Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

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Psmith
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by Psmith »

DKRoot:

So, if I understand you - each "part" of a Grease Pencil Character (Head, Body, Arm, Leg, etc.) would be a separate Blender Object. Each and every Object would need to be parented to an Armature - individually, or as a Group - is this correct?

Thanks,

Greg Smith
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exile
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by exile »

I don't want to start another nerds discussion, but it's quite a jump from the two-legged man to the things in those last three videos. I hope someone takes this beyond the stage of wowing the crowd and starts explaining step by step how it works. I found a very reasonable course for 3D Blender that is well structured. And of course there are countless free tutorials for Blender 3D at every level. 2D animators looking to extend their collection of tools are not likely to be drawn into Blender this way.
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Psmith
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by Psmith »

Steve:

Which last three videos?

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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by Yadoob »

The bones exist in 3d space, while each grease pencil object is locked to a 2d plane.
What you say is mostly true but actually, if the behavior stay the same as the current blender version (and I think it will ?), the points of the grease pencil are in 3d space and can be moved freely inside a layer. The grease pencil object is more like a parent/pivot point for the layers.

For now there's no point weight that we can link into bones to have smooth deformation but we can parent a layer to a bone (and then animate like a puppeteer).

There's still lots of questions regarding the 2D/3D part and that's the exciting part since it is the true power of having those kind of tools inside Blender.
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by exile »

Psmith wrote:Steve:

Which last three videos?

Greg Smith
Sorry. I meant Yadoob's posted on Dec. 5th and the one Herbert posted yesterday, June 13th. Advanced users might be able to follow what Yadoob was doing, but the last one left me completely in the dark as to how the interesting stuff was done. I suppose we could just wait until the software has matured as a 2D tool and then hope for tutorials that make the learning process achievable.
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by Psmith »

Steve:

I think waiting for an "actual" release of Grease Pencil for Blender 1.8 is the wise choice.

However, I've been spending the last 8 months or so really looking into the best 2D animation solution - that covers all aspects of design, animation and composition - in one good package - and I believe I have come to discover the best solution for the money:

Toonz Premium.

OpenToonz developers have made a good start - (not so good on the Mac, my platform of choice). But many things are unstable and incomplete - even on the PC - making the finishing of a production (and the applicable training videos) very difficult tasks to perform.

This coupled with the dramatic price DECREASE of Toonz Premium (Toonz Harmony) - along with the total reliability of the software - its expanded and improved feature set - and both its track record and the track record of Rome's "Digital Video" development company . . .

makes Toonz Premium the most functional, most practical and affordable 2D animation studio available, today - on all major platforms.

ToonzPremium.com promises that, regardless of what happens with OpenToonz, they will continue to develop and improve Toonz Premium - AND incorporate all the best features developed for OpenToonz (it's part of their contract) into new and improved versions in the future.

Digital Video has been developing and marketing pro-grade animation software, beginning in 1981 and making their debut, through the help of SoftImage, in 1991. As far as I can tell, this is the longest running piece of 2D animation software in the history of digital animation, period.

At 349 euros it's a steal.

Oh, and I am in no way affiliated with DigitalVideo or its offshoot companies.

What do you think?

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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by exile »

Greg, since you asked me directly, I'll try to answer now. Tomorrow I'll be flying to Fla. and not regularly online for a while.
I sort have shot my wad on Moho 12, so won't be switching in the near future. But I did do some experimentation with Open Toonz and also thought the tweening was impressive. The loss of color when a shape changed, even if it stayed closed, was maddening. It has a functioning bone system, but not as effective and certainly not as intuitive as AS or Moho.
But if these problems have been solved in the Premium version, I'll be looking into it at some point. Thanks for your appraisal, it carries a lot of weight with me.
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by dkwroot »

Psmith wrote:DKRoot:

So, if I understand you - each "part" of a Grease Pencil Character (Head, Body, Arm, Leg, etc.) would be a separate Blender Object. Each and every Object would need to be parented to an Armature - individually, or as a Group - is this correct?

Thanks,

Greg Smith
Yes, that appears to be how this will work.
Yadoob wrote:
The bones exist in 3d space, while each grease pencil object is locked to a 2d plane.
What you say is mostly true but actually, if the behavior stay the same as the current blender version (and I think it will ?), the points of the grease pencil are in 3d space and can be moved freely inside a layer. The grease pencil object is more like a parent/pivot point for the layers.
In the video, they show the grease pencil locked to the objects local orientation. They didn't say if this is something that can be toggled, so I assumed this is the new norm. Hopefully it's a toggled feature.

