Grease Pencil Tips and Tricks to Master 2D Workflow

Grease pencil is AMAZING!  It is a very powerful tool in  Blender that you can use to create Stuff like 2d animations, digital  art, storyboards, animatics,  motion graphics and many more. All in 3D space. Possibilities are ENDLESS. I have used grease pencil a  lot for my personal projects  and I'm going to share tips and  tricks I have learned on the way. I tried to pick tips that would  make your life easier to start. And I will also show you some  more advanced and funny stuff,  so be sure to stick around. I also have more tutorials on my channel if you want to learn more. Also Check out the description. There are timestamps,   more additional info and links to resources. I also have created captions  if you like to use them.  I know so many of you incredibly talented  and I can't wait to see what you create! If you are a total beginner with Blender.  I recommend the fundamentals playlist at Blender  youtube channel before you begin with this one. I know Blender can be intimidating and takes  time to master. But Keep  on learning and exploring! Remember to take breaks and have enough sleep. Hope you learn something. Im Dantti and let’s go! UUUUUUUSER EXPERIENCEEE There are 6 modes to a grease pencil objects where  you can perform different changes to your artwork. Most changes made with  these modes can be animated. Object mode: This is the first object  level before you dive in to make changes. You can move, scale and rotate  your grease pencil objects  in 3D space. You can of course animate them, parent  them to other objects and many more. Some animations are easier to do  in object mode because you can take   advantage of origin points Of course  it all depends what you want to do.  Next one is DRAW MODE: it  is for drawing your artwork   Here you have the best tools available for drawing  stroke, fills, gradients and numerous settings that you can use to customize your brushes.  Then there's EDIT MODE: you can  edit the drawing points here. You can move, scale, rotate, bend, shear, change  the radius, clean points, assign materials   interpolate, sequence them and so on. It is a very powerful mode that I use   all the time. At SCULPT MODE you can  modify large amounts of points very easily "EY! U TALKING TO ME!?" Some sculpt tools only work with stroke materials  and fills that have stroke added to them. Even so, it is a very powerful mode for  tweaking your drawings. At VERTEX PAINT mode: You can modify the color and look of  your drawings using vertex colors.   I'll discuss more about these later in this video. Weight paint mode is needed when you are doing  rigging. Weight is stored in vertex groups that you can find here at Object  data properties and is used to   calculate how much bone is affecting the object. Switching between these modes faster will save you a very big chunk of time in the long run. You can normally change the modes up here. But there’s quicker way. Default shortcut for the  interaction pie menu is CTRL+TAB,   but it is not very ergonomic for your hand. So let’s Go to preferences, keymap  and enable tab for pie menu. Now when you hold TAB it will  bring out the pie menu and you   can hover your mouse to the mode  you want to go and release TAB. You can also press TAB once and  select the mode you want with mouse   or press a number associated with the mode. Shading modes: Things like effects won’t  show up unless you are at rendered view. Normally you need go up here to change them.  If you press Z you can change viewport  display modes faster with this pie menu There is also an option to hide overlays when you   check the Extra shading pie  menu items at preferences. There are also many other pie menus in blender. But I use these two all the time. Blender also has few presets that you  can use for different types of work. Grease pencil also has one, the 2D animation  preset that you can see at the splash screen or when selecting File -> New or pressing CTRL+N And I highly recommend that you would use it. Not that there's anything wrong with adding   a grease pencil object to your  3D scene and going from there. 2D animation preset gives you a ready  canvas with basic colors and layers   and you can just start drawing. It saves you a lot of time setting up. 2D Animation preset is it’s own thing.  So changes you make here won’t  affect the other presets. You can customize your startup file  to your heart's content if you like. You can add stroke and fill materials you  like, change brush default size and strength,   append brushes, add color palettes You can add more workspaces up here   like a layout that gives you the normal  3D layout without the white background. You can duplicate your current  workspace and make minor changes. If you move your mouse to a corner, you will  see a symbol that lets you drag a new area. You can also press the right  mouse in the middle of the line   and it will give you more options  to split or swap your areas. You can change all these  areas to be anything you want.  If you want to show layers or materials, choose properties, you can flip the navigation bar   to the other side and hide it if  it gets in the way by dragging. You can also join these areas by moving your mouse   to a corner you want to join over  another and drag to that direction. Or click the line and choose join area. You will  see an arrow which direction area will be joined. If you want to enlarge any area. Hover your mouse over it and press CTRL + SPACE. You can return to normal with the  same shortcut or pressing here. Remember to save the startup file  when you are done with your changes. Also remember, that if you  need to reset everything   and load factory settings. It will  also load default preferences. You can make your current preferences as   a new default by saving them  here at the preferences menu. When you load factory settings, you need to go  to preferences and revert to saved settings. When you do this, Blender can also forget that you  are using 2D animation preset so be aware of that. Always double check which preset you are   changing and saving so you don’t  accidentally overwrite anything. Quick favorites is one of my  favorite things in blender. It is SUPER useful, you can  add almost everything to it. You can either click on tool or  a setting with your right mouse   and set it to be a quick favorite. When you press Q, it will bring  up the quick favorites menu:   where you can easily access  the things you have put there. If you can’t remember where a certain  thing was, you can use the new search   and add the quick favorite from there. 2.91 also has a search field for settings.  This will be expanded even more in the future. Draw mode is your world! You can paint in anything you want! Let’s start by talking about the  shortcuts we can use in draw mode. I want to remind you about  the quick favorites menu. It combines very well with  everything you do in Blender.  It is also mode dependent. When you press F, you will change the brush radius  And with SHIFT + F you will  change the brush strength U is for changing the active normal material Y is for changing the active layer I is Insert frame, you can  also draw to a blank frame.  But sometimes you might have many layers and this will come in handy. It also works at the timeline. H = Hide the active layer SHIFT + H = Hide inactive layers ALT + H = Unhide everything. When you press W you get the Context menu When you draw, you can hold ALT and you can draw  perfectly straight horizontal or vertical lines. If you hold CTRL and draw, you can erase points,   the setting you have here at the  eraser tool will be how this will work. If you hold CTRL + ALT and drag, you get this  lasso tool that will erase where you draw. When you have a tool like the line selected,  holding SHIFT will get you perfect straight lines but if you also hold ALT. It will extend the line on the other side as well. Same principle works with  primitives like box and the circle.  If you press SHIFT and drag,  you get a perfect shape but if you press SHIFT + ALT and drag, you circle  will be centered where you started drawing. You can still move these with G  and use mouse to modify the shape,   if you press TAB you can return to editing before committing to the change by pressing enter. When you scroll middle mouse, it zooms in and out Holding SHIFT and Middle mouse pans the view.  If you just press middle mouse, it  will take you to perspective view. You can return to camera with  Numpad 0 or pressing this button. If you have many grease pencil  objects that you want to draw to.   You can press this dot at the  outliner to switch to that object. The interaction mode you have active  will also be active on the other object. This works in other modes as well. Timeline also has some great shortcuts.  You might want to check what  is the playback shortcut. It depends what you have set your space to be. Up / down arrow keys go to the next keyframe. Holding SHIFT and pressing left or right arrow  keys will go to start or end of the timeline. Pressing TAB at the timeline  locks the current active layer.  