Features to make Grease Pencil more awesome!
Hey amazing Blender devs!
I'm a professional animator / director and absolutely loving Grease Pencil.
I have a few suggestions for features and tool additions which would really make the process of cel-style animation quicker and more pleasurable. Several of these are stolen from the excellent Digicel Flipbook (a great but ageing tool known by many 2d animators and used by Disney etc).
Here they are, in no particular order:
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Effects which can be applied to individual layers within a grease pencil object (for example, a blur only applied to a shading mask layer, to soften shadows).
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A fill tool like the one in Digicel Flipbook, which fills everything on screen in the given colour for a given range of frames, then UNFILLS from one specified corner, leaving everything else filled. (Great for laying in a base colour of a character.)
**** Edit **** How about an 'unfill' tool: a fill eraser. I currently can fill an area but I don't seem to be able to remove the fill from an area apart from with the eraser and that has unpredictable results!
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A fill tool to fill from the same point over a given range of frames. Great to auto-fill parts of a character that stay in the same place over several frames. (actually I think this might already be possible but not sure.)
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A 'despot' tool to fill small unfilled areas automatically with the nearest fill colour. (To remove fiddly unfilled areas).
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An 'interactive' fill with a slider to find the leak points in a drawing. So as you pull the slider along, you see the fill moving across the drawing and you can stop it when you see the colour leaking out where it should not.
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A tool to find and highlight small gaps, maybe even to close those gaps with a click.
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A key on the keyboard to ‘flip’ through a series of frames (3 or 4) around the current frame to review animation, then land back on the current frame ready for editing again.
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When using grease pencil in 3D space and snapping to the surface of an object, have the fill tool conform to the surface of the object rather than being flat, so if you fill over the surface of a sphere, the fill is spherical.
*** EDIT *** How about a new shader node to allow a grease pencil object to be used as a shader? This could be incredibly useful for all sorts of things (such as the above) and also potentially lighter on the system than bitmaps. Thoughts?
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A custom layout for Grease Pencil, so it's not necessary to switch modes (draw, edit, sculpt), but have any of the tools available at any time. (don't know if that messes with Blender's architecture though) It's a bit annoying to have to change modes all the time for 2d, and doesn't really make as much sense as in 3D.
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Linked keyframes in Grease Pencil, so that frames which the animator wants to be identical repeats are all updated automatically when one of them is edited.
Some of these I think might be very easy to implement, even with a little script. What do you think.??
Believe me, they would make life so much easier!
7 Comments
Lots of great ideas; I would love to see a new shader node to allow a grease pencil object to be used as a shader. This would allow grease pencil objects to not only receive light (as they currently do), but to also receive shadows and to cast shadows. I can't tell you how sad I was when I saw they cannot currently receive or cast shadows.
* @cobykr * Depends how you want to do that, but you can turn a GP object into a mesh...
Vpaint features / algortihm, could it make grease pencil more smooth / accurate? youtu.be/kMfou82FlnU and this kind of intersect/cutting feature would be nice :) also that auto snapping/looping (connection line start and end point is nice) or have i missed this kind of features from blender?
I would also love to see grease pencil features inside texture editor / uv editor and possibility to animate them directly inside uv/texture editor window (easy face animating) also some face rigging features for controll these grease pencil strokes inside uveditor/texture editor would make texture based face animations more easier (like lego, anime, toon, 2d face expressions) - this would make blender more like animal logic inside tools in lego film: fxguide.com/fxfeatured/brick-by-brick-how-animal-logic-crafted-the-lego-movie/ (that video "A clip showing some of the animation rigs in Softimage." - 50sec-> there is face rigging/animation features that would be nice tools for animators.)
+100000
i'm very exited about blender and the idea of mixing 2d and 3d in a same software, it's opening so much possibilities!
but yeah for now filling 2d animations feel a bit too "sandboxy" it could use a more dedicated approach
a smart way of filling drawings is a very crucial point that can't be ignore! i knows that blender is primarily a 3d package, and it does so much cool things already, but one of the main reason he's so unique i think it's his 2d capabilities, which are greats.
What i try to emphasize is that, i think those smart filling features are big deals and should be among the top priorities on the grease pencil roadmap in my opinion (and it's probably already the case)
so yeah, +100000 votes
Yikes. I think you could have submitted any one of those as individual proposal.
"Despot" took me a while, until I figured out that "de-spot" makes more sense.
#6 is especially attractive. Heck, they're all worthy suggestions.
Is #8 consistent w/the GP philosophy of "everything is flat"? Because it sounds more like a 3D modeling tool than a GP tool.
#9 -- Blender.org LUVVZ them some modal operations (which I h8) so, good luck with getting that one thru. Blender is the most highly modal program I've ever seen.
* @jeric_synergy * Lol, too long of a Christmas list? Am I being greedy?
Thanks for the comments. I agree the #8 is not consistent with “everything is flat”, but I’m really interested to take the grease pencil into 3D space, drawing on top of 3D objects and effectively texturing them that way, giving them a hand-drawn look.
* @tom.werber * ..and as you say this 2.9 has a feature that takes a fully 3d object (car) and with one button makes it GP strokes. 3d and all. :-) I'm not sure how it handles the spheres.