Curriculum for Teaching 3D Drawing

3D Drawing Highlights

Overview

This page describes a curriculum for teaching a hybrid studio/lecture course on 3D drawing in eXtended Reality. This was first taught by Prof. Daniel Keefe at the University of Minnesota in Spring 2025 using the special topics designation (CSci-8980) and will become a regular course offering starting Spring 2026 with the permanent course number CSci-8605.

Reuse

Copyright 2025 by Daniel Keefe. All rights reserved.

I would be excited to share and support instructors who wish to use the curriculum in their courses. Please contact me at dfk@umn.edu to discuss permission to reuse or remix.

Acknowledgements

This work is supported in part by the National Science Foundation (Awards #2326998, #2326999).

CSCI 8605: 3D Drawing in eXtended Reality

Course Description

In this experimental course, you will do hands-on work with 3D mixed-reality hardware and software (headsets, 3D controllers, both commercial and custom software) to learn a style of digital free-form 3D modeling known as 3D drawing and painting. We'll study the topic from two complementary perspectives:

  1. the creative art/design practice of 3D drawing, and
  2. the technical interactive computer graphics tools that make it possible.

We'll engage equally with both perspectives through a format that combines in-class studio time for learning and practicing 3D drawing skills with demonstrations, readings, and presentations on the latest research in 3D drawing technologies and the 25+ year history of 3D drawing in virtual reality. Then, you will complete a final work that is either a creative exploration or a technical exploration of 3D drawing and present their your in a public exhibit/demo day at the conclusion of the semester.

The course syllabus includes details.

Topics and links to readings are outlined below.

Week 1: Context and Course Intro

Topics

Readings

Weekly Drawing 1

For this week's drawing, your prompt is:

What is a drawing tool?

Create a drawing made with a tool that we would not typically associate with drawing.

  • You can use an existing tool or a tool you create.
  • Invest time not just in the drawing but also in the choice of the tool. Your tool might be technical or digital or intentionally non-technical. You might select a tool that forces us to broaden our definition of "drawing tool".
  • Document your drawing and also your tool.

Week 2: First Class Crit, Continued XR Studio Practices

Topics

  • Crit: What is a drawing tool?
  • Technologies and procedures for XR-based classroom critique
  • Safe XR studio practices
  • Saving images and videos in XR

Readings

Weekly Drawing 2

For this week's drawing, your prompt is:

Drawing with Light

As we move toward drawing in virtual space, let's take inspiration from Picasso's early experiments drawing with light (1949).

Create a drawing this week using OpenBrush in a style that references Picasso's light drawings. Specifically:

  • Create a complete drawing using one continuous line.
  • Make it a quick drawing--imagine you're working with a 1949-era camera with an open shutter as Picasso and Mili did. I'm not sure exactly how long that was for Picasso, maybe between 5 and 30 seconds?
  • Practice, practice!

To document your work, let's experiment with two complementary approaches this week!

  • Mili setup two cameras to capture Picasso's drawings, one with a front view and one with a side view. Using the instructions we posted to take snapshots from within VR, move around your drawing and take two snapshots of it, one from a "front" view and one from a "side" view.
  • Setup a phone or other camera to record a SHORT video of yourself creating your drawing. We will not be able to see your virtual drawing but we will see your physical movements. Since, by definition, this week's drawing should be quick, these should be short video clips, like 5 seconds to 30 seconds long.

Week 3: Technical and Perceptual Foundations for 3D Drawing

Topics

  • Crit: Light drawings.
  • Background on working in virtual spaces
    • Human perception with perspective-tracked stereo displays
    • Selection, manipulation, and navigation techniques
  • Mark Making in Virtual Space
    • Form and Physical Simulation
    • Virtual Color and Texture
    • Virtual Lighting and Shading Perception of 3D form / Suggesting form

Readings

Weekly Drawing 3

Building upon the line control and geometric shapes exercises we started in class, this week's prompt is:

Create a 3D drawing in OpenBrush that is a "physically impossible combination of geometric shapes".

