of a building, you have a certain expectation. But then when you see it, you're surprised because it's something completely different that you would have never been able to imagine just because you are able to do stuff that you can only do within VR. So love to hear a little bit about that. influence of architecture and also your own world building process of trying to cultivate these different tensions of building and releasing of expectation and surprise and novelty?
[00:40:52.597] Durk van der Meer: Yeah, I think for me, the influence that I have of architecture in the world building that I'm doing, it's really now being allowed to do all the things that I wasn't allowed to do in the beginning. Because when you start visualizing these buildings, you really want to make a really beautiful image. That's really what you want to do. But that's not really what the client wants. They think that's what they want, but what they really want... it was the lowest amount of images with the most amount of features that the house actually is so many times you would have to render an interior and they would want to see like the left wall the front wall and the right wall you would almost end up with a camera that's like 180 degrees just because they want to show all the features that are are in the room So that was always pushing back and now I can fully control that. And I think that's why I like it so much. The other thing is also about. I don't build very realistic worlds, but I also feel that one of the things that I've learned from architecture is that realism is also not the thing that people want. They think they do, but they don't really know what realism looks like because nobody is objectively looking at the world around them. So I had to render out this house on a beautiful summer day. They would expect the blue sky to be reflected in the windows, but windows are pretty black. If you just go look around And if you put that in a render, all of a sudden, they look very differently at it. And that doesn't feel very cozy. Can't we see the interior? And realistically, unless you're shooting HDR and mixing different shutter times in one compositing, one image from that, you can't really see both. You can't see an interior. Same if you're in an interior, you're looking out, the windows are going to be almost completely white, unless you do some trickery there. so and there's a certain material that they say it has a certain color and they send you a photo that they took in their office of the material but then you're like yeah but now it's outside and it's a little bit reflective you know and it's going to look different but people have these expectations of what they think something looks like so it's not really about creating things in the way that they really are But again, playing with those expectations and thinking about like, what's the purpose of this thing? And I think that subconsciously, a lot of that stuff does kind of get into what I'm building. But I have to say at the same time, it's not very premeditated in that sense. For me, just when I've done that first pass of creating that landscape and I'm walking through it, then ideas just start to kind of come to me. And I already have kind of an idea of what I want to do. like a certain vibe that I want to create. And then the ideas just kind of pop in there. And then the enthusiasm just to follow that idea and see it through is what allows me to create that. And the cool thing is that even if these things are not completely balanced and level out, and sometimes if you put them next to each other, you'd be like, they're not a great match. It's very different if you put them into a world, but because now the world is their context. And now objects that are very different can actually work great because now there's this other tension. Now there's almost like this dialogue between these two things. One of the things that I put in Suku, and you were at the guided tour, so I talked a little bit about that, how the first little house you see when you're in Suku was actually a slave house. And I talked a little bit about the really dark history there is on Curacao and the slave trade that happened there. And I think it's, I mean, it's hard to not mention it if you have these Caribbean and Dutch colonial influences. The other house that's there is a plantation house, so it would be ridiculous not to mention it. But I think something dark like that, but still kind of a beautiful environment and kind of a fantasy aspect, I think they can live very well next to each other in a world like that. I think this is also where a bit of the Ghibli influence comes from, where they managed to create these movies that sometimes are very... nice and friendly, but also psychedelic and even like scary, you know, and they're not necessarily for kids. They're not necessarily for adults. It just has the full range of things that the real world also has the contradictions and the weirdness and the awkwardness, but also the beauty. And I think that's for, for world building. I don't really want to overthink it that much. And it can just kind of see what, what happens, you know, as I put it all together.
[00:45:30.333] Kent Bye: Yeah, I wanted to follow up on, ask about that, the contrast between what you refer to as the dark history of Curaçao with the colonial history and enslavement of people. And so what my experience of the Suku was this guided tour where you were able to not only refer to this creative imagination inspired by Studio Ghibli, but also refer to your direct experiences there on Curacao and referencing both the architectural elements, but also some of the references to this colonial history featuring this slave house and plantation house. And so as a medium of expression, there's a way to pull in the architectural references of that My experience of it was that there was some reference to the dark history, but I didn't get to learn anything about the dark history, either from the guided tour or from the experience itself. And if people were just going into the world, they may not even pick up on some of those references. And so part of my experience was that I was left with wanting to know a little bit more of that history. And I didn't know if... pointing to it without really digging into it was kind of a continuation of that type of colonial influence in the area that is seizing upon some of the different elements of culture that are convenient within this context without sort of really unpacking some of those other dimensions of that colonial history. I think through the guided tour, I got a lot more of that through your own experiences, but I guess I was left with wanting to know more and having more questions than answers.
