So I finally tried Blender's Grease Pencil 

Welcome to the Blender Club, now you need to make a doughnut. 10th comment btw.

I'm neck-deep in Grease Pencil research for everything I do now. I'd love to get with you and do some mutual brain-picking at some point.

Pepe's school creator Daniel Martínez Lara is the one who create the new grease pencil adapted for animation!!! you could write him to tell them what thing in the setings didin't work for you. or you can be part of the live stream in the blender youtube channel on mondays, you can ask things to Pable Vazquez

Grease pencil objects can receive light, cast shadows, and interact like other 3D objects. Here’s a good demo to illustrate: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-4pIH10O17JU.html

About the problems you were having with the timeline: Blender actually has many different timelines. The one you were using is just the generic timeline, which is simple, but not very useful for complex tasks. There is also the dope sheet editor, which is basically a more advanced version of the normal timeline. Finally there is the Non-Linear Animation timeline, which allows you to layer multiple "actions" on top of each other. Actions are small segments of animation that are combined together for the final animation. I'm a full 3D animator, so I'm not too sure how they would be used in a 2D pipeline, but This is what I usually do: I create separate actions to control the major components of an animation. For example: one action for the transformation of the character as a whole, one for facial expressions, one for the upper body, one for the lower body, etc. Leaning an action based workflow can be quite complicated, but it is a NECESSITY for anyone working on complex or feature-length animations.

Blender's vanilla state versus its plug-in offers is arguably a casualty of its "do everything" nature. If every potentially useful feature/plug-in was enabled by default, Blender would likely be rendered unusable. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and it feels like a major factor of that decision is "How many users don't actually need this?" Even sticking to 3D, there are multiple plug-ins ranging from "obvious" to "essential" that ship with Blender but are disabled by default. The issue is that different people have different views of what is useful. For example, Node Wrangler is arguably essential to anyone who does anything more than the most basic work in the Node Editor, but it just wastes hot key combinations (or causes needless conflicts) and system resources for anyone who doesn't.

When I first tried out Blender back in 2.79, the user interface and the tools felt really confusing and discouraging: it gave the feeling that you needed to master every tool to make something decent. I tried really hard to be motivated, but at the end I gave up for almost a year. Then I discovered 2.8 and the grease pencil functionalities, and Blender finally made me feel like home! The UI was so much easier to understand, and animating felt so fun! Plus, since I don't have a pro computer, EEVEE made my life so much easier. Now I use it for almost everything, and even if I had the money to pay for Maya, I would still stick with Blender.

Nice! I'm glad you tried it out. 2D/3D hybrid is the future!

Grease Pencil objects cast shadows and can be affected by scene lights. Make sure you have the settings correct for it.

Pro tip, you can press tab while selecting an object to go to edit mode (So when drawing you can just press tab and it will go to edit mode)

I've been learning greasepencil for a few reasons, one reason is price. I'm pretty tired paying monthly packs or paying a massive amount for software. The other is I just love the creative potential of 3d/2d hybrid. The amount of control is incredible! (Also I'm already subbed to Broke My Pencil! Great stuff there)

g r r r a t i s

I tried blender but the program didnt blend my fruits

Fun fact: One of the anime industries used blender for one of their anime movies, which is the Studio Khara known for the anime Evangelion.

Soooooooo Toniko...have you ever heard about 2d animation on a nintendo 3ds? 👀

21:00 There is the ability to make lighting to affect grease pencil artwork, various fx modifiers like rim lighting, blur, motion blur, and depth of field. Spitfire Storyboards will tell ya all about it. I'm gonna watch that video next. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-InkFqh0K5Uw.html

Being a jobless waiter made me consider going into 3D modeling but the licence for any good program costs more than a laptop I use. Glad to have discovered Blender! Still had to sacrifice 100€ for a Wacom tablet though..

