I’ve been using Blender on and off (mostly off unfortunately) since 2009. Just recently however I have started an earnest effort to create quality 2D animations using it and other free/cheap programs, having toyed with the idea of such a workflow for the past year.
This thread is going to be a record for all my efforts in this regard, and I’m hoping that each new submission will be more ambitious than the last and help showcase a little bit of what Blender is capable of in a field that isn’t necessarily its focus.
The first step on this quest is this slime character, which I find quite fitting. It was completely created in Blender, using the grease pencil. Pretty amazing how much you can do with it, and I’m hoping that there’ll be more development targeting it in the future.
Yup! The Grease pencil has recently gotten an overhaul, so stuff like this is possible now. Still a little lacking in some areas, but quite capable nonetheless.
Once again, all made with Blender’s grease pencil. I’ve started working my way through a list of 51 animation exercises to sharpen myself up a bit, and it’s a great way to run the grease pencil through it’s paces. I’ve noticed a few quirks/bugs recently, most of which I’ve been able to develop workarounds for.
Still, making Blender work as a focused 2D animation kit with a graphics tablet certainly isn’t a straight forward task. I’m thinking that the grease pencil would be the perfect tool for sketching out animatics or planning a combination of 2D drawings in a 3D scene (which I intend to try) with a little more development invested into it. Especially true if the grease pencil could be parented to a null so that a whole layer could be moved and animated separately (currently you can only move individual frames).
I’m going to keep using the grease pencil for now, but soon I think I’ll make my way to Krita. Maybe I’ll come back to it once I’m ready to attempt some more ambitious 2D/3D hybrid animations.
The list I’ll be following for my animation tests can be found here:
@Doc Whittaker: Nice work. What sorts of bugs are you running into? (If it’s the old concave vs convex poly fill issue, then that is a known issue that we are working on)
@Jared.Owen: I’ve got a cintiqu companion that I’ve been using for a while. To get it working with a stylus in Blender I’ve remapped some of the shortcuts and programmed the express keys to speed things up. Some things work better than others though. I could give a rundown on how I’ve done my setup if you’re interested.
@bigbad: Haha yeah I spose it might. I figured whatever invisible force pushed it off the shelf may have allowed it to clear the shelves below, but I will admit I was being a bit lazy.
@Aligorith: Cheers! And thanks for the the work on the grease pencil (if i’ve not misread the implication that your into the dev side of things). I’m actually a bit unsure of whether I’d count what I’ve encountered as legitimate bugs, as some I’ve found where just a result of user error; most of the others are inconvenient quirks of the program related to Blender’s design.
I’ll list them anyway, in case it’s useful to you:
On a few occasions when I’ve been using the grease pencil in draw mode (continuous drawing checked) with editing enabled and the eraser has stopped working. The crosshair will show if I try to use it but the red field showing what it will be erased doesn’t show. If I exit draw mode and adjust the radial control with ‘f’ then it will start working again (but unfortunately this can’t be done while in draw mode). I might have somehow reduced the eraser size to zero somehow while I was drawing, but I don’t know how I might have done it.
Another issue I’ve run into is when I click on the draw button on the toolbox and then cycle to the frame I want to draw on. If I do this, the frame that was selected will stay frozen on my viewport until I draw on it. After i finish the stroke the viewport will go to whatever frame I cycled to and resume as normal (except for the mark that was left on the ‘frozen’ frame). I run into this issue a lot when I’m quickly switching between multiple frames and drawing/editing the strokes.
A pretty minor point about the layers for the grease pencil is how the layer manager works; a layer that is below another layer in the layer manager is actually rendered on top in the viewport. You can flip how they’re ordered, but the arrows that are used to move the layers don’t respect the new orientation.
Last thing I’ll mention is how nice it would be if entire layers could be moved and animated for the grease pencil. Or maybe the layer could be parented to whatever object it is being used on. This one isn’t anything close to bug report, but thought I’d be cheeky and throw it in anyway
I tracked down and fixed something like this a few months ago. IIRC, the problem would occur if you exit the drawing session prematurely and/or if using Escape Key. It should be fixed for 2.77
It’s normal that the frame will stay put until you start drawing, provided that there are no other keyframes between the previous one and the current frame.
However, the second issue you mention here sounds strange and rather buggy. I did also make some changes there recently, but I haven’t checked on this particular issue
Regarding the layer order: This is also somewhat of an issue with a few other lists too (e.g. modifiers and constraint stacks). With the arrows, if you like you could go into install/2.76/scripts/startup/bl_ui/properties_grease_pencil_common.py to change how this works:
Search for “gpencil.layer_move”
You can switch the order of those two lines, and then switch the icon=‘TRIA_UP’ and icon=‘TRIA_DOWN’ parts
Regarding moving entire layers or parenting them: Yes, this is functionality that is planned. It won’t be ready for 2.77, but hopefully I’ll get time to look into it later in the year.
Concerning #2, I should have been more clear in that when I mentioned frames a meant keyframes. So the keyframe that was active in the viewport when I press the ‘draw’ button on the toolbox would stay in the viewport no matter which keyframe I cycled to on the timeline (until I drew a line somewhere). If this sounds like a bug to you then I’ll submit a report.
Anyhow, awesome to know that moving layers is planned. I’ll be keeping an eye out for that one.
Another two animations cleared away: #6 (character blinking) and #7 (character thinking)
Not too substantial of an update, but I wanted to submit it anyway because they’ll be the last animations I do with the grease pencil for a while. For now I’m going make the switch to Krita to do the 2D animation and Blender for the compiling and any other editing/effects I might want; at least until I feel like going for some 2D/3D hybrid animation.
I’ll probably write a bit of a summary of my time spent with the grease pencil on another post.
I have started using this blender artists many years. it teaches me about 2D and 3D animation. I have released a 3D animation movie with the help of blender artist
And I know that most commercial animation is 3D these days (even the ones that appear to be 2D), but I just prefer the art of drawing characters to life. Even if it isn’t the most efficient way to work most of the time I’ll probably stick with it, at least for a while.
Well, I’ve made another lot of animations that round off the first level of exercises. Finished these a while ago actually, but forgot to post them here.
These were made using Krita, but I’ll be going back to Blender for the next lot of animations since there’s been a few updates to the grease pencil I’m keen to try out. Blender is also way easier on my puny little tablet’s processor.
