HI IT'S BEEN AWHILE! I've wanted to make this one for awhile, I hope you like it! I put more work than you'd expect into Benjamin the 2D Frog... Timelapse toward the later attempts. Also it's good to be back in LA :D
To show this kind of transparency and give us such an honest behind-the-curtain look at the real-time struggles and frustrations of learning a new tool (Blender itself, and now it's Grease Pencil)...is just uncommonly brave for an influencer...of ANY field and subject. So fascinating to watch...but also wildly relatable since we've all been there. Just love all your learning blender videos!
You've obviously figured it out and did an outstanding job with the frog, with masking and everything! More drawing on live action!! That is where this tool can excel! thx
2:42 You didn't break him! He's fine, you were just in Edit mode (look at the top left of the Viewport) while also playing the animation (pressing Space Bar). It would appear you entered Edit Mode (probably by pressing Tab) on the exact frame he's stuck in. This happens for most objects, including those you animate in AnimAll. Leaving Edit mode will make it play normally. Blender is expecting you to edit it from the current state you pressed edit in.
@@SirWade Totally! The one thing in Blender I'm specifically bad for is slapping that space bar and wondering what in the name of Ton Roosendaal is happening lol
4:55 A good pro-tip for drawing in the viewport state is to add a camera, then press 0 on your num pad and draw your scene from there, then you can draw everything from that perspective. You can then select the camera, go to the little green camera in the bottom right, and make it orthographic so it's nicer for 2D (or change the perspective focal length to 300mm)
Great video! You might have figured this out already but one thing that is helpful for animation in grease pencil is sculpt mode. It kinda allows you to push or pull lines to change shapes without having to redraw them. Can’t wait to see what you do next!
8:58 Currently grease pencil objects are drawn separately from everything else. That means that GP objects can't affect other objects. Having GP objects behave like any other object is on the roadmap.
@@jmalmsten Just, materials and shading aren't yet feature complete. Lights can already affect grease pencil objects, and I think they can already throw shadows too, but beyond that, GP objects afaik can not be shaded. I think there are some workaround such as rendering the GP objects to images which you can then import as planes with transparency and such
It's so interesting to see you jump into blender man! I love seeing your perspective as someone who already has experience in a different program. I'll keep watching these as long as you keep uploading them!
Grease pencil is difficult to get around and to use for animation when you start with it. There are some challenges and I have a few issues with it. But, beyond that, it's a great tool for animating.
I do all my stuff in blender now bc once you get everything in your head it is awesome! Only thing I need to learn is rigging, bc that can be very helpful as well.
I do not know how much you deep dived into blender yet, but here are some tips: - You can actually open a 2d animation start file. It will give you a white background and some sample materials, positioning the camera on one of the main axes as well. - You can save any blend file as a start up file. Brushes are stored in the Blend File, so saving a dedicated blend file as start up lets you open any new project with everything you might need - there are real layers, they are in the tab on the right with the stroke symbol! - There also is a setting under "advanced" in the fill tool where you can set a value for gap filling, what means you can fill even if the shape is not fully closed! - There are also a ton of effects like rim light, background shadows and such - ALSO besides effects there are modifiers, my personal favorite: the noise modifier! Using this you can simulate line boiling for example with a randomized boil each x frames - you can loop frames by using the time offset modifier, they definitely used this in the animation with the tiny chickens - each material has two modes: material color and a vertex color. You can switch between those at the top. the first mode always uses the material color, meaning changing the mat color will change it ANYWHERE in the animation itself, while the second one activates a tiny color field next to it. Clicking it you can create color palettes! deleting or changing one of these colors will NOT affect the animation and makes quick coloring way more intuitive and fluent! Hope this helps you or any one else here who is not as into blender! :)
As people have been saying... having the whole process behind it shown really can help people a lot, as can surrounding discussions and questions asked at people more in the know. Learning how to troubleshoot your problems is an entire skill in itself, so nudging people towards that intuition sure isn't a bad idea at all, as far as I am concerned. Neat video!