[00:46:57.119] Durk van der Meer: No, I understand that. It's a very fair question. And there were some moments where I felt like, is this some kind of form of cultural appropriation that I'm doing here where I'm not really digging into it, but I'm just using it in a world where it's kind of part of the context, but it's not really the main thing. And I think for me, the answer is that This is the kind of art that I like to make. This is not a historical document of that history. Again, what are you optimizing for? If I were to make that, it would be a very, very different world. And then that would be the main thing, to communicate that history and to educate. But I think that there are very different ways that you can embed these real world things through art in people's minds, where if you are left with wanting to figure out more about it, I think that's great. I think that that's actually perfect because, you know, as an experience, there are other people that have their takeaway is like, oh, I want to get back into world building myself. you know some other people like oh the history part was really interesting you know i wish i knew a little bit more about that i think neither of those two things are necessarily why i built it but those are kind of the things that just as i said like naturally kind of came out of it and i thought about like should i do more information in the world and explain why this looks like that but i i really don't i really like it for people to experience it and different people will have different questions and i'll do some more i love to explain some of that stuff during the guided tours i'm also probably not the best person to really dive into that kind of history because there's also some small stories and myths that i talk about that are from curacao for example why the houses are so so brightly colored things like that. So it is a bit of a potpourri of those kind of feelings and tidbits of history, but it's not meant to be like an educational piece like that. In the end, inspiration just works You're put in a place and everything that comes in is going to be fed into your engine. You're going to be inspired by the things that you see, which is very different than setting out to educate people about really great other places where you can go for that. This is just all the stuff that ended up in my creative engine and then took form in Suku. So I think that that'd be how I would see this piece.
[00:49:33.578] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that came up when I was on the tour and hearing about it is, you know, just thinking about, okay, what would some local natives of Curacao think about this or that? And I think there's being in right relationship to the cultural context that you're around. And I was more wondering if, you know, like what some of the other reactions of that would be. Yeah. So I think thinking about that relationality, how is a project like this in right relationship? And I left it not knowing what kind of relationship there would be.
[00:50:03.868] Durk van der Meer: I think that for local guys that I know here on Curacao, it's not so much them trying to figure out what's the right relationship to this history. First of all, they're just proud that there are some Curacao Caribbean influences in this. And I've got nothing but good reactions. I think that sometimes... It's more of an overthinking on, yeah, just let's call it the people that actually had the colonial past, like me and, I don't know, maybe you, that kind of overthink it and like, what's culturally appropriate here? What's... But for local people in Curaçao, it's just been part of their life. It's been part of their history. It's not too complicated for them to see those things in a different context or combined. Because those canuco, those little slave houses, you see them still all over the Caribbean, all over Curaçao. And every kid should know what their history is, where they come from, and what the history is connected to that. But putting it in this different kind of artistic level doesn't negate that. And I think they're much more... I always feel like... Honestly, if I talk to white people from the Netherlands, they usually think a little bit more complicated about these things than when I talk to local guys or girls here on the island. But I do have, you know, it is something that I became much more aware of starting to live here. So I do have much more conversations about these things. And I do realize that I was very, very uninformed, even growing up in the Netherlands, about We don't really learn too much about the slave trade and how big of a part that was for the Netherlands. But this is true for a larger part of Europe. So it was more like I think I've always felt more uncomfortable with it. than the people that I've met here. And I have to say that also Curacao, it is really like, if you talk about a multicultural world, Curacao is really that, like multilingual, multiracial, multicolored. So it's much less of a, I think, they-them mentality than we might think it is. That doesn't mean that there's not like certain sentiments, you know, there's not like... A country like Curaçao only had its independence for a little over 10 years and then still in a way embedded in the Dutch kingdom. So that weirdness and that history, it's still very apparent. But in your day-to-day life, no, people have just been really supportive and I think even kind of proud like, oh, this is cool that you're highlighting this and understanding it's not... It's not an educational piece. It is really more of an inspiration piece. Inspiration could be, let me get into some world building myself. The inspiration could also be, let me find out something more about that history that just briefly got touched upon during those tours.
