Yes! You are totally right, I have not played around with this feature, but it looks to be the same. I'll have to check this out in my drivers master class series.
I think it would be interesting to have a list of mouth and eye positions as already created key frames. 2D animators work a lot with that and not with so many bones. I love your job.
This was very very informative. I just came to know that blender is advancing very much in 2d animation. Keep up the good work. Waiting for more cool rig tutorials. May be a full body all perspective rig xp
This is so nice! One day ( after i do all my projects that I want to do in my lifetime, which are perfectly doable and not out of scale at all!) I will do 2D animation. It's nice that by learning basic blender I learn so much around it! Who knows, maybe some day I will learn basic geometry and shapes, I struggle with triangles too ;(
These are fun little contained projects, I also like using a premade IP. That was I mostly focus on animation and function, rather than design and concept.
The video was very good, it was super useful. About the rigging of the eye, at the end, I have a character with whom the same thing happened to me. My solution was to set the shrinkwrap offset to 0 and a Displacement modifier with the value you want to offset. With that I solved it. As long as the mesh has enough resolution. I hope you find it useful.
Thanks I'll give it a shot! I was playing around with this as well, but I found the drawing of the GP Objects with fill to have some issues, I'll keep playing around with what you suggested here!
The lego movies/TV shows had a similar issue with aligning the face rigs to the curve of the head, so the faces are animated with the geo slightly offset away from the head then projected onto the head during rendering
@@LevelPixelLevel might also help if you have a camera inside the head to handle the projection! It'll be more consistent than projecting from the outside.
@@LevelPixelLevel I dont Know if you solve the problem completely, But in blender 2.9 you can convert mesh to grease pencil, where you can replace the greace pencil original primitive to mesh with the proper subdivisions to conform to 3d object, drive.google.com/file/d/14vY6oxH5VzqMH21XvR2dcZi1Tyl5vLiK/view?usp=sharing Here is a blend file I made using your tutorials. in blend file the eye is a grease pencil object converted from mesh circle Thank you very much for all the useful information
I recall seeing a tutorial (forgive me if it was an older one of yours) where they used a bone to select the different mouth shapes from a chart. By moving the bone it drove the shape key I think. Anyway, the upshot was there was a visual chart where you could select the shape rather than having to remember which number corresponded to which shape. There also used to be a plug-in that used voice recognition in conjunction with text to create key frames with the corresponding mouth shapes, based on phonemes. Of course, with the system your showing you can add mouth shapes that aren’t speech related.
Yes, I saw that one as well, I think Maisam Hosaini has some cool tutorials that go over that twitter.com/maisam_hosaini I'll try to combine this now with some of the other things you outlined. Agreed, some kind of visual pose sheet would help elevate this mouth set up.
Please do more Grease pencil content! We need to see how you would approach a full character. At my company, we use Moho for 2D but I experimented with GP for use in an ad and I saw the great potential in creating 2D in a full 3D app. I used your videos for reference but I was filling in blanks as I went and I am a new blender user (Been houdini and c4d all this time). Please consider going through with this character and even if you do a multipart series, it would be epic!
Hehe sounds good, I've been building up to that, here is my face rotation test: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AtUbR1kXOQw.html Now that I have this I might break it up into a full character build in the future.
MLP Friendship is Magic style. Say what you want about the show, but it's one of the more impressive, smooth and _consistent_ looking shows made in Flash, which means rigging vector graphic puppets. I would like to know if Blender's new 2D suite can somehow replicate it.
Ok I figured out your lego head fill problem. Use the polyline tool under "drawing". You will have to use it like a vector drawing tool instead of freehand, but it will fill to shapes properly and is easier than creating a mesh. In the view settings at the top, choose surface on the left with a small offset, and then view on the right. This will allow you to draw directly on a surface according to your view angle while drawing. Hope that is a little better for you cheers!
First off, love your work! Secondly, correct me if you're wrong but it sounds like you have quite a bit of 2D animation and rigging experience. Do you have any thoughts on how your work flow here compares to working in Cell Action or toonboom harmony?
Thank you! And actually, that is what I am trying to replicate. Toonboom harmony has some amazing features, but I do think that Blender can match this (one day). I've been playing around with toon boom, and adobe animate, to see how they deal with certain limitations. Blender has some work to catch up, but I think in 2.83 it will be extremely close. The biggering thing with Blender is the rigging tools. Once you can add a rig to something you also add a pose manager, which is extremely helpful in cutout animation!
