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Quill

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Quill
Information
Type VR illustration and animation software
Industry Animation, illustration, previsualization
Developer Smoothstep (originally Oculus Story Studio, then Facebook)
Operating System Windows 10 or newer
License Proprietary, free of charge
Supported Devices Oculus Rift, Oculus Rift S, Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3 over a Link cable (PC required)
Release Date December 6, 2016 (beta)
Website https://quill.art


Quill (sold as Quill by Smoothstep since 2021, and earlier known as Oculus Quill) is a virtual reality illustration and animation tool for Windows PCs and tethered Oculus and Meta headsets. Artists paint strokes in three-dimensional space with tracked controllers, organize them in layers, and animate them frame by frame or with keyframes; finished pieces can be exported to conventional 3D pipelines or published as self-contained VR films.[1][2]

The tool began in October 2015 as a hackathon project by Inigo Quilez, then a VFX supervisor at Oculus Story Studio, to let art director Wesley Allsbrook paint the studio's short film Dear Angelica entirely inside VR.[3][4][5] Oculus released it as a free public beta on December 6, 2016, the launch day of the Oculus Touch controllers.[4][6] Development survived the closure of Oculus Story Studio in 2017, gained animation tools in 2018 and a full animation timeline with Quill 2.0 in 2019, and in September 2021 Facebook handed the software to Quilez's new company, Smoothstep, which continues to distribute it free of charge through the Meta store for Rift and Link.[7][8][9][10][2]

Quill is the production tool behind several festival and award-recognized VR animations, including Dear Angelica (Emmy-nominated in 2017), Studio Syro's series Tales from Soda Island, and Baobab Studios' Namoo.[11][12][13] Its files can also be viewed on standalone Meta Quest headsets through a separate Meta viewer app, currently called Theater Elsewhere.[14]

Reviewed 20 September 2026. Origin and version history, Smoothstep transfer, current availability and pricing, supported devices, features, notable works and every citation. About review dates.

History

Origin at Oculus Story Studio (2015-2016)

During preproduction of Dear Angelica, directed by Saschka Unseld, Oculus Story Studio wanted to keep illustrator Wesley Allsbrook's drawing style intact rather than scanning her 2D illustrations and rebuilding them in CG. Engineer Inigo Quilez built the first version of Quill for that purpose during a 48-hour internal hackathon in October 2015, and then extended it as Allsbrook asked for new capabilities.[4][5] Quilez had previously spent five years at Pixar as a sets technical director on Brave and The Good Dinosaur, and is a co-founder of the shader-sharing site Shadertoy.[15][16]

Oculus showed Quill publicly for the first time at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2016, alongside a preview of Dear Angelica. Road to VR's hands-on at the festival described painting with the Touch controllers, picking colors by hovering the pointer over an existing stroke, and grabbing painted pieces to rotate and rescale them.[17] Quilez presented the rendering challenges of the tool (high polygon counts, live editing, and stereo rendering at 90 fps) at NVIDIA's GTC in April 2016 and demonstrated Quill at the SIGGRAPH 2016 Real-Time Live! show.[3][18]

On November 17, 2016, Oculus announced that Quill would ship as a free beta on December 6, 2016 with the Oculus Touch controllers.[4][6] It launched that day next to Oculus Medium, the company's VR sculpting tool; the two were positioned differently, with Quill aimed at painterly illustration and narrative work and Medium at modeling solid objects.[19][6] The launch version had flat, spherical and cube brushes, trigger-based pressure sensitivity, controls for color, opacity and thickness, a nudge tool for editing strokes, and a layer system.[19] TechCrunch compared it with Google's Tilt Brush, then an HTC Vive exclusive, and wrote that Quill produced a look "much more like a 3D oil painting."[6]

Dear Angelica premiered at Sundance in January 2017 and was nominated for a 2017 Emmy in the Outstanding Original Interactive Program category.[20][11]

Facebook Social VR team (2017-2021)

Facebook closed Oculus Story Studio on May 4, 2017, laying off about 50 people; TechCrunch reported at the time that Quill would stay on the Oculus Store but receive no further updates.[21] That did not hold: by August 2017 Quilez and former Story Studio art director Goro Fujita had moved to Facebook's Social VR team and shipped an update adding 360-degree mono and stereo image import, 3D positional sound, an opacity blend mode for the colorizer tool, and joystick shortcuts.[9] Fujita, a former DreamWorks visual development artist who had joined Story Studio as art director in 2014, became the tool's artist-in-residence and published a stream of short animated pieces, which Road to VR covered as a demonstration of what the tool could do.[22]