You can select keyframes with a mouse. Selecting this Keyframe at summary line  selects all keyframes on all below layers. You can also select keyframes  separately on different layers.  You can also use B for box  select, C for circle select You can also invert selection with CTRL + I  Pressing A selects everything,  Pressing ALT + A de-selects everything You can move selected keyframes with G You can duplicate keyframes with SHIFT + D And repeat the last action with SHIFT + R When you have multiple keyframes selected  and you want to tweak the timings. You can press E to extend on either side of  the playhead and move those keyframes only. You can also use S to scale, it  works wonders when you are at frame 1 You can also slide keyframes that are between  first and last selected frame with SHIFT + T And finally X = Delete keyframe Materials and vertex colors:  What’s the difference?  Normal materials you can add and  change here at the materials panel. You can determine if it’s a stroke, fill or both. You can change the colors on the fly very easily.  You can also change materials by  assigning new ones at EDIT MODE. It is a very flexible way of working.  Vertex colors on the other hand are  closer to what you would do in photoshop. It is a more artistic tool Combined with custom brushes   you can make really nice drawings very quickly. You can still change and modify these later on. You can pick a color from a default palette,  create a new palette or you can import your own. You can add new colors to the current palette with  this plus icon and remove those you don't need. You can sort colors here.  Draw mode is good for drawing  vertex strokes and fills. You can use the basic draw tool or add tint  to existing strokes with this tint brush A good place for modifying vertex colors is  at the vertex paint mode I showed you earlier. Here you can also paint, blur, average,  smear and replace colors at the same place Where vertex colors are very strong is the ability  to randomize colors here at the stroke panel. You get different shades really easily  and it can save you a lot of time. Brushes and how to append more. Up here you can see what brush we are using. There are few default ones, and you can  append more brushes from other blend files. Like the great texture brush  pack from Daniel Martínez Lara,   that you can download at Blender cloud. You can find a link at the description. Just go to File - Append and select the blend  file that has custom grease pencil brushes. Go to the brush folder, select  the brushes you want and press   append. Now you have more  brushes to your disposal here. Remember that you need a decent graphics card (Nvidia 1050 or better) for custom brushes   to work well. Stroke materials: You can add new strokes  with the plus icon and remove with minus. Strokes can be a line, dots or squares.  They can be either solid or  have textures added to them. Dots and squares also have alignment options,   which can alter how the stroke is  projected. (2.92+ will also have rotation) From this special menu you  can do a lot of useful things.  Like remove unused materials. These materials will be removed from the list  when you save and open the blend file again. If you suddenly want to change a stroke color  to a fill, but the fill has a different color. You can copy the color by moving  your mouse to the fill color,   press E and select the stroke  color (or anything at the viewport) If you want to copy your existing  material and make changes,   add a new material slot, select your material press this number to make it a single user. This works with normal fill colors as well. Fill materials can be solid,  gradient or have textures on them.  You can draw them using the drawing  tools, or use the fill bucket tool. Remember, if you are using the fill tool. Make  sure you have a fill material selected or checked. Otherwise you will be filling a stroke  and it looks like nothing is happening. You can also make inverted fills  when toggling this minus symbol   or pressing CTRL and clicking outside of  the stroke that insides you want to fill. You also have options to select  which layer this will be affected on. You can also have fill materials that have a lower  alpha value. These are very flexible for shading. Because you can tweak them very easily, but  you can also achieve this using layers opacity   or opacity modifier, it’s totally up to you. Nice way to use fill textures is to  use a halftone or screentone textures.   Playing with rotation and scale  will get you stylized results fast. You can also change color  and lower the alpha value.  I’ll talk about layer masking in a minute Holdout materials are a new  thing in Blender 2.91 and above.  We can set a stroke or a  fill to be holdout material. This means that the material will be transparent  and it won’t show up when you render.  You can easily mask out stuff  you don’t want to be shown. Like gaps you don’t need. Just use the fill tool. You can assign holdout materials at the edit mode. Holdout option also works with textures. You can get nice transparent shapes   by using a transparent black and alpha image. You can now make really complex holes very easily. SO powerful. Drawing tool is self-explanatory. Fill tool has few settings you should be aware of. Simplify, increasing this value will make  more simplified fills inside the stroke. You can choose which layers the  fill tool will use as boundaries. Playing with the resolution will get you  more accurate fills, but it’s also slower. You can mask out gaps using a holdout material. Eraser has options for dissolving, which is  smooth. Erasing points or entire strokes at once. Cutter is good for quickly drawing  a area that will be removed.   You can play with the threshold value. Brush settings. This shows what material is selected. Here you can select if you  are drawing a normal material   that you can add at the materials panel,  or a vertex color you can change up here. You can also use this pin, now that material type  will always be used with that selected brush. Here you can change the brush size and   strength and if they are affected by  pressure when using drawing tablets. Here are advanced options for the brush:  Input samples are basically  how many points are drawn. You can see the effect especially with brushes  that use dots or squares. Like the airbrush. If samples are set to zero,  you need to draw quite slow.  Because drawing fast will not  be smooth as you can see here. When the value is set to ten, you  can draw faster and it looks better. When you tweak Angle and factor you  can write calligraphy letters easier,   even with using a mouse. I recommend playing with these  values to get the look that you want.  This hardness value is little  bit tricky to work with   and I recommend to use the airbrush or opacity  modifier set to hardness for the same effect. Next one is stroke settings. If you want strokes to be smoother,   you can increase these values  at the post processing settings. Trim stroke ends is very useful   where intersecting stroke ends   are automatically removed when  you draw overlapping strokes. Randomize option is so powerful.  With normal materials you can randomize these  values and you will get very interesting results. But when you switch to vertex colors and  also play with Hue, Saturation and Value. These settings will produce very colorful  drawings in a matter of seconds. So strong. Stabilizing the stroke is useful when  you want to make super smooth strokes. When you normally draw, you can also  hold SHIFT for stabilizing stroke   and the setting here are how  the drawing will be affected. Also it’s the other way around when  you check the continuous stabilization,   you can hold SHIFT and it draws normally. Next I'm going to talk about these  extra modes at the upper left corner. This symbol means that the new strokes are  drawn on the back side of whatever is at front.  You can also arrange strokes and fills at the edit  mode, so no worries if you forgot to turn this on. This is for adding weight data for every new  stroke, you need to add a vertex group here at   the properties for it to work. It will add  a weight value of one to your new drawings. Next one is additive drawing which keeps  the old frame when you draw a new one.  So basically you can make  animations like this faster. Stroke origin and drawing plane are what you need  more when you are drawing in perspective view.   If we enable canvas up here at the ovelays  menu, we can see where we are drawing.  We might as well show the 3D cursor so we can   see where it is. ((when you disable scene  world you will get this darker background)) Default setting for stroke placement   is at the origin of the object. We can move the origin at object  mode   and it can also be rotated and scaled.  (scaling affects stroke size) When the drawing plane is set to front, you  will always draw where the canvas is showing.  You can also choose the side or top  plane and the same principle applies.  If your drawing plane is set to view, you  will draw in perspective view depending   where your viewport or camera is facing. When your stroke placement is set to 3D cursor,   which you can move it in object mode or  by modifying the shortcuts at preferences   to be something else than left mouse. You can click a spot and draw from there. Surface is great for drawing on top of 3D objects. You can tweak the offset to fit your needs.  You can change stroke depth order to  3D location for better visibility. After drawing you can parent your  grease pencil object with the 3D object   if you want to move them easily  or animate them together.. Setting stroke placement to stroke,   will enable you to draw new strokes  that stick to other existing strokes. Guides are very powerful.  They can be activated up here.  Reference point is set to 3D cursor by  default, you can show 3D cursor up here   at the overlays menu. You can also choose  custom location or a object like an empty. Circular lets you draw perfect  circles around the reference point.  Radial is perfect for drawing  your anime action lines. NANI!?  Parallel creates straight lines, you can  change the angle to be something else.  Grid allows you to draw both straight  horizontal and vertical lines.  Isometric allows you to create isometric  lines when you change the angle.  And.. suddenly you have  created a custom crosshair. Curve tool is very nice  way to make clean drawings.  When you draw a line, you get these blue  anchors that you can move with your mouse  When you are done, just hit enter to confirm  If you want to continue drawing, press E and  you get a new stroke that follows the old one  Just be careful not to  press the right mouse button  It will cancel the drawing and  you lose stuff you did earlier. Subdivisions. When you look at  the tool bar, you might wonder.  how I'm going to make things like triangles.  There is not a direct tool for it.  The answer is using circles  and this subdivisions value.  When you put a value like  1 here. You get a triangle.  If you hold SHIFT while dragging,  you can make a perfect shape.  Once you release the mouse, you can still continue   to scroll your mouse wheel to  increase or decrease segments.   This is also possible with older versions  when you scroll the middle mouse down enough. You might have to go to edit mode, select  and rotate to get the angle you want.  Default value for circle is  94 and you can reset it here.  Other cool use case is these arc and curve  tools, where you can also lower subdivisions.  At lower values you get this  blocky line instead of a real curve   that you can subdivide later using a modifier. If you use subdivisions on tools  that have a blocky shape already,   it will only increase or  decrease the points drawn. Let’s go over how layers work  This is the order that you  can also see at the timeline.  Plus adds layers, minus removes them. You can change the order, isolate or lock them.  You can toggle masks, onion skins,  visibility and locking here. From the arrow you can duplicate or hide a  layer, you can select Auto Lock inactive layers,   this means that when you select a layer,  it will lock everything else automatically.  You can also merge down to  another layer below, you can also send the selected layer to other grease  pencil object, this is very handy. Note that this opacity value is for the current  layer only and you can indeed animate this value.  If you want to affect the whole  object, use an opacity modifier. This checkbox is for using lights, grease  pencil objects can interact with light objects,   you can add lights when you are at object mode  by pressing SHIFT + A and choosing a light.  Playing with the placement and strength of the  lights can get you very interesting results. Let’s talk about layer masking. This can be a little bit confusing sometimes.  So let's say we have this  square with a fill color.  And we want to draw something  inside of this so it doesn't   go over it and only shows inside. We need to use masking for this  Add a new layer and enable masks by clicking  this icon or selecting this box down here.  Choose the layer that is below,  order of layers is important. And voilà you can draw inside,  this works for strokes as well. If you want to mask something inside of a  stroke, you can move the other layer up,   and mask the stroke layer. You might have  to increase the stroke strength to see it. If you don't want to see the bottom layer,  you can turn the layer opacity to zero. Onions skinning comes very handy, when you want  to see what is going on with frames before and   after the current one you’re working on. You can see them when you have a material   that has onions skins activated, And that the onion skinning is   activated at the drawn layer, and you are  at solid view or viewport shading modes.  You set basic things here,  like what mode are you using,   opacity, filter, how many keyframes are  shown and what are the custom colors.  You can also set onions skins to  be shown at rendered view here.  But they will also be rendered.  So remember to turn them off. When you draw in perspective view, you sometimes  get funny results like with this box right here.  You can solve this by changing the  stroke depth order to be 3D layers.  Thickness can be set to world space where you  can tweak the thickness scale or screen space. EDIT MODE HAS MORE THAN MEETS THE EYEEE Edit mode shortcuts There are three modes to select your drawings. You can change them up here or press  1 to select only points 2 to select all stroke points  And 3 to select strokes that  are between other strokes When you have a single point  or many points selected.  You can press CTRL Numpad + and -  (minus) to select more and less points. L is to select linked, this is super useful. You can also press SHIFT + G to select grouped.  CTRL + I inverts the selection, A selects  everything and ALT + A de-selects everything You can also select or deselect  materials at the materials tab.  Remember that if your material or layer  is locked, you won’t be able to select   or modify anything in them. Up here you will find even   more functionality that you can add to  quick favorites if you need them more. You can change the active layer with Y  With M you can move points to  another layer or create a new layer You can press F to close points  or join them with CTRL + J  You can split strokes and fills by pressing V You can copy points with CTRL  + C and paste with CTRL + V  Duplication also works with SHIFT + D and repeat last action with SHIFT +R You can change stroke radius with ALT + S You can mirror your drawings with CTRL + M   and pressing a axis like X. You also have this menu. And finally X to Delete or dissolve Blender 2.92 and above will have this  curve editing mode which is SUPER useful,   it will enable you to tweak your  strokes and fills using bezier curves.  The way this works is you hop into  edit mode, enable this curve editing   tool up here or press the shortcut U. You can also tweak the curve resolution,   threshold, corner angle and  adaptive resolution here. When you click on a spot, you will  see the points that you can edit.  Enable this point selection tool or press 1. Now when you click on a point   you will get these handles. You can drag them by using a mouse   or use the basic shortcuts (G/S/R). You can move, scale, rotate,   change the radius and so on. If you press V you can change the handle type. If you want to see all handles at the same time,   you can select all or you can enable  to show them from the overlays menu. All the edit mode operators are supported  and more will be included in the future. Soooooo goood! Gradient’s are great and easy way to  bring more depth into your drawings.  When you have a fill material.  You can set it to be a gradient.  It can be either linear or radial.  You choose your two colors that will  blend together with the blend value.  But setting your gradient here using  these settings can be challenging,   so let's hop into edit mode. Make sure you have all the points selected,   you can press A to select all. Here we have transform fill tool   that you can use to tweak your gradients  and textures in a very effective way  Up here you have translate that you can use  for moving, you can also rotate and scale.  If you scale the gradient very  small, the blending will disappear.  You can reset the Transform fill here  at Stroke / Reset transform fill. There is also another way to create gradients   that you can control with an empty  object, but more of that later. Assigning materials Let’s say you have a character. And you want to change one material to another.  But that same material is also used elsewhere  like in another grease pencil object,  so just changing the current  material can be a HUGE mistake.  So you can add a new material or choose an  already existing one at the materials panel.  