Great tutorial, regarding the curved surface problem. Couldnt you draw all grease sketches on an plane and add a deformation modifier afterwards? I didnt tried this out, but deformation cages could work this way
My dude, that's wild af. Great tut! For your lego rig question, is it possible to take the shrinkwrapped mouth thing and offset it by 0.01 local y based off the normal? That's what I'd do in engine, but idk how to do so in Blender
Thanks! Glad you liked it! For the lego head I did try something like that, even with the offset I was still getting a drawing issue with the grease pencil fill, it always tries to find the shortest route to complete the fill. But I have a couple ideas for fixing this and I've heard some good suggestions already in the comment section here, including a mesh-based system.
That Time Offset with the property driver is actually a practical way to do lip assignment! In professional 2D software, when you're on the mouth layer, you can press Left/Right (or the equivalent of Left/Right) keys to cycle through the different mouth shapes before assigning it as a keyframe, I don't suppose there's any roundabout way of doing that in Blender is there? like assigning the left/right Bracket Keys to cycle through the 1-10 mouths!?
Yeah, something like this is possible, although I think you'd have to write a custom tool. This could be an addon that looks for a property by name and then adds hotkeys to the functions that cycle through. I like this idea!
Level Pixel Level when it comes to Lip Assignment, being able to get to a new mouth shape in 0.5 seconds instead of 2 seconds is a huuuge deal over a 20 minute cartoon, as I imagine you probably noticed doing the Lip assignment for Dipper! Haha!
@@infinitehush Yeah, I know that side of it. A million clicks can slow down a production. Also, I was playing around with this in 2.79: www.blendernation.com/2015/10/06/add-on-pose-lib-preview-makes-pose-switching-easy-and-fast/ I wonder if this would speed up an animator, to just click on a thumbnail of the face shape.
You just achieved the frame picker feature of adobe animate by using the timeoffset and driver thing and thats what i am looking for, now i just need the graphic symbol feature i hope you can experiment with this, it is just like a gif that has its own timeline that you can set if its playable once or looping good thing about this is it is reusable, and mostly i use this to draw something like running in place then use tweening motion to the graphic symbol itself to make it look like its running there are adobe animate features that makes me my animation easy and makes me stay there even tho i really want to jump to blender, hope you can help. Thank you
I know this is from a while ago, but have you ever found out a way to get grease pencil to follow the curve of an object like the lego head? I have a grease pencil rig and I was trying to use the shrink wrap modifier, but I could not get it to work well. I'm wondering if there is a better way than shrink wrap.
This can work by switching the time offset to value, and this can be driven. Here is a great version of this tool: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-GX-3F0BG3t4.html
it would be super cool , if it would be possible to point a camera on a flat face ( Grease pencil RIG ) and then use that camera output as a texture on a mesh. maybe as face RIG camera render output in png and than reload the texture frame by frame . think it would by slow for animation but i don't know a other way do do it .
did you ever figure out the projecting onto 3d thing? I guess weird things happen when you start bending grease pencil hoops, you can sort of see the fill leaping straight across the back if you contort it in the right way.
I have not returned to this yet. I might wait for 2.83 before I explore this again as there are a ton of new Grease Pencil features in that build. For something like this I might also look into a texture or curve base solution.
Can you maybe somehow get the Grease Pencil fil to define a texture change in the underlying material? I'm not sure that's possible, but if it were, you'd basically have the 3D object's material be transparent within the filled area.
I was thinking about that as well, that is something I'm going to investigate. It would be nice if the grease pencil object can project onto a 3D surface, similar to a curve projection in Maya. This would open many options. Good idea!
@@LevelPixelLevel I think the problem why it's not so straight forward is that, at least currently, the way the fill works is some sort of triangulation of the polygon that makes up the fill. If that underlying triangulation doesn't happen to conform to the mesh flow of the thing you want to project onto, it's impossible to avoid the issues you're currently seeing. The only way I could see that might make this work would be some sort of dynamic triangulation. This might be tricky to do fast, efficiently, and in a way that works well with almost arbitrary underlying projection mesh. Otherwise, you'd almost by necessity have to go through modifying the texture of the 3D object instead.
@@LevelPixelLevel One thing you could try (but I suspect it'd become tedious *very* quickly) is basically to "build a scaffolding" of lines in the same color as the fill. Basically a square grid. And then fill out every square individually. That way the fill would have more detail to work with in order to properly project onto the mesh. The grid should adhere to the flow of the mesh as well as possible, which is kinda reasonable to do on a cylindrical object, but it's gonna be a lot tougher on something spherical or what not. It's probably not actually worth the effort, but it might work in principle.
