A Better Blender Keymap For 2D Artists
I have been working on a 2D friendly keymap, and I wanted to submit it for feedback.
The idea behind this is to make blender and Grease Pencil a more welcoming experience for people who come from a 2D background, and to give them some shortcuts that will stay close to their expectations. I have been using it quite a bit and while I'm still always adding stuff and tweaking, I think I can submit it so people can tell me what they would like to find in something like this.
Make your 2D artist friend try this keymap and let me know!
The global layout is very reminiscent of habits people will have developped in Adobe softwares such as photoshop, flash and after FX. I think there is still a lot to add but I hope it's a good starting point.
Here are some of the main features:
-
Pan With Space : Staple of 2D softwares, you can now pan with space, zoom with space+ctrl, dezoom with space+ctrl+alt, and rotate the view with left click+alt.
-
play with Return : to easily play your animation now that space is used.
-
ctrl+left click for lasso everywhere : no matter the mode, select defaults to lasso, and box select in the dope sheet and outliner. Box select with ctrl+alt.
-
ctrl+A selects all, ctrl+D unselects all.
-
for grease pencil objects; B for draw mode, L for edit mode (kind of like the lasso tool in 2D), E for sculpt (as in 2.79), Tab always brings back to Object Mode. Keys for modes because in 2D, modes are tools.
-
Same sort of things for the sculpt mesh tools because these are the more "traditional artist" modes and they go hand in hand: L for edit mode, E for sculpt, and B for texture paint.
-
Arrows to move strokes in increments (this one is still buggy because of issues with blender, I'm waiting to get a response)
-
Since this is based on AZERTY layouts, "," and ";" change frames, ":" and "!" go from key to key to easily flip drawings
-
Move objects and keys with a right click tweak to avoid conflict with selection and tools
Many other improvements here and there.
The main questions I still have :
-
no shortcut I can find to extend a keyframe duration?
-
I'm tempted to go B for draw, E for edit mode and S for sculpt but S is taken by scale. I don't know if this would be work removing? I've set transform tool to Ctrl+T and maybe we can use that instead... G-R-S is just such a useful set of shortcuts.
I'm not very familiar with Github but here is a repository I've set up that also includes a startup file with a good GreasePencil setup.
You can download it here:
github.com/mchaptel/Blender2DKeymap
Please let me know if you would like to see some improvements or if that helps you feel like you're doing 2D, and if you would like to see something like that in the official blender release.
6 Comments
IHMO: yes, absolutelly. Easier to collaborate, report bugs, make sugggestions, and fork.
* @-L0Lock- * Thank you for your input, I've added a link to a repository.
In latest build of Blender 2.8.51 keys G R S no longer works in Draw mode. I raised this concern they replied that draw mode is for drawing only and the developers find it annoying to have transform tools available in draw mode. In a way now you always have to get out of draw mode to use G R S keys. They plan to have rotate and filp options or some other option but not G R S. Finally I changed that portion of code where transformations are disabled and built it from repository but strange i see lot of differences in official version and my build. I followed instructions from office blender wiki site though
* @mohanprasadpatta * Yes I have also expressed to them my surprise at the fact that the lasso in draw mode behaves like an eraser.I'm afraid by moving away from usual patterns and trying to reinvent everything the GP devs are alienating a big part of their potential audience, that is for now very restricted as 2D artists have not yet had much reason to learn blender and so they are all new users with habits from other software.
In my keymap, I have found that using a keystroke to change mode before using selection and GRS or other is better than it used to be, but still not as fluid as it should.
The other problem is that the greasepencil community is very small at the moment and any post trying to highlight these problems has a hard time gaining traction and so the devs are working with very little feedback besides people they've trained themselves. I'm afraid this won't get better if people refuse to get on board because the software is too frightening.
V for edit mode, keep S on scale.
* @Omgzdenek * Thanks for your interest! I have tried several things and settled on scale on "Q" and Sculpt on "S" for now. It feels more intuitive I think when coming from a 2D background where Q is used as a transform tool (for example in Flash). V is used for the cursor.
Have you tried the keymap? I have made new changes today, like more explicit shortcuts for sculpt tools, improvements on the right click menus and so on.