Animation arrived in February 2018 in what Road to VR called the biggest update to date: artists could draw discrete frames, see onion-skinned previous frames, and play them back as flipbook-style sequences. Facebook stated that Fujita finished his short Beyond the Fence in three weeks with the new tools.[7]

Quill 2.0 entered Early Access on Rift on August 1, 2019. It added an Animation Timeline for sequencing whole stories, transform and opacity keyframes with interpolation for paint, audio, image and 3D-model layers, "Stops" that pause the main action while background loops continue until the viewer advances, Sequence Layers (nested, looping timelines), directional cone and pyramid sound emitters, and waveform display in the timeline for lip-sync.[8][23] Engadget described the goal as letting animators go from sketch to finished VR film without leaving the headset or exporting to other packages.[24] Fujita marked the release by publishing the 500 daily "Quillustrations" he had painted and animated in the tool.[20]

Distribution to standalone headsets came in December 2019, when Oculus quietly released Quill Theater, a free playback-only app for the Oculus Quest tied into Oculus TV, with a curated library that opened with Daniel Martin Peixe's ten-minute short The Remedy.[25][26] Quill 2.3 followed on March 5, 2020, and Quill 2.4 in April 2020 built the theater into the Rift app itself and added a "Save to VR" publishing path through Oculus Media Studio.[27] In July 2020 John Carmack wrote that Quill content in Oculus TV on Quest "has turned out to be more popular than I expected."[28]

Transfer to Smoothstep (2021 onward)

On September 16, 2021, Facebook announced that ownership of Quill had passed to Smoothstep, a company formed by Quilez. The original Quill listing was removed from the Oculus Store on October 18, 2021; existing installs kept working but lost Oculus support and the direct upload to Oculus Media Studio. The Quest viewer stayed in the store under the new name VR Animation Player, and Smoothstep open-sourced the IMM distribution format used by Quill Theater together with a player.[10][29] UploadVR reported that Smoothstep relisted the app for Rift as Quill by Smoothstep at version 2.9, and placed the hand-off after Adobe's purchase of Medium from Facebook and Google's open-sourcing of Tilt Brush.[30] Road to VR noted that Quill files had until then only played natively on Oculus headsets, and that an open format could allow players on other devices.[31]

In October 2024 Meta relaunched the Quest viewer for a second time as Theater Elsewhere, with six selectable background environments, a free-fly mode and a one-handed remote, and a catalog it described as more than 2,400 animated works; it is free on the Meta Horizon Store and listed as compatible with all Quest generations.[14]

As of September 2026, Smoothstep's site states that "Quill is currently free for all users" and that the software requires a Windows PC with a headset attached; it "does NOT work on a standalone headset without a Windows PC."[2] The Meta store lists Quill by Smoothstep for Rift and Link PC VR under the developer name Smoothstep, with an average user rating of 4.1 out of 5 from 57 reviews.[32]

Features

Quill records each stroke as geometry placed in an "infinite and precise" canvas: Smoothstep states that it supports sub-millimeter detail and files with millions of strokes, with asynchronous loading and saving of large files since version 2.5.[1] Brushes include round-capped types with pressure sensitivity, automatic width and transparent taper, and a volume grid helps judge depth. Editing tools cover selection, erasing, colorizing, thickening and thinning, nudging, a grab tool (version 1.7) and an optimize tool that simplifies stroke detail (version 1.5). The color picker offers blend modes such as dodge, burn, multiply and screen.[1] Layers can be nested to arbitrary depth, scoped, hidden, flipped and moved with a transform gimbal.[1]

Animation supports frame-by-frame drawing, keyframes, animated brushes and puppeteering; animated paint layers carry an animation clip panel, and the timeline introduced with 2.0 organizes longer narratives.[1][8] Audio layers accept WAV (including 32-bit float), MP3, Ogg Vorbis (version 1.5) and ambisonic files, with sphere, cone and frustum emitters and linear or logarithmic fall-off.[1] Camera layers (version 2.7) record moves for 2D video, 360-degree video with sound, and PNG image sequences (version 2.8), with presets including a 6K render (version 2.8) and a 1080x1920 portrait format (version 2.9).[1]

For pipeline work Quill exports FBX, Alembic, USD (see OpenUSD) and its own IMM format, and imports FBX and OBJ, either from inside the app or through a standalone command-line exporter. Smoothstep documents workflows for Maya (polygons and curves), Unity (FBX and animated Alembic) and Arnold rendering with vertex color and opacity, and points to a community add-on for Blender.[33] The features page also lists example materials for Unity and Unreal Engine and a standalone Quill Player viewer (version 1.8).[1]