@@Kram1032 Ah I see, almost build a pixel grid texture with the grease pencil across a 3D object. That sounds interesting. I'll give it a try at least with some smaller pieces to see how it goes. Great idea!
Great Work Master!. I did an exercise on my own by following the steps in part 6 (Advanced Time Offset Rig). And everything works perfectly. In fact, I made an animation moving the bones to go choosing different parts of the original drawing(mouth positions in this video). And everything works great (excellent tutorial). However, when I render the image is stuck in a single position, that is, the positions controlled by the bones in the rendering do not work, even though everything works fine in the project. Pls Help =(. Ty in advance.
Sorry if this is a dumb question -- I have the file open and I'm struggling to figure out how you animated his arm and hand. How were you able to achieve the change? I see that you have different layers for the change in hand shape but I'm not seeing where the value of the keyframe is coming from.
Hello! The arm is animated just using keyframes on the GP object. So select the arm, open up a dope sheet and change the dope sheet option to Grease Pencil and you should see the frames. docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/dope_sheet/grease_pencil.html
So I started animating with the mouth rig you made, but if I want to go from, let's say pose 12 to pose 6, then all the poses in between will play, right? Is there a way to stop those poses from animating? and just interpolate the line movement of pose 12 to pose 6?
Right, for something like this you'll need to add a frame hold. So say you want to hold pose 3 for 10 frames, you'll have to key pose 3 at frame one, and 10, then at frame 11 set it to say pose 8, and add another key at frame 35 for pose 8 to hold this for the duration.
Hi there, this rig is great! I'm only having an issue with the mouth at render time. It doesn't respect the frame offset modifier. It's probably a quirk of Blender, but do you perhaps know why it does this?
What a nice stuff!! Btw I’m trying ‘time offset’ modifier according your video, and I did ‘fixed frame’ setting with different frames ,but I don’t understand how to make animation using ‘time offset’ on dope sheet. Pease help me!
Hi! Once you have the fixed frame option there is a number under this (I think zero is the default) You have to key this at different values in time to have this animate. Check out my example files as well, they will show you this function.
Is it possible to do a frame offset modifier and rig a linked GP object? Because from experience, having a lot of GP keyframes in a scene is heavy on playback. But if they are linked they play with no lag at all.
Hello!! this is amazing. I love can make some like that I do with After Effect, it is the best. I'm teaching 2D animation the traditional way, digital too using diferente softwares. I have some question for you: Can I do the some like that but using a secuence frame texture of mouths or eyes, and conect it with a driver or time offset modifier and changes the mouth as I want? sorry for my english, I'm not so good writing in english
Hi, yeah sort of, you can use something called an image sequence texture, and then add this to a 3D object. This method works okay for smaller texture-based animations. I have not tried this on a full face rig.
Hello, is me again. I have another question for you. Can I use the some bone (armature) to become it a container the controllers to the face, I mean for the mouth and eyes. I made the face and the eyes in diferent grease pencil element (I hope that you can understand my english)
@@rodrigodpc2331 Are you referring to a face panel, that is in a different location from the main rig? If so then yes this is totally possible and is a great way to build a 2D rig!
Eventually ... One day... I hope you are able to make an, "Action" rig. For instance a fighting capable Goku from Dragon Ball. If you get really skilled than an action rig from Avatar the Last Airbender.
Hey, I'm working my way up to something more advanced like this. I think a good action fight scene is a great test to push Grease Pencil to the limit. Good suggestions!
hi can you make a video on getting character proportions right? i struggle with that aloti started to make a certain character but it was turning uncanny :(
Hi. I have troubles by following your tutorial on 7 minute you are using time offset modifier with bone using data path and getting this nice control in the item panel. I really like the way it works but trouble is I made it for Other objects and that control shows up on the Pose mode while other shows up on the Object mode. I hope you get my point.. question is how can you switch it so it shows up on pose mode or otherwise on the object mode? may be I'm doing something wrong...
hmm that's a good questions. I guess the easy answer is because it is free, but this doesn't mean it is a better software. I think for me I am most comfortable in Blender, so I can do things quick within the software. For now After Effects is probably better at 2D animation. What will make Blender better in the future is being able to leverage all of the 3D character animator tools on a 2D character rig, something like toon boom harmony. But this will take time to learn and perfect in Blender (sorry for the long response!)
At 7:10, I'm having trouble finding that menu where you were able to toggle between the frames in Properties. I've looked everywhere, but cannot find it. Does anyone know where that might be?