[00:53:10.916] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think going on the tour was really helpful to hear you share some of those different pieces of information. And I think if people just go into the world itself, they don't get all that additional context. So I definitely appreciate hearing that context directly from you, being able to walk through it and to hear more about your own experience of what it's been like to be there on Curacao and some of the different unique elements of a culture where If I were to actually travel to Curacao, there may be some of the same types of things that you would walk around and talk about that you're able to give this kind of guided tour cultural sharing from your own experiences there on Curacao. So, yeah. And I think that my overall experience of the piece is that it did successfully bring in all these moments of awe and wonder. architecturally and what you're doing with the world design. And then the things that I was left with were also this kind of like allusion to the dark history, but not really digging into it, which I think is sort of another thing that we're kind of unpacking here and still lots of opportunities to kind of really get a lot more context as to a lot of that, you know, digging into it more and learning just more about the Dutch colonial influence in that area and the Caribbean. So yeah. Cool. Well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:54:24.235] Durk van der Meer: I mean, for me personally, I've actually just bought Quest 3. I've been working with MetaQuest Pro now for a while. As I said, like two or three hours a day doing 3D modeling. The MetaQuest Pro was giving me a big headache because the controllers weren't tracking and I was really restarting it like eight to 10 times a day. And I was thinking about myself that even despite all that resistance, that still the format and the hardware has and still uncomfortable and it sometimes doesn't work and doesn't do what you want. I still want to go in VR and model because there's just nothing like it. For me, that's the killer app. Going back to a flat screen, trying to create 3D models, especially for a virtual world, it just feels... I don't even know how to do it anymore, really. I tried just the other day and it was just taking so long. I just couldn't get a quick idea of what I wanted. So for me, the creation is really the killer app. And I think... for that also co-creation. I think if you look even at really popular games, whether it be Roblox or Minecraft, people really love to create things, create worlds together. Gravity Sketch has a really cool collab feature where you can actually be in the same virtual space. I've actually used it to give some tutorials, which is great because you can literally just show the buttons or grab a model that somebody's making and make a small adjustment. But also there are other websites, there were some worlds on VRChat that were made in Resonate, which is really also a co-creation kind of software, which I'm actually going to get a little tour of next week. I'm going to check that out. I think this has always been my dream of in the future building something where it's kind of a game, but it's also co-creation. My early days, just before I started in architectural visualization, I had a short period where I worked with people from Second Life, where I was creating some worlds, which was kind of my first dipping my toe into the metaverse. The cool thing about Second Life was you would actually be building in the world. So there were sandboxes, places where you'd have five or 10 different people around there building things One guy was building a dinosaur, somebody else is creating a building, and you actually just walk around and you talk about these things to other people. They're like the ultimate conversation starter. And now with VR, it's even more immersive. It can really build scenes and worlds collaboratively together. for me that's the first thing that i think of when you ask me like what's the future of vr i think for me that's something that i i hope really takes shape and gets supported and gets traction
[00:57:06.107] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to do the Tales of the Mystic Cat in Resonite, which has like a live painting using some tools that are very Tilt Brush-like, so much more of the drawing and the painting. And so, yeah, just be able to do that in real time and to see something be constructed with those collaborative tools. Because a lot of the stuff that's in VRChat right now, you know, you have to do everything outside of VRChat to make it, but to have... tools within the vr creating vr is really powerful to see what's happening there in resonite rec room also has a lot of those collaborative creation tools and it's much more low poly and it's aesthetic so yeah well i guess is there anything else that's left and said that you like to say the broader immersive community
[00:57:45.498] Durk van der Meer: No, not really. I hope that people check out my virtual worlds. The world that I mentioned earlier, Moranga, it's also been available on VR chats for a while and you can find some other worlds. So I think if you want to take a look into my creative mind and that's probably the best place to start. It's all PC VR. I haven't really built for mobile quest because I just want to have like all the bells and whistles that I currently have, but maybe that's something for the future. And I've started slowly kind of building my next project, which I'm not completely sure about, but I think it's actually going to be a game. I think it's time for me to really start not just build a world like a gallery, but something more narrative and more game-like, more interactive. But very, very early days, but I'm very excited about it.