IMM, the format open-sourced in 2021, is described by its maintainers as an API-neutral runtime delivery format for mixed immersive media (geometry, pictures, 360 panoramas and stroke-based paintings) that keeps scene-graph and animation metadata uncompressed for streaming while compressing asset data. The GitHub repository under the Immersive Foundation organization contains exporters, importers, a reference playback engine, a native Windows viewer with OpenGL and DirectX back ends, and a Unity plugin, with Android builds for Quest.[34]

Supported devices

Headset Connection Notes
Oculus Rift Default setup Requires three USB 3.0 ports[2]
Oculus Rift S Default setup [2]
Meta Quest 2 Oculus Link or compatible cable PC required; no standalone version[2]
Meta Quest 3 Oculus Link or compatible cable PC required; no standalone version[2]

Smoothstep's minimum PC specification is Windows 10 or newer, an NVIDIA GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 480, an Intel i5-4590 or AMD Ryzen 5 1500X, 8 GB of RAM and an HDMI 1.3 video output.[2] Playback on standalone Quest headsets goes through Meta's separate Theater Elsewhere viewer rather than Quill itself.[14]

Notable works

Work Creator Year Notes
Dear Angelica Oculus Story Studio (Saschka Unseld, Wesley Allsbrook) 2017 First film painted entirely in VR; 2017 Emmy nomination, Outstanding Original Interactive Program[4][11]
Beyond the Fence Goro Fujita 2018 Short completed in three weeks with the first animation tools[7]
The Remedy Daniel Martin Peixe 2019 Launch title for Quill Theater on Quest[25]
Tales from Soda Island Studio Syro 2020 Episodic series made entirely in Quill; first chapter "The Multiverse Bakery" on Oculus TV and Quill Theater[35][12]
Namoo Baobab Studios (Erick Oh) 2021 Premiered at Sundance 2021; created with Quill[13]