What should I do when I have a character facing to one side (like yours here) but I will also need him to look to the opposite side, do you know any ways, maybe, to mirror it with all the edits?
Yeah, a mirror might work for this - and even place the mirror after the armature modifier so you can still use the rig. There is another way I'm working on where you build the left and the right side of the character and have a node that moves this from side to side to change the face.
@@lesia.mammal Opps no I meant rig controllers, more like a face panel - something like this but for Grease Pencil: cdn.lynda.com/video/98819-67-635185083860782478_338x600_thumb.jpg
when i insert a mouth shape in 1st keyframe and another mouth shape in 5th keyframe , there are inbetween keyframe coming automatically, can you help me with this
Once you add the time offset you can no longer edit the shapes that exist. In this way, you are a little out of luck. But you can always add more mouth shapes, meaning instead of editing old ones you can just keep adding newer shapes.
@@LevelPixelLevel i'm not sure if you found this solution yet, but you can modify the old strokes/shapes that were already set in place with the time offset modifier. it's true that when you turn on the modifier it automatically locks/grays out the keyframes to prevent you from modifying shapes, but the various drawing layers can be unlocked in the dopesheet to be drawn on/added to/tweaked: temporarily hide/disable your time offset modifier (monitor icon). in the grease pencil dopesheet, scrub to the keyframe you want to adjust. find the stroke(s) you want to modify under the dopesheet summary on the far left (assuming the summary drop-down is expanded), and unlock the strokes by clicking the padlock icon. make your changes with draw or sculpt. they should be applied to the whichever keyframe you were on. reenable modifier and make sure everything is in working order. i might recommend locking the strokes again to make sure you don't accidentally make unwanted changes later thank you for sharing this flexible workflow!
@@mxpepper Thanks for this option, yeah I was playing around with this, the only problem I ran into was that it would change the shape for the whole animation. Meaning if I used the same smile shape a couple of times throughout the animation and I wanted to change one frame it would change it for everywhere I used that shape. I've been using a mix of the method you mentions here and duplicating frames to add to the sub-level animation. Thanks for the tip!
I've learned to rig by being a rigging on film, games, and tv shows. The best way to learn (quickly) is to surround yourself with amazing artists and technicians. This can also be achieved in discord channels these days. The other thing I do with learning is to focus on a project-based workflow. I prefer to pick something I want to make, and then just dive in. Usually, I get lost along the way, but I learn a ton by doing this. I find that 6 hour or 10 hour tutorial series are nice, but at the end, I feel like I just followed along, rather than tripping and pulling my self up as I do on my personal projects.
Help! I tried to make a simple 2D eye rig similar to yours, but having multiple grease pencil objects shows tiny white blips where the two objects intersect, even in the render? How did you set up the eyes?
hmm, are you using a orthographic or a perspective camera? Double check your clipping mask. Download my example files as well and copy the render settings over.
iI am having so much trouble learning how to key the mouth rig it is always showing my the mouth position I want at the key point but also the ones that I do not want in between HELPPPP!!!
@@LevelPixelLevel ok, so I have to animate the bone some value of which will show a certain frame. So how to connect that value with sequence of frames?
Look, I subscribed to your channel, but it won't let me set the notifications for all your videos because it says it cannot be done for "content made for kids". Ive been looking for content like yours for months! Can you fix it so I can get full notifications for your channel, please?
5:20 thats hell lot like the feature from Adobe Flash that Alan Becker showed in his tutorials. _See here: __ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-xdwdO2ZpYI8.html_ 7:38 thanks for showing both versions. Thats a huuuuuge boost to my motivation for blendering :) Ohh, and also, have u tried shape keys???
I was thinking the exact same thing! Symbols is a powerful tool in Adobe Flash and now we know how to use it in Grease Pencil !!! Thanks Level Pixel Level and Blender Foundation!
You are very right, I've found a couple of bug reports on this issue. I have not been able to get this to open. I'll keep playing around with it and let you know if I find the answer.
I thought about this as well, but I really want everything to work in the shot and in-camera with the geometry/grease pencil objects. But 2.83 will have some awesome features that might make this a lot easier!
How are you syncing the mouth to a voice? I am accustom to adobe, your time offset trick is very similar to how adobe uses symbols to sync lips to voices. I am not slick enough with Blender to make the connection to how you are using this to sync to the voice. Can you clue me in on that?
Sort of, it's more how the circle draws itself. It will always try to find a linear route to for the fill. So even if the edge is conforming to the 3D object the fill of the 2D object will always be flat (intersecting the 3D geo)