GSoC 2020 Overview: Editing Grease Pencil Strokes Using Curves
Falk David’s GSoC project, Editing Grease Pencil Strokes Using Curves, was mentored by Antonio Vazquez and Matias Mendiola . This project endeavours to enable the editing of grease pencil strokes using curves, both furthering GP’s integration with the traditional toolset, but also further expanding its operation and flexibility. The Screenshot below showcases the “Curve Edit Mode” enabled within the grease pencil edit mode.
The Curve Edit Mode can be accessed entering edit mode while selecting a GP stroken in the 2D Animation workspace. The stroke will be then converted into a curve, that can be manipulated easily and with accuracy, via the handles of its sample points. The number of sample points and their distribution can be controlled in the curve edit tab poping up when first converting a stroke into a curve.
Falk David outlines the future plans for this project, which include more operators such as snapping and beveling, more transformations such as curve point slide, and even drawing tool allowing to draw curves directly. The result of this GSoC is slated to shipped with Blender 2.92, so keep an eye out!
Links
This post is part of a series overviewing the various Google Summer of Code 2020 projects.
Every year, google funds students over the summer to work for open source projects.
This year, Google has granted 10 projects for the Blender Foundation. The students behind these projects are assigned mentors from the Blender development team, which follow their progress over the summer and then assess their work. All of the GSoC 2020 projects have successfully passed their mentors’ evaluations!
This is an awesome addition to an already powerful tool! I’m looking forward to 2.92 coming out in February!
Hi, Mario Hawat, this GSOC overviews are awesome! Thanks a lot for what you’re doing. I know that this information is not hidden but having this overviews bring the news to the surface! We had an amazing GSOC this year. Great projects, some of them already merged to the master… Thanks!
Hey Eversimo, thank you very much for the kind message! And exactly, while the information is publicly available, I thought an overview recapitulating everything that happened during the very exciting 2020 GSoC would be interesting! I have a few more to come!
Curve editing seems very amazing and intuitive, I thought it was something possible straight up, though I haven’t used the grease pencil feature much as I didn’t need it so far and I’m still a bit confused about it. I’m guessing that the annotation tool is the grease pencil stuff… I’ll have to spend some time learning on how to use this grease pencil I keep seeing cool stuff made with it.
Maybe it will be suitable to make sprites in it for 2d games, because I like vectorial art, but it’s too crappy to make and control in Inkscape sadly and raster also stresses me out in 2d apps like Gimp/MyPaint/Krita as it’s somewhat hard to control/reshape/rescale and I also feel that 2d canvases themselves constrain me navigation/viewing/planning wise.