Select the part of your drawing you want  to change and press assign new material.  You can also select the old color with a press  of a button and assign the new one from the list. Extrude points. You can extrude points in edit mode.  Select the points you want to extrude and press E.  This is good for extending and  tweaking your strokes manually.  You can also extrude multiple new  lines and you can do stuff like change   radius that gives you this interesting look. You can also make a copy of the original stroke,   then extrude points to it to give this weird 3 dimensional look. Up here you can select a the  transformation pivot point  These are very powerful and  have different use cases. You can use transformations like  individual origins and median point.  (active element = origin point) Now when you have points selected and do   things like scaling and rotating, the results  will be different compared to normal scaling Cool thing to transform is the 3d cursor that  you can show up here at the overlays menu and   change its position with your mouse. Things like rotation and scaling   now can yield interesting results  depending where the 3d cursor is. Proportional editing is one of my favorite  tools, you can get complex shapes crazy fast.  It is super useful when you want to  affect many points with a falloff   which size you can adjust with your mouse wheel.  If we have a set of lines,  activate proportional editing You can also subdivide strokes  to get more points to work with.  Select a single point Press G to move.  R to rotate. S to scale. Just Amazing.  This also works with other  tools like the radius tool. You can of course also select different  falloffs here, maybe the most interesting   one is the random, where you can easily  create interesting things, like this meteor Shhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii Separate strokes If you want to split up your   drawing to multiple grease pencil objects. You can do so by selecting the points and press P,   you can choose the whole stroke, points or  entire active layer. You can of course join   two grease pencil objects at object mode  when selecting them and pressing CTRL+J You can do all sorts of cleaning in edit mode.  One that I u se very often is merge by distance,  which you can find here at the clean up menu.  When you have points selected, you can play  with the threshold value to merge points.  You can also dissolve points, press  X and choose between these options.  You can also use this simplify option  that also reduced points in your artwork.  Not that you NEED to reduce points, but I think  this is good to know when you have heavy scenes. Reproject strokes Sometimes when you have made a drawing,   and it looks okay when viewing from a  camera or the view you have been drawing in.   But once you change this view,  it is all wonky and strokes are   not where they are supposed to be. This can happen for several reasons. So the way to fix this is go back to camera view   or to the place you have been drawing in. It all depends what you are working on.   I like to draw using cameras because then  I have a fixed view where I can return to. You can select the points that are  wrong or all points to be sure.  Go to Grease pencil ->  Clean up and reproject strokes.  Add this to your quick  favorites if this happens often.  You can choose different settings and  keep the original one if you want.  In camera view I usually use the front option. Now the drawing should be on the same plane. WONDERFUL! Animating with interpolate and sequence  You can do this in a few different  ways like everything in Blender. Let's say I have this drawing, and I  want to animate it going to the right. You can duplicate the keyframe  and move it in the timeline,   or copy these points to another frame  and move it to another location. You can make certain modifications  in edit mode and sculpt mode,   like moving, scaling,  changing the radius and shape. Just don’t draw anything new between the  first and last frame you want to sequence.  It will most likely not work the way you  want. Also animating rotation can be tricky. All animating happens in the interpolate menu.  If you use interpolate, you can slide  one frame between the two drawings.  This comes in handy when you want to play  with the pacing when you use sequence. Sequence is used to create the animation  between two keyframes or an interpolation point.  You can use these presets or create  your own curves for the sequence. If you have many layers that you might want  to animate, check interpolate all layers.  You can also set steps how  often a new frame is drawn.  If you are working on something important,  save your file before sequencing,  At the timeline. Click on the middle  of your keyframes and press sequence. You see these blue keyframes  appear at the timeline.  If you want to change the interpolation  you must first remove the old breakdowns   and sequence them again. This also removes the  single interpolation point. So pressing undo   and changing the settings is a good idea at first. Later if you can’t for some reason  press the remove sequence button,   check that layers aren't locked, or you  still might need to delete the dots manually. I suggest that you add these buttons to quick  favorites menu that you can access them easier.  Once you get the hang of  it it goes pretty smoothly. Multiframe editing is super useful when you  have a lot of keyframes at the timeline.  Let’s say you have an animation already going and  you want to tweak the selected frames a little.  You can activate multiframe editing with this  symbol and you can use a falloff if you like.  Now you select the keyframes at the timeline  that you want to see and they will all appear   on the canvas at the same time. Now you can  do stuff like edit the shape, stroke radius,   move, scale, rotate and do all the  other stuff you would normally do.  Except now you are affecting all  the selected keyframes at once.  This also works at sculpt mode, vertex  paint mode and weight paint mode Scuuuuuuuuuulptt mmmodeee In sculpt mode you can toggle the same  selection modes like in edit mode.   If you don't have any of these selected,  the brushes will work normally. Let’s say you want to sculpt only  certain parts of your drawing.  First toggle one of these selection modes on. Then you can use C for circle select a few  points, then you can press L to select linked.  Or you can also select grouped that  are on the same layer or the same   material, shortcut for this is SHIFT + G Check out this select menu for more options. Shortcut for deselect everything is ALT +A. You can also hop into edit mode and  select materials with a click of a button   and hop back to sculpt mode. Just make sure  you have one of the selection modes enabled. There is also an option to lock layers or  materials, both of them have an option to   lock unused or inactive ones, so you can  REALLY find the workflow that works for you. Now you can easily sculpt any area like you want “ooo look i'm a pancake!” Shortcuts for changing brush size   is F and changing brush strength  is SHIFT + F same as draw mode. Multiframe editing works  the same as the other modes.  You select a bunch of keyframes and they appear  at the canvas the same time. So powerful! Many sculpt tools have these plus and  minus buttons that indicate if you are   adding or subtracting stuff.. You can also hold control for   the reverse effect on those brushes  that have two plus and minus options. You can find more options for the  brushes here at active tool settings.  Like cursor color, falloff and what they affect Smooth brush is perfect for  smoothing your strokes and fills.  This tool doesn’t remove any  points, only makes them smoother.  You can also do smoothing with other  brushes while holding SHIFT while dragging. Thickness brush is good for tweaking your  stroke thickness to get more stylized results. With Strength brush you can tweak the  strength of your strokes after drawing. Randomize does quick randomization  of your fills and strokes. . Grab brush. It does what it says. If you have a large brush size, you can place   your cursor on the very edge of the drawing and  when you drag you can make very subtle changes. Push brush is great for pushing and  it isn’t like grab brush. Pushing also   works from dragging far away. Playing  with the strength will get you far. Twist is great for adding small waving  to your animations like walk cycles. Pinch brush is so much fun, you can pinch  your drawings or hold CTRL to deflate them. For the clone brush you need to back into  edit mode, select the points that you want   to clone. Press CTRL+C, go back to sculpt mode.  