What Vermillion is
Vermillion gives you a full oil painting studio in VR, with none of the physical mess. You get an easel, a palette, and a range of simulated brushes from the two inch brush down to the rigger. Paint behaves like real oil paint: colors mix on the palette when you whisk the brush through them, and they keep mixing on the canvas while wet, so yellow and blue give you green and you can pull smooth gradients in a few strokes. A dry brush lets you blend further or push paint around to make effects like reflections or grass. Pressure on the brush controls how each mark comes out, and a hand steadying tool compensates for having no real canvas to rest against. When you need precise detail you can switch to layers — four of them, mergeable and re-orderable — or hit undo. When a piece is finished you can mount it on the studio walls, export it as an image up to 8k, or export a varnished 3D model for your VR home, Sketchfab, or social VR apps.
Painting together
Up to four people can be in the studio at once, so one session holds you and three friends, or people you meet in public rooms. Everyone shares palettes, and you can work on each other's canvas, so a group can build one painting together or each work on their own. That structure fits a class or a plain paint night. Multiplayer is cross platform with Quest 2, and the overlay mode works there too. Note that the overlay only exists inside Vermillion — people outside your multiplayer session cannot see your painting equipment.
Getting started and things to know
A built-in web browser sits next to the easel, so you can pull up a YouTube tutorial or reference image while you paint, and the browser can be projected onto the canvas for tracing. Local images work the same way. If you have never painted, there is an hour-long in-game paint-along that walks you through painting a robin. Paint-by-numbers templates can be generated from any image on your PC or found in the browser: the game draws the outlines, adjustable in detail and viewable above or below the paint, and fills your palette with between 2 and 20 matching colors. You can isolate one outline color at a time to fill a single area. Vermillion also runs as a SteamVR overlay, so the studio can be opened on top of other VR games and you can paint inside them. For recording, a controllable spectator camera and full LIV support are included.