Animators like Worthikids uses this program. :)

Welcome to Blender! There is someone working on a VR version of blender, by the way. Also Blender is made by the community, it is a patchwork of good ideas and addons and variants are the strong points of blender. Every time you think "I wish blender had this or that" someone probably made it as an addon or forked a build of blender and is working on it.

YESSS! I was hoping you’d try this out!

Blender, the legend of open source.

FINALLY I WANTED A REVIEW!!!! THANK YOU 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏✨✨✨

I laughed out loud when you said "gratis" cuz we use that word in Norwegian too XD

About the coloring part: Grease Pencil has reverse selection fill and fill by layer since the 2.91 update. It's the (+/-) button on the top of your workspace

I would say that what Blender is currently great for, is for concept art, storyboards, animatics and such. But I am excited for it to be developed further, adding shadows and more materials on greasepencil. And a more optimized layout for 2D specific workflow!! Great video!

One thing I think grease pencil will be great for is for translating 2D animation into 3D animation. It’d be really cool to use a grease pencil drawing as a guide for posing a 3D animation. Seems like it could be a useful tool, especially for 3D noobs like me. Blender may be the most accessible 3D program because of it being open source and having a wide variety of community made tutorials, but it still doesn’t change the fact that learning 3D is really freaking hard.

I’ve recently started using grease pencil and it’s only so nice. I’ve never seen a free software where EVRY possible tool is there. It’s amazing!

So glad you went in depth. Thanks for the links and mention. You mention depth of field as per camera . U can get the grease object to do that in its fx blur by checking King the 'use depth of field' setting. It will conform to the camera then. I cover it in partc3 of my sci-fi tutorial. Cheers

I know that I am missing the point of the video (which is a great video btw!), but I find it really curious from the comments that "gratis" is used in so many lenguages

yeeah this is what I wanted!! I want to use flat 2D characters in a 3D space I didn't even know blender can do this. I still need to learn it. It's so big I never know where to start.

One thing that I love, as an experienced 3D model artist, is the ability to just draw concepts in Blender, there and then on the spot. This comes in very handy when I'm creating modular assets and want to quickly sketch out ideas without having to fire up Photoshop! I can literally just draw over my 3D geometry. So I can draw a window over a wall to see roughly what it would look like. Great stuff!

4:34 Woah, you didn't even stutter. It takes guts to say you pirated, even if it was a long time ago.

I remember hearing about it through A Fox in Space and being excited for it. I'm waiting until I get a decent PC until then

Pro tip, turn on pie menu and switching between modes would be a breeze, i don't even notice i am switching to a tab now the muscle memory with pie menu is so strong.

The amazing world of gumball be like:

Even after everything you said at the beggining I would still like to see you try out clip studio paint and see how it compares to other softwares used in western. I know clip studio paint is used a lot in anime and you can do everything up to composite there, but i dont know so much about western and it would be nice seeing the perspective of someone in that industry. THough there do are quite a lot of featurs in clip studio paint nad quite a lot of them arent that well documented/known about so it might be hard finding info on everythign and how to work around in stuff like keyframes auto actions etc

For the shadows and light interaction u can turn the drawings into a 3d object and it will do all that

Worthikids also preaches the gospel and has some neat tutorials / livestreams about Blender

I have tried to get into Grease Pencil for a couple of years now. Coming from 2D animation on Krita and Adobe Flash before that and pencil on paper before that. And yeah. While I do see a lot of potential. I mean, I just can't get the thoughts out of my head, so there should be something to the hybrid approach. But I have always thought it felt very... tacked on and not exactly thought out for people outside the in-group of blender modelers. If I understand it correctly it was at first just an annotation tool (the name coming from the grease pencils used to draw on glass surfaces like displays and viewfinders) that someone decided to hack to make animation. And that still feels like it. I have seen some fantastic stuff dine with the tool. But whenever I look into tutorials I always am struck with how many steps are needed for the simplest of actions. So I revert back to the simplicity of Krita. But this is a long winded way to say this. I welcome all tutorials I find for Grease Pencil. So I'll check out the suggested channels. One of these days I will decipher the workflow. One of these Days I will learn how to draw in 3D planes.

to inverse fill 1. select the fill tool as usual (& select a suitable GP fill material) 2. ctrl and click on the area outside your artwork. all areas inside the artwork are filled.