Now you can make all the clones that you want. HEEY! Waaaaait a minute.... [POWER OF OBJECT MODE INTENSIFIES] Object mode shortcuts. W is the context menu where you can  always find a lot of useful things. G is for moving You can constrain the movement with X Y   and Z axis by pressing one of those keys when you  are moving. (Also works for rotating and scaling) R is for rotate S is for Scale C is for circle select, you can change  the circle radius with your mouse wheel  B is for Box select You can invert selection with CTRL + I  A selects everything, even the  camera. ALT + A de-selects everything. This selection menu contains more  cool things, like select random,  select active camera and select all by type. You might have noticed that many  shortcuts are all the same in many places.  Once you learn the basics. Working with blender  will be a lot smoother and more enjoyable. Aligning objects If you want your objects to be on the same level.  Select the objects you want to align. Go to object, transform and align objects.  You can choose if you want the  objects to align in X, Y or Z axis.  If you press SHIFT you can  select multiple options.  If this doesn't work straight out of the box, you can try using different relative to options,   like scene origin, 3d  cursor, selection and active. You can toggle snapping on and off here,  there is also a shortcut to activate this   and that is SHIFT + TAB. This is great for  aligning objects efficiently in 3d space.  You might have to add a 3D  object for it to work properly.  Snapping also works in Edit mode. It’s  totally up to you where you want to use this.  You can snap to various  things like you can see here.  You can select the snapping to  affect moving, rotating or scaling.  You can also select multiple  options while holding SHIFT .  You can also select align rotation  to target to get different results.  If your surface isn’t straight and you  need to offset the drawing a little.  You can press G to move and lock X Y or Z axis,   if you press that key again and  you can move in local orientation. Transform values Every object has a default location and rotation that are  set to zero, and a scale that is set to 1.  This is at the world origin. Right in the center. You can see these values when  you press N at the object mode.  You can also open object properties tab. Now when you move, rotate and  scale your object in 3D space,  you always have an option to  clear these values to default  by hovering your mouse over  them and press backspace. You can also choose to reset  a single value to default   clicking the value with the mouse. There are also shortcuts   that are ALT + G for location, ALT + R for rotation and ALT + S for scale. There is also an option to apply these  transformations when you have made changes.  This is important when you are doing rigging. Also Some effects and modifiers might behave   differently if the object is  placed somewhere else in 3D space. If you think something is showing wrong and  can’t figure out a solution you can try press   CTRL+A and apply transformations. Or set  origin to geometry. It helps sometimes. Randomize transformations is best for adding  variations to multiple objects very fast.  You select the objects you want to  randomize. Go to object - transform   and randomize transformation. You can  randomize location, rotation and scale.  Funny thing we can do is to go to frame one,   select all the objects, switch to dope sheet,  add a location, rotation and scale keyframe,   go to last frame, use randomize  transformations. Tweak these values like   you want and add another location rotation  and scale keyframe. Play your animation. So nice, and efficient. You can do this as  many times as you like. Look at them go! Origin point and how to move it You can see this orange dot.   That is the origin point of the object. Also 3D objects have this and you can move it by   selecting origins up here. (Or CTRL + . (period)) This also works when you have multiple   objects that are already parented. Then you select also to affect parents.  If you press W, you can also set the origin  point to geometry and other things here.  Many things depend where origin is located,   and this will make animating  in object mode so much easier. Keyframes and graph editor. As I showed you before. You can   animate a lot of things in object mode. Object mode keyframes you can see at   the dope sheet or at the regular timeline. Grease pencil keyframes are a subcategory of   the dope sheet and they are different things. When you press I you get this long list of different keyframes that  you can add to the object. You can add keyframes for  multiple objects at the same time. Basic keyframes are location, rotation  and scale or a combination of these.  Scaling and rotation is based on the origin point. You can also add single keyframes at  the N menu or at the object properties.  Remember to scroll forward in  time to add the second keyframe. You can also turn on auto keying here which adds  keyframes automatically when you make changes.   Just remember to turn it off when you’re done. You also have more settings under  here when this is activated. You can select one or many keyframes  and use ready interpolation presets at   timeline with T shortcut. You can  get nice animations very quickly. Nice way to take advantage of ready interpolation  presets, is this bouncing ball animation.  You only need to have two Z locations  keyframes, one at the top and one at the bottom.  Then you select both keyframes,  press T and choose bounce. This is a very simple example, testing  these presets and tweaking the spacing of   keyframes can get you very nice results.. But  if that isn’t enough, you might have to go to   the graph editor. (GAAASP) I suggest you drag a new   area and change it to be graph editor. This way you can also see what you are doing.  When you have your object selected,  you can see animation F-curves.  The more you have things keyed, the more  transformations and lines you will see here. You can filter keyframes by typing like loc  here and it will show you location keyframes.  You can also hide curves with  H, unhide them with ALT + H. If you want to work on only a specific  curve. Select it and press SHIFT + H to   hide everything else. If your view is too far  or close. Press Home and it will be centered. You can also clear the view by removing  unwanted or unused keyframes with X When we select our Z location from the list,  the curve is highlighted and we can view it here   at the active keyframe settings. Press N at the  graph editor if this panel isn’t showing for you. You can hold CTRL and scroll the middle mouse   how different presets are drawn  here to get an idea how they work. If you want to edit the keyframes by yourself,  select keyframes and change them to be bezier.  If you hold control and click on the  curve, you can create more keyframes.  You can select what type the keyframe is with V   shortcut. You get different  handles depending what you choose. You can also edit keyframes like in many other  places. Move with G, rotate with R, scale with S. One cool thing that we can do in the graph editor   is to use F-curve modifiers that  you can find at the modifiers panel. If we add just one keyframe to our object,  let’s say it's the location, rotation and scale.  We can choose them and add a noise modifier to it. Tweaking these settings and copying them   from this symbol, selecting another  transformation and pasting them from here,   adding a little bit offset or variation and voila! You get complex procedural animations very easily! Collections are very powerful. They  are the containers of your objects.  You can add a new collection  here or with your right mouse.  Collection that has his area around the symbol  marks that new objects will be placed here.  You can move objects to other  collections by dragging them   at the outliner or pressing M at the viewport. If you want to select everything inside  the collection click on the collection   and choose select objects. If you want to delete  everything you can choose delete hierarchy. You can also parent objects at the outliner   by drag and dropping one object on  top of another while hold SHIFT . If parented objects are  not in the same collection,  you will get this gray text  but it works all the same.  You can clear the parent with drag  and drop while holding SHIFT .  You can also keep transformations by holding  SHIFT and ALT while drag and dropping. If you have a big project. You can also  add color labels to your collections. Up here you have this filter which lets  you add more restriction to your outliner.  Definitely useful ones are disable selection   when you cannot select the object  by accident and disable from render.  If you have many objects in your collections and  want to apply one of these quickly, hold SHIFT   and press the symbol at the same  line as the collection text. Best thing ever is that you can  make an instance of a collection.  Press SHIFT + A and way down at the bottom  you can select a collection instance. If you have a group of objects  that you want to make a copy of,   but keep them linked so everything  you do inside the main collection   will be copied automatically to other instances. You can still add objects to that original   collection and they will appear  at the other instances as well.  