[00:58:35.751] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Dirk, very much appreciate having you come on the podcast to share a little bit more about your creative process of using all these different tools and workflow. And I think Basuku is a world that really shows the extent to how far you can take a tool like Gravity Sketch to create these vast worlds, you know, really vast architecture and really mixing the mundane world and that context of the Curacao, you know, that Highland, that Caribbean culture, but also having these imaginal magical realism and Studio Ghibli-inspired architecture and look and feel. And yeah, very much appreciated, you know, going on this tour that I had lots of moments of awe and wonder. And yeah, also catalyzed me to go do a whole other deep dive of other unanswered questions around the history and the context of Curacao. So I think it speaks to the power of what you can do with virtual reality and world building. And yeah, just very curious to see where you take it all in the future. And thanks so much for taking the time to help break it all down.
[00:59:36.029] Durk van der Meer: Nice. Great to hear. It was really nice talking to you. Thank you, Kent.
[00:59:39.966] Kent Bye: So that was Dirk van der Meer. He's a freelance digital artist based in Curaçao, which is a Caribbean country. He's also a character artist and a VR world builder where he uses 3D modeling tools like Gravity Sketch in order to create these vast VR chat worlds. His experience that he created for Raindance Immersive 2024 called Suku ended up winning the best art world. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, it was just great to hear a lot more context for how Dirk uses virtual reality as a part of his workflow and pipeline, primarily with Gravity Sketch, just because he's able to, in a very detailed fashion, control the size and complexity of all the models that he's creating. And there's some tutorial videos that I'll link that are also really helpful to see how he's using these tools in order to be a professional artist. He's got a number of different outputs for these pieces of art that he's creating, either creating 2D renders, and we talked through all the different pipeline he uses for that, but also actually putting into these VR chat worlds that he treats as a sort of like living painting, where as he was giving the guided tour, he was saying, you know, when he's working, he has his day job where he's creating digital art for a number of different clients. But then whenever he's having his own time to creatively explore, he tries to create this big, massive project where he can Start to iterate with all these different experiments or pieces of art that he's creating that are going to have a context for where it's going to go live. He started with Marengo to treat this as a prototyping space where he was exploring all sorts of different types of 3D modeling tools from like Oculus Medium to Google Blocks and then also Gravity Sketch. But then with Suku, he's primarily focusing on Gravity Sketch. So my experience of the world, I just really enjoyed the sense of awe and wonder. He's really able to create these vast architectural spaces and, you know, as a background in architectural visualization, which is really where he started to get in. And you can really see that influence here because he's creating these moments where you're moving your body through this virtual world and then having these contrasts that he's creating for the mundaneness of the world around you. with the kind of magical realism and surrealism of this kind of Studio Ghibli-inspired psychedelia that he's creating. So there's certainly some really magical moments within the course of taking this tour. I think also just having a guided tour aspect to this for Rain Dates Immersive is also really super helpful just because he's able to add a lot more context for not only his process for how he's creating this art, but also the broader context for what it's like to live there in Curacao. So I did want to unpack a little bit more around these questions around cultural appropriation, because if there's one complaint that I have about this world is that there is this kind of unconscious replication of some of the aspects of colonialism that he's reflecting there in the culture around him. So Curaçao has a colonial history with the Netherlands and the Dutch colonial influence there, and he's representing that within the context of architecture. And it was super interesting to hear a little bit more about that history and context while I'm in the guided tour. Generally, when people are going into this world, they're not going to have access to that. And so it's not necessarily the best medium to really dig in and unpack some of these different elements. But I do think there is this consideration for what is the line of what is being culturally appropriative versus what is a fair use remixing of taking a cultural exchange and transmuting it and transforming it into something that's new and different. So his intention is certainly not an educational one. He's made that quite clear that he's mostly focusing on his own creative inspiration for what is his own process for what he sees around him. He lives in Curacao, which has a lot of the elements of Dutch colonial influence kind of embedded within the culture. And so in some ways, he's just kind of reflecting that and repeating that within the context of virtual reality. But I think there's also these other elements of like, to what point do you have permission or license to take other elements of another culture and start to integrate it into these types of virtual worlds? This is certainly something that's not isolated to the experience of Suku. I've seen this time and time again of different worlds within the context of VR chat, but I did dig into some of the scholarship on this issue. And so I did look up a communications theory article that was written back in November 2006. It was called From Cultural Exchange to Transculturalization, a Review and Reconceptualization of Cultural Appropriations. Just to get a little bit of a baseline for what are some of the