3:42 G R A T I S

blender should be considered in the mainstream industry, because maya fucking sucks, it has a shity ui, overpriced, and you're forced to use it when learning 3d animation because its INDUSTRY STANDARD??!. its just ew.

hm... for the lasso painting brush you say something like "This is the tool I wish TVP and Harmony had..." only, TVP does have it and it is called filled stroke, it is in main panel under the stroke. And due to the bitmap nature of the tvp, it is more flexible since it can also delete shapes, which is messy in Blender at the moment. Other than that, kudos for your video!

Middle school 2010s that makes me feel old since the first time I picked up 3D program was in the late 1990s. With Bryce, Ray Dream, Animation Master and Lightwave.

I have a solution for grease pencil's interaction to light/shadows/etc! Just render only the animation as a video with a transparent BG. Then, import that video using images as planes addon to a new blend file, where you build a background scene and animate the camera. Then voila, Grease pencil interacts with light & shadows just like any other object! But I think that they should've done interactions with shadows as a default thing

So basically, It's like how Dangonronpa works

@26:21 "...I judge it by its vanilla form." This is one approach but not the best approach. Everyone should be looking for the best toolset for a job which is almost always a tradeoff between cost (both time and money) and efficiency. Sometimes the best toolset is not vanilla but a combo. Sometimes it's vanilla. If Blender with free plugins that you can get set up in an afternoon is far superior to a vanilla app... you should use Blender with plugins... unless the time cost to learn those plugins exceeds the cost of programs you're familiar with. But this vanilla vs vanilla philosophy, while not useless, hamstrings people unnecessarily.

This video has a lot of comments so im sure youve probably already heard it, but if you havnt. Ctrl+tab (hold tab) will let you switch modes quicky Ctrl+tab (quick press) will switch between your last mode w will select the select tool, keep pressing it to get to the select tool you want. like lasso for example.

I imagine you have some good thoughts on Beastars and Klaus

:D It's great to see your impressions of Blender, Toniko! Allan's work inspired me to check it out, and then this video popped up in my recommended. Good pick, algorithm!!

Im doing my thesis with blender. It is looking nice so far

Look at kristof dedene his work make background look animated and amazing

To switch fast between draw-, edit- and sculpt mode use the Pie Menu. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Keymap -> Preferences and activate the checkboxes "Tab for Pie Menu" and "Pie Menu on Drag". Then click the Burgermenue in the bottom Left corner -> Save Preferences. Now if you hold the tab-key and drag you mouse you get a quick menu. It saves a lot of time. Nice Video.

Blender is arguably the 2nd best 2d animation toolkit available. I would say it's Number 1 In many ways it is. But It needs to develop a good library system for "frames \ symbols." and a better curve, and envelope deformer for Grease Pencil objects, before it can beat out Toonboom.

Excellent video 😄 I have a few tips for you to make it a bit easier in some cases ☺️ at around 16 minutes you were talking about how tedious it is to have to switch to edit mode. Well there's a way you can do it without moving your pen away from the drawing - use the pie menus. You need to enable the add-on on the Preferences, but with it you can access whole menus with each workspace by using hotkeys. For instance if you want to go to edit mode from draw mode, press Ctrl Tab, the pie menu will appear and you can choose your desired mode. Then to get back to draw mode, Ctrl Tab again. Also at about 21 minutes you mention that the grease pencil objects can't be made darker, well there's actually a really cool thing with the lights that can do this for you. You need to make sure that you are using a version of blender were the grease pencil objects can react to light. Then instead of animating the darkness on each frame, you can add a light and set up the way you want the "shadow" to look, then you can actually give the Watt value a negative value, like -100 and instead of casting light, it will darken the area that the light is effecting! The more negative you make the value, the darker it will get and you can keyframe these values to get animated lighting. It's amazing to see.

