Associated with death and rebirth, representations of ostrich eggs in gold and silver were commonly placed in graves of the ancient Egyptians as early as 5,000 years ago. This has influenced the Christian and Islamic cultures and traditions we see today.

Inspired by this dark and strange history, we wanted to create our own golden sculpture inspired by the Egyptian underworld of Duat.

We used Adobe Medium, a 3D sculpting tool available on Oculus Rift to create an intricate gold egg, which features the starry night and river of Ra as he journeys through the underworld, and the sprouting of vegetation and the annual flooding of Osiris. The main shape and additional assets were created in Medium and built up in layers in C4D.

ABOVE IMAGE//
MAKING OF FIRST EGG SCULPTURE
VR PAINTING IN MEDIUM AND C4D CLEANUP

ABOVE BELOW//
25MB EXPERIENCE. CAN TAKE A WHILE TO DOWNLOAD.
POLY REDUCTION AND STREAMLINING ONLY WENT SO FAR. 
BE PATIENT.

RIGHT INTERACTIVE//
VERSION 2.0 WE SCULPTED 100% IN MEDIUM AND ONLY USED C4D FOR POLY REDUCTION
LOST PRECISION BUT EXPERIENCE MORE ORGANIC
 

BELOW VIDEO//
MAKING OF VERSION 2.0

LEFT IMAGE//
MAKING OF VERSION 2.0

We used Medium to create the physical geometry of each sculpture. The app is a really fun and intuitive way of creating shapes, however, using the older VR headsets in a smaller space meant that fidelity was an issue at smaller scale. Would love to try it again in a large space with big arm movements.

The sculptures we created in Medium have huge polygon counts. This was a problem because we wanted these pieces to be viewable online and in AR. The bulk of the work in C4D was to reduce the polygon count and simplify the final sculptures.

The power of Vectary for this project was its great built-in textures and simple AR functionality. Once our FBX was imported, we simply added the gold texture from a drop-down and defined the AR and viewing parameters.