Week 4: Advanced Line Control and 3D Drawing User Interfaces

Topics

  • Crit: Geometric Compositions
  • Dragging and Bimanual User Interfaces for 3D Drawing
    • See influential research on Tape Drawing:
    • Also, key videos from Week 1:
    • OpenBrush implements some of the tape drawing and drag drawing ideas.
      • The OpenBrush "Bimanual Input and Revolver" features are inspired by Tape Drawing. However, their implementation of Tape Drawing makes some strange decisions. Advancing the line only works well when the brush hand is close to the line, otherwise the drawing can seem to "jump forward" too fast. Yet, when drawing with a ribbon, the tilt of the ribbon can only be reliably set when the hand is pulled away from the line. This seems to create an awkward situation where the technique works well if you can keep your brush hand at about 4-5 inches away from the tape line while drawing, but that is difficult to do when trying to coordinate both hands and without any haptic feedback.Given this, the technique in OpenBrush is probably better suited to working with strokes that are tube-shaped so that you can ignore the tilt of the line and try to remember to keep your brush hand very close to the tape line while drawing.
      • The OpenBrush "Lazy Input" feature is a form of Drag Drawing. This also has some questionable decisions in the way it is implemented. The length of the drag line changes dynamically but in sort of the opposite way that I would expect / have done in the past. When drawing fast, you don't really need a drag line, the lines are already pretty smooth when drawing fast. So, I would expect the line to get shorter in this situation, but this is when the drag line in OpenBrush gets longer. When drawing slowly/carefully/deliberately, this is when it can be hard to draw a nice smooth curve due to muscular jitter, so this is when a drag line is useful; yet, in OpenBrush, this is when the drag line gets really small so it has little impact on the drawing. Regardless, in my experience, adjusting the line length based on the local curvature, like in the Dynamic Dragging paper, is much more useful.
  • Line Control
    • Creating smooth, intentional lines
    • Judging space to connect points
    • Pressure control: Controlling line thickness and weight
    • Geometric control: Controlling the surface normal
  • Understanding tool limitations and strengths relative to various drawing styles
    • Quick Dynamic Styles (e.g., Gesture Drawing)
    • Detailed Precise Styles (e.g., Slow Drawing, Photorealistic, Technical)
    • Experimental Styles (e.g., Abstract, Minimalist, Surrealist)

Homework

Weekly Drawing 4

Building upon the various 3D drawing user interfaces and techniques for controlling the tilt and thickness of the lines you draw, this week's prompt is:

Create a 3D drawing in OpenBrush with the following constraints:

  1. Make it monochrome -- using a single color of paint.
  2. Use only "flat"-style brushes that create geometries that look like ribbons.
  3. Use pass-through mode to draw a 3D picture of a still life -- some object or group of objects that you arrange.

Week 5: Hack the Headset Day--Intro to Custom Hardware for 3D Drawing

Topics

  • Crit: Monochrome Still Life
  • How 3D drawing tools respond to various inputs (virtual and physical)
  • Hack-a-thon

Readings

  • Hardware resources for constructing custom 3D user interfaces.

Weekly Drawing 5

This week's prompt is similar in spirit to the first one of the semester about drawing tools:

Create an OpenBrush drawing that incorporates some external "tool" to assist or augment your drawing.

Thinking about your process, one goal I would like you to have is to be able to describe your drawing process as a truly "mixed reality" creative process--that is, a process that incorporates and integrates both the digital and the physical.

Week 6: Planning and Guides

Topics

Readings

Weekly Drawing 6

This week's prompt is:

Create and document as usual an OpenBrush drawing where you incorporate two new aspects into your process:

  • Use at least one of OpenBrush’s Guides to create some portion of the drawing.
  • (Option A: requires following our class instructions on Advanced Headset UseLinks to an external site.) Import some external imagery into the OpenBrush Media Library and use it as an element of your drawing or as a reference for your drawing.

OR

  • (Option B) Do some preparatory work for your drawing with traditional drawing, painting, or sculpting media outside of OpenBrush and document how it informs or is used directly within your OpenBrush drawing process.

Week 7: Intro to the Software--Building XR 3D Drawing Tools in Unity

Topics

  • Crit: Drawing with Guides
  • Programming a modern 3D drawing tool in Unity

Readings

Weekly Drawing 7

We are now about half way through the course. It's a good time for you to now get more serious about brainstorming what you plan to do for your final project in the class. Here, again, is the description of the final project from our syllabus:

Your final product for this course will be a significant creative work or programming project that you develop over the last 4-5 weeks of the semester. The choices of the type of project and specific topic are up to you, and we will take time to brainstorm and discuss possibilities in class. A final creative work could be a well developed 3D drawing or XR installation or a series of drawings or studies on a consistent theme. A final programming project should implement a new 3D drawing tool or feature extending the software we discuss in class.