If you set the paint bucket fill tool to "minus mode" (subtractive) and click outside the drawing, it will fill the whole silhouette in one go.

O, im 6th :) Love your content I can always lern new things and tricks with animation

I've completely swapped to Blender for 3D Animation, however, it does tend to die A LOT if you push it too hard and I should know, I've had times when my Blender would crash in the middle of making a new model and I forget to save. Thankfully, Blender actually does auto-save work incase it happens so thats a neat feature

Grease pencil has a funky learning curve, true. But I urge you to revisit it in may, when final 2.93 comes out. Brings many new features: mult coloring, very good interpolation, you can create stylized background with scene lineart, that works in realtime... then for 3.0 we're most likely getting true grease pencil cast shadows (already tested that branch). It is on a sure path to maturity

my biggest question is blender grease pencil vs krita animation tools

You talk more than my friend charleen LOL 😁

maybe you could put in english subs. I dont speak english very good and its hard for follow you to me.

This looks like an incredible amount of work. I thought the software would make this somewhat automated.

Convert grease pencil to mesh then You got shadows etc.

11:40 The pepeland(Daniel Martínez Lara) is actually the Grease pencil developer :D

there is a feature called "convert to" which allows you to convert an object into either a mesh, line, or grease pencil stroke. turning a grease pencil into a mesh would allow you to do some of the stuff you talked about with the material nodes.

now i need a better pc for blender sadiulhiduashddas i'm stuck with 2.7 because my potato can't handle 2.8, i hope i don't find difficult to change from one to another since everything is different now

crtl + tab brings up a menu for the different modes

Grease Pencil has advanced a lot in the last few months.

congratz, sad i missed the wedding though!

The short cut for quickly switching back between edit mode and other modes is "CTRL + Tab"

You can use lights on the grease pencil object - you just need the right settings (vertex paint?) There's videos out there. If you want to add bump maps etc to the grease pencil object you can convert it to actual 3d geometry. A lot of the complaints are probably just not knowing how to do it...(if you ever figure it out make another vid :) )

Adobe Animate into Blender, or just use Grease Pencil?

Suggestion: Try changing the nib on your pen to the paper one so it feels more like your drawing on paper.

Definitely inspired to give Blender a serious try now. Thanks!

Blender is god. its free and its good...

Please explain how you created the normal map for your Dog Knight-character! I’ve searched the entire internet without finding a good explanation for this.

OK, my final thoughts. A lot of the limitations you mentioned at the end aren't actually true; the thing about Blender is that it's a suite of advanced tools. The catch is, they aren't always in places that are the most intuitive for people; but they are both configurable and very extensive. I honestly think that it's an artifact of the sheer number of people who have contributed to the software over the years; and as Blender progresses it isn't uncommon for a popular feature to be cleaned up in the UI. Additionally, 2D isn't just the grease pencil. You've also got 2D shaders (which can be written in OSL if you want), Freestyle, grease pencil modifiers and effects (which are a different thing), the graph editor and its tools, and layers in compositing. Not to mention, texture painting and vertex painting on meshes. Grease pencil is, as an example, totally capable of working with shadows and light! But, it's not the first place that a 2D animator would look, and it is a special setting as it demands more of the processor. I'm an old school 3D animator and you're right, I've gotten leagues better since I started studying 2D animation (and film making)! But Blender's real power, for better or for worse, comes with experience with it. So you're right, whether it's 3D, 2D, video editing, or Python scripting, Blender ain't for no babies.

Great Video as always! If the software doesn't have stabilization, its useless AF, not going to draw 10,000 wiglgly frames when I can draw 10,000 smooth frames with no extra effort. Its not like my lines are wiggly on real paper!