This is also a great way to reduce  memory taken by your project. You can change scale, rotation and location.  You can also animate the instance which   makes this very powerful. When you animate objects   at the original collection, you can  easily add more life to your scenes. Nice tip for making changes when your grease  pencil object is somewhere else in 3D space,   is to have a duplicated linked  copy of your grease pencil object   that you can make here, or  with the shortcut ALT + D. You can now have one object at the default  location where you can easily adjust your drawing.  And the other in whatever  rotation, scale and location. When you make edits to the original, they  will also be changed to the linked one.  Óne thing to remember is that modifiers  and effects are not linked automatically.  You can however copy them  manually at the outliner. You can have multiple duplicated linked  copies, this is absolutely insanely powerful.  You can totally use this  with all kinds of animations.  If you want to remove the link and  maybe add an offset to your animations,   select the object that you want to unlink,  go to object data properties and click this   number to make it a single user. Now  you can move keyframes at the timeline   and the object is no longer linked. You  might have to duplicate the first frame   of the animations and move it to frame 1 so  the animation doesn’t start out of nowhere. Let’s talk about cameras and camera settings. Default startup files always have a camera ready.  But you can also add one at  object menu or with SHIFT + A One way to move the camera is to  have it active and view through it.  You can press N, go to view  and lock the camera to view  Now the camera will follow you when  you navigate at the perspective view. The way I like to move the camera,  is first to be in camera view.  Go to view, navigation and use this walk command. You can bind this to SHIFT + F   or use quick favorites. Then you can move the camera   with W A S D and mouse like in video games. E goes up and Q goes down. With space you can   teleport forward. You can use the middle mouse to  scroll up or down to increase or decrease speed.   If you want to cancel moving just  press the right mouse. (or ESC) You can also animate the camera by  pressing I to show the keyframe menu. You can also parent the camera  to an empty, and then animate it. You need to be in object  mode to see camera settings.  Playing with focal length and depth of  field can give you very interesting results. You can also dim the outside view of the camera  by changing the passepartout at viewport display.  Also enabling composition guides  will help you to plan your scenes. Your scenes can have multiple  cameras that can also be animated. If you want to have multiple cameras, you need to add one, or duplicate the   current one, or make a duplicated linked copy  that changes when you adjust the first one. When you press the green camera icon, the  active view will be changed to the other camera.  Be sure to name your cameras  so you don’t get confused. Place the first camera to a point you want, go to  timeline and press M, this will create a marker.  Then press CTRL + B to bind the camera to the  marker. You can also see these at the marker menu.  Then you go forward in time and change it to  the other camera. Do the same thing. M, CTRL + B  Then you can move these markers  and play with the timings. Moooooooooooo Diiiiiiiiiiiiii FIIEEEYRYRYEYEYRYEYYRYEYE This is the modifiers panel. We have a good  variety of tools here that will add more   functionality to our grease pencil objects without  making any permanent changes, unless applied.  People often talk about modifier stack  and that’s because you can add multiple   modifiers to one object and the order of  the modifiers does matter depending what   you are going for. You can drag and change the  order of modifiers to get different results. You can easily copy modifiers from one  object to another here at the outliner.  If you press the small arrow with  mouse or use left and right arrow keys,   you can see the modifiers and effects. You can drag the whole stack to another object,   or expand the view even more and  copy single modifiers (or effect) You can also select objects at the viewport,  select the one from where you want to copy and   press CTRL + L, this will copy all modifiers  from the source. You can add this to quick   favorites because the same applies if  you quickly want to remove modifiers,   select one that doesn’t have one  and press Q and select modifiers. Array modifier is very powerful  when you easily want to make   array of duplications of your drawings.  Remember that you can add as  many array modifiers as you like.  You can also duplicate an existing one. You can apply the modifier here.   After that you can modify everything  separately if you want to add variation.. Count is the amount of copies you project You can change material override of   the copies here, this is the same  order that is at the material tab.  Relative offset is measured  by the size of the object   that can vary a lot in some cases. Constant offset is measured by distance,   so no matter what the size of the object  is. The distance will be the same. Object offset is best used with an empty,  press SHIFT + A and add a empty plain axes.  Check empty at the modifier. When you  move the empty you can get fast results.  But you can also rotate and scale it and  you get super cool effects very easily. Animating the number or other values can get  you very nice results with minimum effort. Playing with these randomized values  will get you very funny results. Build modifier is a VERY powerful modifier.  You can get this drawing animation  with a click of a button. This is best used on stroke  materials in my opinion,  If you want to change direction, to edit mode,   select all, go to stroke menu  and select switch direction. If you have multiple strokes on the same layer  that you want to animate at the same time, you   can choose concurrent, you can also select if you  want to align start or the end or the animation. Rememeber. Start delay is not the delay  from the frame one of your animation,   it is the delay from where the keyframe  is. So if you have a keyframe at frame 20,   and you also have a start delay of 20,  the animation will begin at frame 40.  If you have multiple keyframes, you can  also tweak how fast the build modifier goes   by changing the distance to be less  than 100 frames that is set here.. You can also animate this by adding  keyframes to this factor value.  You can switch to a regular dope sheet, select  the keyframes and use the keyframe presets   or play with the graph editor  to get different results. You also have these shrink and fade options. Shrink inverts the build animation.  Fade builds the animation other way around. If you have grow transition and add another  build modifier that is set to shrink.  You get this back and forth loop. If you change the other one to fade and  tweak the start delay or factor setting,   you get this worm animation. Weeee. Aaalso, If you combine this  with an array modifier.  You will get different kinds of animations  when you change the order of the modifiers. Mirror modifier doesn't need much explanation   but i’ll show you how to make  drawing a little bit easier. It can be hard to estimate where the middle line  is and how you should go on with your drawing so  You can go to overlays and turn on the Z axis,  now we have a line in the middle to guide us.  You can also turn on canvas at the overlays  where you can also change its opacity. You can change the canvas size  and color by going to stroke tab,   viewport display, canvas and change settings here. These make concepting things a little bit easier. Multiple strokes modifier is  perfect when you are feeling lazy   and don’t want to draw the same line many times. You can easily change the amount of duplicates,   what is the distance and offset. Playing with the fade values   will get you nice results. Change the opacity to zero if   you want the strokes to have the same opacity. When thickness is zero, all strokes are equal,   when its set to one the further  lines go they get thinner. Changing the center value determines which  side they are at or if they are at the center. You can simplify or subdivide your  objects using these two modifiers. Simplify reduced points and you  have few modes to select from.  This is also a life   saviour when you have more heavy scenes. (or want to tweak texture brush strokes) Subdivide increases points. If you have a curve that is drawn with less  subdivisions or you have merged points by   distance, you can add a subdivision modifier  to make your drawings look round again. If you have made a pointy  line using the polyline tool,   you can use subdivide modifier  to add some roundness to it. You can also combo these  modifiers to get different results   and apply them if you want  to make permanent changes. Rigging is great when you want to animate  more complex grease pencil drawings   or a group of grease pencil  objects, like full characters.  