definitions, what are some of the concerns, what are some of the harms to look out for? And so the author, Richard Rogers, he says that, you know, for the way he's defining cultural appropriation, he says it's the use of one culture's symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies by members of another culture, regardless of intent, ethics, function, or outcome. So that's a pretty broad definition because there's different categories that he's trying to lay out within the context of this article. Everything from cultural exchange, which is more of a reciprocal exchange of different cultures to dominance, which is kind of the colonial influence where one culture will start to dominate another culture. And then there's the exploitation, which he defines as the appropriation of elements of a subordinated culture by a dominant culture without substantive reciprocity, permission and or compensation. And then there's the transculturalization, which is more around like big multinational corporations appropriating different aspects of marginalized cultures to be able to profit from it. So I think of all the different four, this could potentially fit within the category of cultural exploitation. And there's another couple of scholars, Ziff and Rao. who wrote an essay called An Introduction to Cultural Appropriation, a framework for analysis that was published in a book from 1997 called Borrowed Power Essays on Cultural Appropriation. It was cited within Rogers, and he's laying out these four main concerns around acts of cultural appropriation. So the first concern is cultural degradation, which is that any time appropriation happens, it could have potential corrosive effects on the integrity of an exploited culture because the appropriate conduct can erroneously depict the heritage from which it's drawn. So that's the first concern. The second concern that was identified by Ziff and Rao is the preservation of cultural elements. So the arguments against cultural appropriation on the grounds of cultural preservation claim that cultural objects, symbols, and practices are best understood in their native contexts and that the priority should be preservation of the integrity of those marginalized cultures. And then the third concern about cultural exploitation is the depriving of material advantage. And I don't think this is necessarily an issue here just because there's no money being exchanged. This is just an art project. But there are concerns around these different types of cultural products of either the past or living cultures of being, quote, wrongfully exploited for financial gain. And then the fourth and final concern is the failure to recognize sovereign claims. So it's the idea that traditional cultures should have ability to either block what they perceive as inappropriate uses or adaptations. So these are some of the larger frameworks for cultural appropriation that I just wanted to get a little bit of a baseline for seeing what some of the concerns are, because we're talking about virtual worlds where you're able to Create this whole imaginal space, and it's kind of like the Wild West of possibilities. And some of these concerns around commodification and profiting, I think that's a whole other class of cultural appropriation. But I think there are these other side effects. So I just wanted to read through some of those things. As people go on, obviously, this is a broader ethical question for how to navigate these things in the context of art that's being created. But also just thinking around the relationality and what does it mean to be in right relationship to art? these different considerations. You know, in this context, Dirk is pulling these elements and he's taking these architectural representations of colonialism in terms of these slave houses and plantation house, and he's transmuting it in a way where it becomes this immersive art installation. And so he's playing a lot with these expectations for what you expect And then creating these different contrasts. It's like you go into this world, you're not expecting this interior of this plantation house to be this immersive art kind of Meow Wolf inspired installation. For me, there's an element there of taking something that has a cultural meaning of something like a slave house and then turning it into like a fun, psychedelic, surrealistic art world. So colonialism is something that is embedded into many cultures around the world, including United States of America here, where there's many different unceded territories that were stolen from indigenous peoples. And so, you know, there's a movement within Canada and beyond to do land acknowledgements to be able to at least acknowledge some of the different harms that have happened in the past. But The criticisms around that is also that it can transform into some sort of performative ritual that doesn't actually address some of the deeper harms of colonization. It treats it as a metaphor rather as something that is actually trying to build towards this kind of acknowledgement and reconciliation. So, yeah, it's certainly something that's an open question for how to bring about these different levels of decolonization and levels of awareness. And in terms of like as we're creating these different virtual worlds, then what are the different things that are kind of replicating different aspects of these power imbalances? And then what are ways that we can use the virtual medium to start to really reimagine and maybe even potentially start to strive towards these right relationships and all these different contexts? But overall, my experience of the piece was that it's certainly an awe-inspiring and beautiful instance for what you can do with tools like Gravity Sketch to take these art projects and to use the World Creator professional plugin from Unity to be able to create these vast worlds and then to have these different contrasts of these different 3D models that he's got in there. So yeah, it's certainly a beautiful world to go check out and to see some of the different frontiers and potentials of immersive world building. So that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
