Grease Pencil: Drawing 2D Animation in Blender 2.8

Antonio Vazquez shares a detailed overview of the recent work on Grease Pencil.

Spring 2016, I was playing around with Blender 2.77 grease pencil when I noticed a bug in the stroke filling, so I decided try to fix it and contribute to the Blender project. Since then, I have done more than 1,100 commits for grease pencil as a volunteer and I think it’s time to write my first blog entry.

Grease pencil has something very special, because you need to keep the feeling of a 2D animation inside a 3D environment, integrating these two worlds smoothly. But this challenge makes more exciting to work in an area that can change how 2D animation will work in the future.

Christmas is around the corner and the Hero open movie directed by Daniel M. Lara is on production for several weeks already, working in a daily basis with the Grease Pencil branch.

Working in a real production is the best way to fine tune a software and find the real artistic requirements as well as to polish workflows. Therefore the Hero open movie is a perfect way to improve grease pencil.

During these weeks the Hero team has requested a lot of new features and adjustments to adapt grease pencil to the production workflow. Sometimes the changes were simple modifications of default values but other times the changes were bigger like the multi frame editing falloff.

Let’s review some of these new features and changes we have been working on. Thanks to Daniel Lara and Matias Mendiola for providing the demonstration videos of this article.