“Since the knowledge is available, why try to struggle along without it? The difficulties of not knowing are always much greater than the effort of learning.” Andrew Loomis, Successful Drawing
I like the feeling of exploring something for the first time without any context or assistance - to me it feels like the first time playing a challenging video game without an intro / tutorial where everything has to be discovered. Once I get that first go out of my system, I look to tutorials and documentation - but I find it refreshing to rely only on my intuition and the UI design of an application at first. You end up learning a lot about the tool and about your own learning style that way :) Plus it's much more entertaining for a video, since I'm in no position to make a tutorial on the topic myself ;) My goal is just to normalize learning and show the exploration phase, which is perhaps also useful to developers who want to know what someone's first time using their tools is like in a vacuum of any other influence.
Looks like you got the animation stuff figured out. Next try your hand at storyboarding an animatic in 3D w/ Grease Pencil and the Sequence Editor. Blender is crazy powerful with what can be done in even that realm! Last year, I did animatics for 4 22 minute episodes all in Blender, then we were able to use the camera work from the animatics as the layouts for the animated shots! Think of it as a way of doing camera layouts while boarding (its a bit more involved than that, but you get the idea : )
I remember blender being able to track points from a video and map them to 3d coordinates. It seems like it could be fun and educational for you to use that and create a scene that mixes live action with a moving camera, 3d objects, and grease pencil objects. The whole shebang.
well done on trying it without knowing, props for that! GP is one of blenders strengths which like everything else is ongoing and will improve over time! merry christmas!
It makes me feel better to see an industry expert get frustrated with Blender since I keep trying and failing to learn it. When I watch Blender tutorials it seems like everyone comes at it from the point of view of someone who is already an expert, which makes no sense. Thank you for your transparency.
You can fix that layering issue by going into Object Data Proportions (That thing that holds the layer tabs), scroll down to 'Strokes' and change '2D Layers' to '3D Location'. Sorry if you already knew this, I'm just saying incase you didn't.
Grease Pencil is awesome! I highly recommend people to try it. But I also suggest to watch some tutorials if you're used to work with other similar programs. Blender functions a little bit differently, but once you get past the learning curve, you can create awesome content super fast 🥰
Welcome back to cali Sir. It's great to see ya slowly get back into the swing of things of uploading again after awhile. Hope you n Jess and kitty are doing well n hope to see yall again soon on twitch. Also hope yove been enjoying your recent new job to. i have recently learning Houdini lately the free version and wold love for you to try n tackle learning it Sir.
Very fun! I think Grease Pencil shading stuff isn't yet finished. Apparently it's kinda tricky to make that stuff work fully, but it's definitely on the radar Would love a standalone video on just Benjamin - seemed quite successful
9:30 Placement - Surface will draw directly on the surface of the mesh, no need to move the cursor around 10:27 Currently there is no easy fix for it, easiest way is just keep drawing them in order or make every box wall a separate gpencil object.
Blender is intimidating mainly because it is so DENSE with few to no instructions. Just dicking around or doing smaller more manageable projects and adding to them each new time around tends to be how most people will learn Blender.
Try to remember that most of Blenders hotkey shortcuts are universal, so it's easy to guess what controls what even in unfamiliar viewport environments, like how 'G' will always move things (grab) and 'Tab' will usually edit things. An example of this is when you discovered what you call 'curve helper' by holding shift. Holding shift in Blender by default allows for fine control, so you can move, scale, or rotate anything with more precision. The curve helper was likely it's own tool, but the fact that they mapped it to shift is a great example of how they try to make everything consistent.
It was cool to see your approach to blender. I am very impressed by your interesting personality. I look forward to learning and being encouraged by your Blender progression. I'm really wanting to eventually master Blender 2D but I'm far from it. I really like Blender because it's completely free and has infinite potential. You have infinite potential too.
As a hobbyist 2D animator I do find Grease Pencil to be quite intriguing for 2.5D work. But I just can't wrap my head around the intended workflow. Materials for strokes? How do one simply return to a canvas to draw more on it? Can I animate roughly in Krita with their intuitive pencils and pixel based layers and do ink n paint in Blender? Can I make brush strokes that don't look like fat flat flash animation strokes from the late 90's? Are there tutorials for us that aren't 3D modelers that makes sense of the whole workflow so I can minimize the "what did I do? What should I do to make basics work???" And spend most of my time actually... animating instead of troubleshooting UI?
"Can I make brush strokes that don't look like fat flat flash animation strokes from the late 90's?" Yes. There are modifiers for this. Also GreasePencil is on the roadmap for updating the objects so they behave (shader and light influence etc) like other 3D objects. What that means? U will be able create ur own procedural stroke shaders (thats the advantage of having materials for strokes) and even the nodes that create that shader can be animated and that implies the ability to fake very suttle movement without actually animating the obejcts for a more dynamic animation.