EDIT:
Nevermind, it looks like it's a toggled feature. :D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsMp0Bj_SI8
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by herbert123 »

Somewhat related news: the Blender Foundation rolled out their production tracking/management tool today. It looks very handy for teams and independent animators. Also: Flamingo render manager.




Flamingo:
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by herbert123 »

New Grease Pencil development: modifiers for 2d!

Developer Antonio Vazquez has just implemented the first modifiers for Grease Pencil objects.
Check out this demo by Daniel Martinez Lara:



The new modifiers shown in this video:

Array
Lattice
Simplify
Noise
Tint
Hue Saturation Value
Blur

Even though more modifiers are planned, focus now is to squash as many bugs as possible before the merge with the main Blender 2.8. This development is currently happening on the ‘greasepencil-object’ branch.

PS: Watch it until the end for a nice surprise!

Source: https://code.blender.org/2017/08/modifi ... encil-2-8/
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by dkwroot »

How does the new grease pencil handle layer ordering? Is it based on distance from the camera or is there a layer order menu? The array looks awesome, but I'm concerned about how useful it will be if draw order isn't based upon distance from camera. I hope they add some tools for cutout animation, like a switch layer.
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by herbert123 »

Ordering is very flexible. Either it is based on traditional layering (like Photoshop) or you could create multiple grease pencil objects that can be placed in the 3d world - and each GP drawing still has its own layering.

GP drawings can be attached to either the current Scene, or to a specific object. Hiding an object with an attached GP drawing will hide the drawing as well.

The placement and viewing of a single GP stroke layer in a GP drawing is based on View, Cursor, Surface, or Stroke.
"View" puts a stroke relative to the view - similar to a 2d drawing application: the 3d view does not affect it.
"Cursor" inserts the stroke wherever the 3d cursor happens to be, and a camera view will rotate around it (resulting in a flat plane view: from the side only the stroke will be visible), or zoom in/out.
"Surface" draws a stroke on an existing 3d surface.
"Stroke" sticks the stroke to existing strokes.

These can be combined in the same GP drawing - so some parts can be view dependent, others can be drawn on the surface of objects, etc.

Btw, since GP strokes include dynamic timing data when they were drawn, it is also possible to convert them to a regular 3d spline, and recreate the exact timing at the time of drawing (or speed up, etc.).



@dkwroot: you've written an addon for Blender that does object switching, right? So just attach your various gp drawings to that?
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by dkwroot »

herbert123 wrote: @dkwroot: you've written an addon for Blender that does object switching, right? So just attach your various gp drawings to that?
Yeah, I've been using my little hack to do just that. I was just hoping that they would add in an official switch feature.
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by herbert123 »

First official open source 2d short to be animated with GP Tools supported by the Blender Foundation!

https://cloud.blender.org/p/hero/blog/h ... ie-project

The aim is to make GP Tools production-ready and proven. This will be a two-minute long short.
Today we announce “Hero”, the latest Open Movie project -the 6th already- funded by the Blender Cloud.

As usual for Open Movie shorts, we select a strong artist (or team) with artistic vision, and let them push Blender’s limits with help of a development team. The team will do this by weekly updating progress in Blender Cloud, blog posts and tutorials. For the first time however, the director and his team will work remotely (not at the Blender Institute).

The technical target for “Hero” is to use and improve the Grease Pencil tools from the Blender 2.8 branch - to make them production ready and to show everyone how to make compelling 2D animation film in a 3D environment. Daniel Lara has established a great name in this area, leading the design and direction of what started as a 2d/3d annotation and storyboarding tool. This is going to be a new highlight for Blender and the Blender Cloud.
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Re: Blender New Innovative 2d Animation "GP Tools"

Post by InfoCentral »

Targets

The Blender 2.8 workflow release original plan was rather ambitious. To make sure the development doesn’t drag forever, and everyone knows what we are working towards we will define the 2.8 project goal and targets as:

End-user targets

Pipeline for complete 2d animation with grease pencil

Overal goals

Tight to a “Just draw it” concept.
Artist friendly for traditional 2D animation.
Artist friendly for 2D rigged character animation.
Easy to use on a 3D space.
Well integrated with other Blender 3D objects.
Well integrated in Compositing and Render process.
For 2D editors (Nodes, Image, VSE, etc.) limited support as annotations only.
Roadmap for Gpencil features

Things are certainly looking very exciting on the FREE 2D animation front. :D :D :D
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