Cage deform active tool for grease pencil
Hello community ! Hope you all are fine.
It would be awesome for the grease pencil (and meshes in general) to have more widget based active transform tools !
I discovered recently that we have a handy scale cage hided under the scale.
But as awesome as it is, it's covering only the basic need (for grease pencil user at least).
Tool inspiration
Here are the 2D transform tools in Krita painting software.
1.free transform - equivalent to Blender's scale cage (except pressing shift toggle homotetic mode)
2.deform
3.perspective
4.cage trace
5.liquify
Existing solutions
No need to have all Krita tools in Blender, but the deform (2) and perspective (3) are the mosts usefull ones (even if I really like the custom cage of krita).
That is at least what some professional 2D animators told me.
And guess what ? We can already use these two with lattices modifier, even in grease pencil !
Here I traced a grease pencil grid deformed by lattices with some settings.
But !
Lattices are good for a dynamic animation deform purpose on the drawing (or the mesh).
Placing the lattice, changing the settings, tweaking and applying is way too long/tedious task to use this for a quick adjustement.
And even if we automate the placement/influence/apply of a lattice on selected points (which I want to try while I wait ^^) the interaction is still not direct !
You can't just click-drag points but have to select lattice points then perform a transform on them.
That said, this makes your 3D edit skills transferable and can prove powerfull too, but not as fast as a well made widget.
Further notes:
A 2D mode (view projection axis) could be the most usefull for grease pencil, it already exists in the scale cage, and maybe easier to make.
This way you can transform tweak your strokes and eventually make an anamorphosic projection on the canvas when working on flat plane.
Conclusion
To sum it up : A supercharged Scale cage with tweakable deformer points would be super cool ;)
12 Comments
As mentioned in the post, I tried to hack my way with automatic lattice handling. I'm happy with the result so far and just released it as an addon.
Demo : youtu.be/gY9Ni5r6bc8
Download : github.com/Pullusb/Box_deform
Even then, I think an integrated active tool is still needed in the future.
The Deform would be fantastic! (WITH keyframe ability of coarse) Right now like you said we can parent a Lattice, but to animate a lattice's vertices is either shape key or clumsy.
Can we have GP DEFORM modifier in the future? And we can Deform the GP per a mesh...(the mesh can deform per armatures) Would work also. Thank you.
* @j_infla * I made the lattice hack as an addon . The animation of the lattice are limited as you mentioned, but better than nothing. I plan to add a shortcut that just create the lattice (currently only applying or deleting once the user is done)
This functionality needs to be implemented %100 in my humble opinion.
I know this is an old thread and Grease Pencil Box Deform is now in Blender (I use 2.93 at the moment). I'm proposing adding even more functionality to the proposed tool.
#1 Adding a "Shear" function would be nice...yes there is one in edit mode, but you cannot keyframe it unless you use the "anim all" addon and you must be in edit mode, which adds more steps to the process, also you cannot revert back to your original shape with this method with (Alt+G, Alt+R, Alt+S)....unless you know your keyframe and duplicate it on your time line.
#2 Have the Grease Pencil Box Deform tool cage all of your selected objects...Currently it will only cage the active object whereas the Scale cage will cage all selections.
#3 Have the ability to move the origin point of the cage by selecting it like any other point on the cage. This prevents the user from having to use the "Transform pivot point menu" reducing clicks in a good way.
#4 Lastly if your using the time offset modifier on your Grease Pencil shape with various sizes of drawings. The currently "Scale cage will adjust with the size of the drawing. This is awesome and should not change, having this stay and be implemented with the new proposed tool is a must in my opinion.
Anyhow I know its not as simple as just giving suggestions, A lot of programming needs to happen for all of these suggestions to happen.
Thanks for reading and taking this into consideration.
You can click and drag points by switching to Tweak selection type instead of the default box selection
* @tapio.lahde * Yes ! I figured and made the switch automatic when going to lattice edit in the addon I made .
Combined with auto switch to "confirm on release" preference, this feels very natural to use.
M8, can you please upload that sanik-looking blender logo somewhere ? I need it for meme purposes XD
* @meutzitzu * Sorry deleted it, only used it temporarily for demo purpose.
OpenToonz has a lot of features that blender3d could take some inspirations from. This software is one of the most powerful drawing softwares in the industry and it is open source I believe.
opentoonz.github.io/e/
* @johnpdelacruz28 * opentoonz is far from an industry standard, sadly. But this stuff exists in all 2d softwares basically and would be extremely useful!
* @m.chaptel * I agree. It is not the industry standard but I believe all people who are familiar with anime animations would be aware how capable the software is. The workflow is just not for everybody I believe and currently I don't know if there are some sugnificant updates already.