I highly recommend Sophie Jantak's tutorials. She started from a strictly 2D-background before coming to Blender, and often uses a softer style resembling pencils or watercolor. I feel your pain with how weird and unintuitive this can be, though. It feels like Grease Pencil started as an experiment tacked on to 2.8 ("Wait, we already have all this geometry stuff, couldn't we use that to represent 2D linework as well?") with the bare minimum to get it working, to see what people would do with it. It has become a lot more polished and powerful since then, but it is still evolving a lot, and the best workflows for it are emerging after the fact and then have to be integrated into the larger software.
Oh, and if I had to pitch Grease Pencil to 2D artists, it would be that besides being able to draw in a 3D environment, it also gives you the ability to go back and modify each stroke you did after the fact - sculpting the shape to refine it or animate the next frame, changing what color/drawing implement/technique you used by the material, animating materials & textures, ... While I know my way around Blender & 3D, I haven't really touched Grease Pencil - still, maybe these answers are helpful: There isn't really a "canvas" - there are only 3D Grease Pencil objects that contain strokes, and you can adjust where new strokes are placed in 3D based on your camera view, 3D cursor position (the crosshair thing you can place with Shift+Rightclick), and other objects' surfaces. The white "canvas" you get if you select _New > 2D Animation_ is just the world shader, in the infinite distance in every direction. (Think of it as the sky.) To return to draw more, select _Object Mode_ in the top left of the viewport, select the GP object (probably named _Stroke_ or _GPencil_ in the outliner), then enter _Draw_ mode. Make sure the _Stroke Placement_ & _Drawing Plane_ dropdowns in the top center are set to what you want (default is Origin & Front X-Z). You might also want to return the view to the camera object (~ 1, or Numpad 0). I guess you could import rough sketches you made in Krita as images and trace them with GP in Blender. You can select an image as a camera background, or import an image as an object. No idea how to best turn that into an efficient workflow - I'd have a go at image sequence as camera background? You can make or import custom brushes, though I haven't looked into how to do it or where you can download good basic ones to get started. Besides Sophie Jantak's channel, maybe check out Paul O Caggegi, Team Miracles, Open Class, Blender NPR, Dantti. HTH!
I don't know what I'm doing either, but I saw a video that showed that you can show a grid on any surface plain for drawing with grease pencil, which provides better visual clues for us beginners : )
emission in material never affect to much the sorroundings, usually i crank the emission to the moon or stick a lightsource nearby to easy-low processing result. sun light the scene, even when in very low light to have some "skylight" or place a skylight map in the world (for more real lightining)
I don't know if any have have said it yet, but the reason why your emissives weren't effecting the enviornment was because you were using the Eevee render engine which doesn't support that. If you change to Cycles, it will work. Additionally, the reaosn why your material wasn't glowing was because you had the wrong one selected. Good luck :)
Cycles renderer will make emissive materials effect the environment. Eevee renderer is like a videogame renderer, but cycles is a full raytracing engine.
You can do it, it’s easier in cycles, so in eevee you need to add an irradiance light probe and then bake the textures, to better explain our search indirect lighting eevee
I believe you can create a rig for him and especially a face rig. I’m not good at rigging nor am I good at Grease Pencil. Nice work so far for a noob starting out. I’m still a noob at most things 3D. Fun stuff!!
illuminating an object's surroundings with emitters only works for cycles, and even then i'm not sure it works for this particular effect on the grease pencil but it probably does as it just ray traces the light bounces there's screen space reflection cardboard scams you can use in eevee, here's also boxes that allow you to bake shadows and reflection, but it is qui9te hacky (about as hacky as fake caustics) so it's not the default behaviour so fixing this in the compositor after rendering is probably a better approach, or using actual volumetrics so i has a density / temperature values to work with and shade those dynamically, but that can get heavy pretty quickly (that said, eevee is pretty quick with its volumetrics)
Hey!, ive just started doing animation as an elective at university and absolutly love it! So im only just new to the channel. What im finding very difficult and im not sure if you have covered it yet is. How do you animate at the correct time, as in making it so your character doesnt move to fast or slow. But a more natural speed? Is there a general time frame speed that can be used as a rough timing that can be tweaked to suit? Im Loving your videos so far, slowly working through them all!