The tool is still used in animation production. At a TD Meetup in October 2025, Studio Syro co-founder Dan Franke demonstrated painting, hand-driven animation and export to Maya, Blender and Houdini pipelines, and recommended a Meta Quest 2, 3 or 3S as the headset.[36]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 "Quill Features". Quill. Smoothstep LLC. https://quill.art/features.html. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 "Pricing - Quill". Quill. Smoothstep LLC. https://quill.art/get.html. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Ben Lang (2016-04-01). "Oculus to Detail the Creation of 'Quill' VR Illustration Tool". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/gtc-2016-highlight-oculus-to-detail-the-creation-of-quill-vr-illustration-tool/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 "The Origin of Quill and What it Can Do - Beta Available at Touch Launch". Meta Quest Blog. Oculus VR. 2016-11-17. https://www.meta.com/blog/the-origin-of-quill-and-what-it-can-dobeta-available-at-touch-launch/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "How one illustrator forced Oculus Story Studio to redraw VR". Engadget. 2016-01-26. https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/26/oculus-story-studio-dear-angelica-interview/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 6.3 Lucas Matney (2016-11-17). "Oculus is giving away its mesmerizing VR painting tool, Quill". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2016/11/17/oculus-is-giving-away-its-mesmerizing-vr-painting-tool-quill/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Ben Lang (2018-02-08). "Facebook's 'Quill' Gets Animation Tools to Bring Your VR Paintings to Life". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/oculus-quill-gets-animation-tools-to-bring-your-vr-paintings-to-life/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 "Quill Launches VR Animation and Storytelling Tools". Meta Quest Blog. Oculus VR. 2019-08-01. https://www.meta.com/blog/quill-launches-vr-animation-and-storytelling-tools/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Ben Lang (2017-08-03). "'Quill' Development Continues Under Facebook Social VR Team After Oculus Story Studio's Shuttering". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/quill-development-continues-facebook-social-vr-team-oculus-story-studios-shuttering/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 "A New Milestone for Quill". Meta Quest Blog. Meta Platforms. 2021-09-16. https://www.meta.com/blog/a-new-milestone-for-quill/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 11.2 Jamie Feltham (2017-07-14). "Dear Angelica, Stranger Things And More VR Nominated in 2017 Emmys". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/dear-angelica-stranger-things-vr-nominated-2017-emmys/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Scott Hayden (2020-05-20). "'Tales from Soda Island' is a Spectacular Animated Short Built Entirely in VR". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/tales-from-soda-island-quill-vr-quest-rift/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Harry Baker (2021-01-29). "Baobab Studios' Next Project Is Namoo, Premiering At Sundance". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/baobab-studios-namoo-sundance/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Ian Hamilton (2024-10-03). "Theater Elsewhere Is The New Home Of Impactful Quill VR Animations On Quest". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/theater-elsewhere-quest-vr-animation-quill/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  15. ↑ Alex Dudok de Wit (2021-09-20). "Facebook Returns VR Drawing Tool Quill To Its Creator". Cartoon Brew. https://www.cartoonbrew.com/tech/facebook-returns-vr-drawing-tool-quill-to-its-creator-208791.html. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  16. ↑ "Inigo Quilez". ACM SIGGRAPH History Archives. ACM SIGGRAPH. https://history.siggraph.org/person/inigo-quilez/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  17. ↑ Paul James (2016-01-26). "'Quill' is Oculus' Professional VR Paint Package, Powered by Touch". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/quill-is-oculus-professional-vr-paint-package-powered-by-touch-breaking/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  18. ↑ Quilez, Inigo (2016). "Quill". ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Real-Time Live!. ACM. pp. 26. doi:10.1145/2933540.2933549.
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Jim Thacker (2016-12-07). "Oculus ships its Quill and Medium VR art tools". CG Channel. https://www.cgchannel.com/2016/12/oculus-to-release-its-quill-vr-painting-tool-in-free-beta/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Jose Antunes (2019-08-07). "Oculus Quill 2.0: an all-in-one tool for Virtual Reality animated stories". ProVideo Coalition. https://www.provideocoalition.com/oculus-quill-2-0-an-all-in-one-tool-for-virtual-reality-animated-stories/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  21. ↑ Lucas Matney (2017-05-04). "Facebook shutters Oculus Story Studio original VR content division". TechCrunch. https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/04/facebook-shutters-oculus-story-studio-original-vr-content-division/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  22. ↑ Ben Lang (2018-03-10). "Oculus Artist's 'Quill' Shorts Show the Incredible Potential of Illustrating & Animating in VR". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-artists-quill-shorts-show-incredible-potential-illustrating-animating-vr/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  23. ↑ Ben Lang (2019-08-01). "Facebook Launches 'Quill 2.0' with Enhanced Features Making It a "self-contained storytelling tool"". Road to VR. https://www.roadtovr.com/oculus-quill-2-0-release-early-access/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  24. ↑ Kris Holt (2019-08-01). "Facebook wants Quill to be a one-stop shop for VR animators". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/2019-08-01-facebook-quill-vr-animation-tool.html. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Ben Lang (2020-01-02). "'Quill Theater' Brings Incredible Immersive Artwork & Stories to Quest". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/quill-theater-oculus-quest-the-remedy/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  26. ↑ Harry Baker (2019-12-20). "Quill Theater Available On Oculus Quest". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/quill-theater-quest/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  27. ↑ Jamie Feltham (2020-04-02). "Facebook Finally Brings Quill Theater To Oculus Rift Via Original App". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/quill-theater-oculus-rift/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  28. ↑ Harry Baker (2020-07-08). "John Carmark: Quill VR Animations 'More Popular Than Expected' On Oculus Quest". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/john-carmark-quill-vr-oculus-quest/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  29. ↑ Kris Holt (2021-09-17). "Facebook hands over VR painting and animation app Quill to its creator". Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/facebook-quill-vr-illustration-tool-inigo-quilez-181549077.html. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  30. ↑ Ian Hamilton (2021-09-16). "Facebook Hands Off Quill PC VR Animation Tool To Creator". UploadVR. https://www.uploadvr.com/quill-smoothstep-facebook/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  31. ↑ Ben Lang (2021-09-20). "Facebook Spins Out the Excellent 'Quill' VR Animation App, Open-sources File Format". Road to VR. https://roadtovr.com/facebook-spins-open-sources-excellent-vr-animation-app-quill/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  32. ↑ "Quill by Smoothstep on Oculus Rift". Meta Store. Meta Platforms. https://www.meta.com/experiences/pcvr/quill-by-smoothstep/5910229332328230/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  33. ↑ "Developers - Quill". Quill. Smoothstep LLC. https://quill.art/developers.html. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  34. ↑ "IMM - Immersive IMM Format and Player (README)". GitHub. Immersive Foundation. https://github.com/Immersive-Foundation/IMM/blob/main/README.md. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  35. ↑ "New Quill Series 'Tales from Soda Island' presents 'The Multiverse Bakery,' a galaxy-spanning VR short film". Meta Quest Blog. Oculus VR. 2020-05-19. https://www.meta.com/blog/new-quill-series-tales-from-soda-island-presents-the-multiverse-bakery-a-galaxy-spanning-vr-short-film/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
  36. ↑ Alexander Richter (2025-10-14). "TD Meetup 21: VR, Quill & the Renaissance of Real-Time Storytelling". Digital Production. https://digitalproduction.com/2025/10/14/td-meetup-21-vr-quill-the-renaissance-of-real-time-storytelling/. Retrieved 2026-09-20.
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