You can get more functionality like bending and  add more control when you animate your drawing.  You can add a armature object with SHIFT +A, you  can also use rigify addon that comes with blender.   It has some meta rigs that you  can modify to fit your characters. After setting it up in EDIT MODE, you can  parent the grease pencil object to the armature.  You have different options to choose.  Then you have to weight paint every bone   and what points they are affecting After that you can control your drawing when  you select armature and switch to pose mode. Rigging a character would be too looooong  for this tutorial and I have to admit   that I'm not very good at it. So if you want to  dive further into rigging using grease pencil,   you might as well learn from the masters.  I added few links up here. (Level Pixel Level  & Dikko if the card isn't showing for you) Lattice is such a powerful modifier.  You can displace and tweak  your objects very easily. First add a lattice object in object  mode with SHIFT + A, move and scale   it to fit your grease pencil object. This is best to do from a perspective view. When you are done, choose the grease  pencil object first, then lattice object   and press CTRL + P, choose lattice deform. This sets up the lattice modifier. You can   also add the modifier manually  and choose the lattice object. When you select the lattice, you can tweak  the resolution, the more you have, the more   small movement you can make. With Grease pencil  objects you can leave the V resolution to two. You also have different interpolations to choose. The way this works is you select  the lattice and go to edit mode.   You can move the points and it will  displace your object accordingly.   Choosing different amount of points  will get you different results. The thing that makes lattice so powerful is you  can also add shape keys to lattices that you can   use to animate the transitions and take advantage  of the graph editor I showed you earlier. Go to object mode, add a basic shape key and  one more key, if you set the Key 1 value to 1   and go back to edit mode. Now move  to displace your object as you want.   At object mode you can slide and keyframe  this value if you want to animate it. You can   have multiple shape keys to your lattice  and they can have different relations. You can also add a hook object to your  lattice in edit mode by selecting a point   or multiple points and pressing CTRL + H This will create an empty object that  controls those points in object mode.  You can also select the same points and press   CTRL + H again to get more options  like remove the hook and so on. You can have multiple hooks to your object. They  are added as a modifier to the lattice object.  You might notice that now you can’t move your  object normally, you can solve this by adding   another empty object and parent the hook and the  lattice containing the grease pencil object to it. Remember the graph editor and noise modifier,  add a single location keyframe to the hook,   go to graph editor and add  a noise modifier. Brilliant. You can also add other  modifiers to the lattice object.  Remember that some modifiers  require to have more resolution,   and if you have shape keys you can't change  the resolution without removing them first. Then you can add like a wave modifier.  Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. This saves you a lot of time. Noise modifier is perfect for  adding simple animations easily.  You can see the effect when  you play your animation.  You can play with the settings and influence to  get very interesting results with minimum effort..  Decreasing or increasing the step value  will make your animation faster or slower.  You can also affect only layers,  materials or vertex groups  When you toggle the custom curve, you  can tweak the influence even more. Offset modifier is great for transforming your  object without having to think about going to   edit mode or object mode. You can change location,   rotation and scale here and if they are  influencing only a part of your drawing.  You can of course animate  these values if you want. Smooth modifier is very handy if  you forgot to adjust brush settings   when drawing and want to get some smoother lines. You can affect position, strength,  thickness and uv or all the same time  Factor slider is for how much you want  these options to affect the object.  Repeating this factor will  increase smoothing even more.  You can also inluence only  certain parts of your drawing. Thickness modifier is very good for quickly  adjusting the thickness of your strokes   without going to edit mode,  sculpt mode or layer settings.  Checking the uniform thickness  makes every stroke equal size.  You can also enable custom curve  to get more stylized strokes. Time offset modifier is a must  when you are making animated loops,   lip syncing and other things where you  want to change the frames separately. Let’s say you have this 5 frame simple  animation that you want to loop indefinitely. Check custom range, set end frame to 5. Now when you play your animation. You might see  that the animation is too fast for your taste.  Instead of adjusting keyframes at the timeline,   you can hold SHIFT and drag this scale  value to get faster or slower loops. You can easily do lip syncing when you have   different mouth shapes drawn  separately at the timeline.  You can also make your life easier  when you zoom in at the timeline   and add markers to your keyframes so  you can see what the keyframes contain.  Add a marker with M and rename it with CTRL  + M, you can also use this marker menu.  When you are done. Drag a new  area and change it to dope sheet.  Adjust your area that you can see the  markers easily and have space to work with.  Switch the mode to fixed frame. Add a keyframe to frame count with I  Move forward in time and select  another frame and add a keyframe. Continue this as long as you  have done your lip syncing.  Remember to select all keyframes, press T  and change the interpolation to constant. Later i’ll show how you can add sound to your  projects to make lip syncing more easier. Hue and saturation modifier. This is perfect if you want   to quickly fix to your colors without  tweaking every single material. You can choose to affect stroke, fill or both.  Play with different hue, saturation and values   to change the color of your artwork very  easily without going to compositing etc. You also have the basic  influences and custom curves. Opacity modifier is great when you want to  animate the whole object opacity in one place.  You can of course influence layers  or materials if you need to. If you have made a drawing using lower  brush strength value, you can check this   uniform opacity which will show the stroke  like it was drawn with strength value of 1. If you check custom curve,   you can change how much the opacity is  affected to get some interesting shading. You can change the mode to hardness, which will  give you this airbrush type of effect instantly   that you can change on the fly. So powerful. Texture mapping is great for tweaking your grease  pencil objects that have textures added to them.  Check if your texture is added  to the stroke or fill material or   you can just choose stroke and fill. With strokes you can choose if the stroke fit  method is constant length or a stroke length.  Constant is great if you have drawn strokes using  the same textures in many places at the canvas. Changing the scale will yield different results  depending what kind of texture you have.  Uv offset is great for adjusting  the texture placement more. If you have this type of distortion at  the stroke ends, you can go to edit mode,   select one point of the stroke, press SHIFT + G and choose material, now you can   go to stroke, toggle caps and select both. You can also adjust your fill textures   like you would at the materials panel. You can of course animate these values. Blender 2.92 will have a rotation value to  control strokes that have textures added to them   and are set to dots or squares. They also work with this modifier. Tint modifier will tint your grease pencil  object colors towards the color you chosen here.  This also works with texture brushes. When the strength value is set to zero,   the modifier doesn’t tint your object all  and you can increase it to fit your needs. Changing the tint mode to gradient  will give you a gradient slider   where you can add colors with this plus  icon, or hold CTRL and click on the area. You can choose different color modes and how  those colors are interpolated between each other. Now you might notice that the Tint icon has  gone red, you need to add a empty object to   control this effect. Choose the empty. You can  play with the radius value, or scale the empty   to adjust it on the fly. Now you can animate  your empty to get some cool shading going on.  