Grease Pencil: New feature on development

Published by Allan Brito on July 20th, 2008 in Development

New feature for Blender 3D? This is the kind of news that we always love to spread. The new feature today is called Grease Pencil and it`s been developed by Aligorith.

What can we do with it? Simple, you can draw over the 3D View. What for? Well, there are innumerous possibilities, like making notes about a model or simple review a work.

Here comes the best part, there are already a few test builds available, with Grease Pencil. Just visit graphicall.org and look for builds labeled "Grease Pencil". The first one just shows how to use Grease Pencil for review work, and the second one shows how to use it and make your own Blender build, with the Grease Pencil Patch on Ubuntu.

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31 Responses to “Grease Pencil: New feature on development”

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1 Sandra Gilbert Jul 20th, 2008 at 6:20 am

This sounds like such a cool feature. Especially for beginning animators. They can trace where and how they want their arcs and movements to flow then adjust their animations accordingly.

I can't wait to play with it myself.
2 Ryan Malm Jul 20th, 2008 at 6:57 am

This is a feature implimented in Pixar's proprietary Marionette software, I think shortly after Brad Bird came aboard for the Incredibles, to bridge the gap between the 2d world he was coming from and directing the 3d. I'm sure other 3d packages have (maybe not?) a similar feature; in any case, very cool to see it come to Blender.
3 Cuby Jul 20th, 2008 at 8:08 am

Looks awesome! I can't wait to see it come out in the official release some time….

Cheers
Cuby
4 rakunko Jul 20th, 2008 at 8:30 am

very nice, hope to see spome tuts done with this new features
I mean like tuts using this feature…uh….
anyways *tries it out*
5 Chris Stones Jul 20th, 2008 at 10:16 am

I just added a ppc binary to graphicall.
6 IamInnocent Jul 20th, 2008 at 1:15 pm

Should be nice to figure out a nice topology prior to modeling.
The grease pencil should also prove very useful in tutorials on any subject.

Jean
7 IamInnocent Jul 20th, 2008 at 1:19 pm

Oh, I can't believe that I forgot that:
the work of creation and maintenance and great service that Aligorith is doing for the animation system makes him my personal coding hero.
If he ever introduces the "everything is animatable" axiom in Blender I swear that I'll elevate him a statue.

Sorry for double posting but 'twas of importance.

Jean
8 chuzzy Jul 20th, 2008 at 1:54 pm

This sounds like a wicked cool idea
9 guran Jul 20th, 2008 at 2:40 pm

But how does it work, drawing 2D in a 3D world.. If you rotate the view from where you painted with the grease pencil it wouldn't point at the right things any longer?
Looks like a great feature anyway!
10 mikahl Jul 20th, 2008 at 2:42 pm

Can someone build an intel mac version? I've been trying to build for 2 weeks now, and I'm in over my head :P
11 Robert Jul 20th, 2008 at 3:49 pm

I have been wanting this sort of feature for years.

Would be great if you could draw over video frames in the video editor too.
12 smartdog Jul 20th, 2008 at 5:29 pm

This sound very interesting!

I am a newbie and becoming a proud Blenderer :-)
since I am learn some many things….I will ask the question:

How to install on windows os?

Great concept!

Go Blender

Smartdog (not so smart just yet :-)
13 toontje Jul 20th, 2008 at 6:00 pm

@Guran
Obviously you have more 3D views of which one is the camera view. It is in there that you want to make your annotations.
14 DarkLimit Jul 20th, 2008 at 7:24 pm

-This sounds great def something handy..
15 BlendRoid Jul 20th, 2008 at 7:34 pm

This is going to be awesome! I can't stand having to screen capture and pull the image into Photoshop before doing a draw-over.
16 kernond Jul 20th, 2008 at 7:56 pm

The grease pencil layers can also be animated. You can draw your animations in 2D and then use that as your guide for 3D, all within Blender.
17 kernond Jul 20th, 2008 at 8:01 pm

Here's a brief demo of an earlier version of the Grease Pencil tool. Beware, lame animation example ahead!
http://forums.blendernewbies.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=845
18 EB Jul 20th, 2008 at 10:22 pm

Pretty cool. This would be great for sketching really cartoony poses and facial expressions.

Perhaps it could also be expanded as a tool for doing full 2d animation, and mixing 2d with 3d.
19 yillfog Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:21 am

genius, thx for the hard work Algorith
20 GustavTheMushroom Jul 21st, 2008 at 2:08 am

…Can you rotate around the drawing?

Does it stay on its plane?
21 ZanQdo Jul 21st, 2008 at 9:53 am

Eh yes, if you use the Draw 3D option it will add a fixed stroke at the depht of the 3D cursor and using current camera coordinates, you can pretty much draw in any 3d space this way
22 znukznuk Jul 21st, 2008 at 12:16 pm

I am very sad about the less few ideas Blender-Developer possibly actual have.
In other packages this is only a plug-in and not an implemented tool!!
It's time to have new unique ideas!!
23 ROUBAL Jul 21st, 2008 at 1:13 pm

Wow, great too for tutorials an naimation setup !
Congratulations and thank you !
24 Vassilios Boucer Jul 21st, 2008 at 1:23 pm

This New Feature is very Usefull in many ways!
Thanks Aligorith !
25 J.P. Jul 21st, 2008 at 6:01 pm

Looks cool. Can someone make an updated Win32 build? I have one of the older ones, but it doesn't have some of the neat features (pressure sensitivity, drawing in 3d, etc.)

Thanks.

– J.P.
26 Chab Jul 21st, 2008 at 9:22 pm

Are the current builds safe to use in production? They won't corrupt my files? I'm eager to use this. It will be faster to draw the keyposes directly on the screen than to use thumbnails! :)
27 Andrew Jul 21st, 2008 at 9:54 pm

This will be great for the animation class I'll be teaching in the Spring, very very very useful!!!

THANKS for the GREAT work!!!
28 John R. Nyquist Jul 22nd, 2008 at 1:52 am

That looks very useful, nice work!
29 Tynach Jul 22nd, 2008 at 2:22 am

For those of us who use Linux, Compiz has the Annotate plugin that lets you write on the whole screen.

Great for making tutorials.
30 jin choung Jul 22nd, 2008 at 4:00 am

sweet!

i love how you can draw a different picture over every frame! fantastic for making notes on animations.

would like to get some control on how long a picture stays up - every frame, every 2 frames, hold this picture for all frames (if you want to draw arcs for an entire animation). just under my threshold of consciousness, i can feel there will be lots of issues regarding this… for example, if i'm drawing on animation that is primarily on 2s and then i run into a section on 1s… etc….

currently, there is a bug so that if you draw on frame one and you go to frame 2, the drawing for frame 1 is still onscreen UNTIL you draw… at which point the canvas is blanked again. this makes it difficult to tell what frames have real drawings on them or which ones are merely persisting from previous frames.

also, the ability to SAVE greasepencil drawings and load them would be awesome. i'm assuming right now, they are just saved with the blender scene but it would be nice to be able to access them as entities in some way to explicitly do certain things like maybe export or heck, even use them in unexpected ways.

layers are awesome! love it.

GREAT IDEA and really wonderful implementation so far!

jin
31 ZanQdo Jul 22nd, 2008 at 5:40 pm

znukznuk shut up stupid