For this week's drawing, your prompt is:

Do a preparatory study for your final project. That could mean, for example:

  • A first drawing on a theme of particular interest to you.
  • A first try a modifying the simplified 3D Drawing in Unity project we discussed in class.
  • An experiment with interesting 3D drawing hardware continuing on the "hack the headset" theme.

You don't need to commit to a final project idea yet; the goal is to do some preliminary investigation into an idea you think you might be interested in so that you can get some early experience with it, and we can have some more classroom discussion to refine our ideas together.

Week 8: Observational Techniques

Topics

  • Crit: Study for Final Project
  • Current challenges in XR research and creative practice
  • Learning to see objects as they truly are, not as preconceived notions
  • Proportions and Scale
  • Negative Space Observation
  • Shape Simplification
  • S-Curves

Readings

Weekly Drawing 8

This week's prompt is:

Create an observational drawing in OpenBrush while making use of the observation strategies we tried and brainstormed in class.

Pick a subject to observe that is worthy of close observation and try to use drawing as a way to study and learn about your subject--use drawing as "a mode of inquiry".

Week 9: More on XR Tool Building

Topics

  • Crit: Observational Drawings
  • Designing and prototyping interactive virtual experiences
  • Implementing novel 3D user interfaces and features
  • Working with class starter code in Unity

Homework

Weekly Drawing 9

This week's prompt is:

Develop a site-specific drawing that responds to its architectural context.

Week 10: Multiple Viewpoints

Topics

  • Crit: Site-specific drawing
  • Understanding how 3D drawings read from all angles (360-degree thinking)
  • Identifying and resolving dead spots or weak views
  • Creating works that reward circumnavigation
  • Understanding how lighting affects form from different angles

Readings

Homework

Create a drawing that rewards circumnavigation–consider multiple possible viewpoints and the personal space and proportions of the viewer (e.g., elements at eye level, elements within arm reach).

Week 11: Time, Process, & Multisensory Experiences

Topics

  • Crit: Rewarding circumnavigation
  • Recording and revealing the drawing process
  • Animated and interactive drawings
  • Engaging other senses

Readings

Weekly Drawing 11

It's you last weekly drawing--woo hoo!! Here's a final prompt:

Using OpenBrush or DrawingFromLife create an abstract composition based on a piece of music or sound that includes some element of animation or interactivity, such as components that relate to or are triggered by body movement, gaze, etc.

Week 12: How to Give Graphics Research Interactive Demos

Topics

  • Crit: Abstract Compositions
  • Demos from Ph.D. students in the research group on their latest research with discussion of both the work and how to present your work in informal learning environments.

Week 13: Final Projects Feedback #1

Topics

  • Crit: Final Project Work in Progress #1
  • Final project studio work / tech-help sessions

Week 14: Final Projects Feedback #2

Topics

  • Crit: Final Project Work in Progress #2
  • Final project studio work / tech-help sessions

Week 15: Final Public Exhibit

Example Schedule and Sessions

  • 20 min: Group Intros & Brief Reflections
  • 40 min: Session 1: Multisensory Illusion and Movement
  • 40 min: Session 2: Nature and Pokemon
  • 40 min: Session 3: Handcrafted eXtended Reality
  • 40 min: Session 4: Drawing in Space
  • 10 min: Closing

Final Reflection

Your final assignment in the course is a written reflection on your final project and the semester as a whole.

Please respond to these in one paragraph or more:

  1. What does your final project mean to you?
  2. What did you learn while working on your final project?
  3. We learned about and experimented with a combination of drawing and extended reality (XR) technologies--after taking the course, how has your understanding evolved about the potential future roles of drawing and XR in society?
  4. What should I keep? Looking back at the schedule of class meetings we had, what is one class topic or activity I should absolutely do again?
  5. What is not yet working well in the class?
  6. How do you feel about the mixed classroom format, specifically a class with students from Art, Graphic Design, Computer Science, and Electrical Engineering and class meetings that include studio/critique time and time for lectures/technical info?