Huh, I didn't know grease pencil objects don't cast shadows and don't have depth of field. That's kind of disappointing. It feels like it should "just work". Image planes work fine and intuitively grease pencil is "just" a flat vector drawing that you should be able to render similarly

Grease pencil actually seems great for 2.5d parallax work

For the edit mode problem just press tab.

Depth of field in grease pencil: add a blur effect and in its menu check "use depth of field". and dont give up on grease pencil. its growing extremely fast. almost everything you present here didnt exist a year ago.

Ok this is a very good video that introduces grease pencil to new users. But PLEASE, change those materials, they're horrible to look at😂

Oh no. Another artist consumed by blender. It's too late (Also 3d art in elementary school is friggin wacky I wish I could have done that)

I think your point about addons is kinda silly, I hate photoshop with default brushes and setups. It doesn't take much effort to install blender addons, and I feel like that should be a totally normal thing across the board of creative programs. Everything from games to applications are usually made so much better through addons, I've never used a program stock and been content with it, it always needs tweaking to fit the workflow I want, isn't that a really good thing that it opens up how creative you can be with the program?

8:00 - yeah, nice idea! If the same stuff you use on you everyday can aquire the VR capability, it kinda put all the pieces together. You'd be able to literally just put up your vrset create something you're imagining then imediatly go work on it on the sofyware, even if you want to put up just a shape. And also you can have a table and work on stuff as a small sculpture. I bet the blender team is capable of doing it, with an easy enought settup. And with the amount of 3d math they already do. I bet as soon as someone gets excited with the idea we'll can see it for real.

Clicked the video just because I saw Volnutt in the thumbnail LOL!! Great job bro!

Can you import a 2D character animation from another program into your 3D Blender scene?

13:39 that is changed in blender 2.93 alpha now. It doesn't create a new frame but draw to the last one (unless you have auto-keyframing on). That "an option for everyone's taste" thing in blender is amazing 😁 Btw, Grease pencil is still heavily developing and improves really fast. So using the latest alpha or the experimental branch for Grease pencil may be useful in terms of features & fixes (but less stability ofc 😛)

Great video!!! Glad to see you playing around with it! :) I have yet to play with the grease pencil myself, despite using 3D Blender a lot. I should give it a shot. I would love to see the shift and trace Add-On implemented fully though, I agree

You should check out Blender NPR, when compositing 3D elements with 2D it can help to have non photo real elements in :p. I think there are a lot of features missing for grease pencil to be a good alternative, but there are definitely incoming features that solve that as well as work around a for most things which is a good sign for the future.

2:08 isn't that the normal way of releasing software? I'd call any program that doesn't get updates close to dead

Omg I get the same fanboy stuff all the time usually about blender gp or csp... It's def worth a look...

A fair overview I think. Grease pencil is my weapon of choice not because I think it's better than other programs, more so as I feel I need to stick to one thing while I develop as an artist. It may not do certain things as well as other programs but it does have it's own ways of dealing with issues and I can produce complete projects under one roof. I'm having a lot of fun learning it as well as animation in general.

If understand well, you said that grease pencil doesn't project shadows, it does but you have to use lights objects instead emissive materiales.

Blender isn't a "new player" to animation, hon. Blender was created with animation in mind first. It is (or was) also capable of making 3D games. The *grease pencil* has been around since *2015.* I'm glad you found it and like it! Here, this might interest you, I'm going to reply to this comment with a link to Blender's history, but Blender is by no means new to the industry. It went into development in *1994,* and in *1998* an SGI version was published on the web, IrisGL. It's been around for a looong while. And, it's been upping it's game for well over TWO DECADES holy o . o I was still a child and I'm 36 now. TIL and it blew my mind.

I can't wait to get back into blender

At the expense of casting shadows and all sorts of light effects, if I'm not mistaken, you can implement it, where on the in the right of the tools panel there is a section for special effects and modifiers, like there are all sorts of different modifiers that work, it is the Blender grease pencil file that can work at the object levels. But this is not certain, but there is evidence in this.

Blender can be uses with VR 7:48