This works well with an opacity modifier  set to hardness with lower value. Michael Bay presents: EFFEEECTSSS Effects, Remember that you need to be  in rendered view for these to show. Blur is great for faking the depth of  field effect, you can also drive this   with the actual depth of field from the  camera settings, but it can be very slow. Colorize is a great way to try  out different color combinations.  Modes like duotone will give you  very fast comic book-like results. Transparent mode behaves a little bit  differently than the opacity modifier  So if you want to animate transparency.  Try them both and see which  one works best for you. Flip will flip the object in either  horizontal or vertical way, or both ways. Glow is awesome. It might not look like  much. Together with a dark background   will give you a glow you would get with using  a emission shader to a 3d object and turning   on the bloom effect. You can also tweak the  size and samples here to get better results.  You can also check glow under if you  don’t want the glow to be up front. You can also change the color to  black and tweak the threshold to   get some interesting inner shading going on. You might have to separate the background   color to its own object and tweak it’s  locations a little bit in the Y axis. Pixelate: It pixelates the grease pencil object.  You can play with the sizes and turn  antialiasing on and off for different results.  You can also do a whole scene pixelation  that includes 3D objects at the compositing. Rim: It is a very powerful for adding additional  shading without actually drawing anything.  You have lots of options to choose.  From color to blend and offset.  I recommend to play with the blur values   and remember to add more samples  for the blur to look good. Shadow is great. It also animates well. You can play with the color and alpha value,   offset and scale to get the look that you want.  For rotation you can type a value like 180  and play with the Y offset to get it matched. You can control the rotation and position with  an empty. Add some blur. Even a wave effect. Swirl: Add a empty object and select it  to be the object driving this effect.  When you increase the radius  enough and move the empty,   you can make very trippy animations! omnomnomnonmonmnomn Wave Distortion: Adds a wave  like pattern to your object.  This is great for adding some glitchy  effect on your grease pencil object. You can animate all these values,  remember to switch to dope sheet view.  You can change if it’s a horizontal or a vertical   orientation to get a different effect. You can also toggle between different   interpolations with T shortcut  to get different looks. Welcome to my constraints chamber! Constraints. They will add more functionality to  your grease pencil objects and can save you a lot   of time. I’ll show you a few use cases. Like the Floor constraint.  Sometimes you might want to set a line  on which the objects cannot go below.  You can add a path object, press SHIFT + A choose  Curve -> Path and place it to the level you want. Now go to your grease pencil object  and add the floor constraint.  Select the NurbsPath. This is dependent where the origin point is.   If you press CTRL + . (period) you can move it. Press CTRL + . (period) again to disable origin   moving. Now the object cannot go below the path. You can also move the path higher and the   grease pencil object will follow. If your drawing is on another axis,   you might need to check another axis from here. You don’t need to worry about the path   because it won’t be rendered unless you have  added some bevel or extrude to the path. Let’s talk about tracking. Sometimes you might need to   have your grease pencil object always  face and track to a certain object.  You can add constraints like damped track,   locked track, stretch to and track to. They all behave a little bit differently,   and playing with the track axis and  influence will produce different results.  Lets say we have an audience of suzannes  that we want to follow a certain object.  We can add the locked track constraint to the  object and target the object we want to track to..  If you have multiple objects, set  this constraint to one object first   and then copy it to others at the outliner. Now when the tracked object moves,   the audience will follow it. You can play with the   influence to add some variation. This can save you a lot of time. With Follow path constraint, you can  animate complex animations so easily.  If you first draw a line with  grease pencil, go to object mode,   press w and convert it to a bezier curve. Add a follow path constraint   to your grease pencil object. Target the lines object and press animate path.  Playing with the axis, curve radius and follow  curve settings will yield different results.  Move your object to the orange  dot that is showing here.  If you want to make changes to the  animation, select the lines object,   go to it’s properties, open path animation,  here you can add more frames to your animation.  If you want to animate this  yourself, clear evaluation   time keyframes and keyframe it yourself. I made few tutorials about this technique before.  In those tutorials I parented the  grease pencil object to a empty object   and added the constraint there but both ways work. Now you have a path that the object will follow,   and you can add more animations and not  worry about the location of the object. Maintain volume is super great and it  works well with grease pencil objects.  When we press S and scale the object the  scaling is very linear and not very interesting. When we add the maintain volume constraint  to the object the scaling changes entirely. You can select X, Y and Z axes and  the scaling will work differently   and depends where your object is orientated. You have few modes to choose, what is the  volume size and what the space and influence is.  Switch to dope sheet view and add  scale keyframes to your timeline. You can get these kinds of animations super  fast and it’s so much fun to play with. One great way we can make use of constraints  is that we can make an easy parallax effect. In this demo we have three separate  objects. Background , some background   trees and foreground trees. These objects  are all placed at different Y locations. Let’s add a empty plain axes  in the middle of the objects.  Add copy location constraint to one of the  grease pencil objects and target the empty.  We can select to only affect the X axis. We  can test this by moving the empty object.  Now if we lower the influence to lower  value, it (GP object) only moves slightly.  Now lets copy this constraint to other  objects by dragging at the outliner.  Let’s go through all objects and change  the influence to a different value. When we move or animate the empty object,   everything moves on their own. We  can also invert the X axis movement. We can still move these objects freely if they  don’t have any location keyframes added to them.  Remember that you can use keyframe interpolations   or graph editor with the empty  object to get different animations. You can also add more constraints  like the limit constraints   to get more control how these objects  behave when the empty object moves.  This is a very simple example, but there’s  so many possibilities and this can save   you a lot of time. Of course nothing  will stop you by doing this manually. Something in my gut told me  there were still more to it. I had to investigate. You can add images and videos as background  images if you want to draw over them.  Be sure to be viewing from the camera. Drag your footage to the viewport.  It will be automatically  set as a camera background.  When you select the camera in object  mode, you can open these background   image settings that you can tweak.  There’s a lot of options to choose. You can drag multiple images and videos to be  your background image or open them manually. With video you can usually just  start the playback and it works fine.  Opacity is set to 0.5 by default. You can raise it, but then you might   have to press this refresh button  for the playback to work again.  You also get to see how many  frames are there if you want   to adjust your frame count at the timeline. This background image or video won't be rendered,  unless you use the viewport rendering for image   and video. Be sure to unselect everything so you  don’t get this line from the camera or objects. I still recommend setting the render  settings to match your footage   and render this to transparent png and do the  compositing in the software of your choosing. You can trace your images and videos in Blender   and turn them to grease pencil objects. The way this works is go to object mode. You can drag your image or video  from the folder to the viewport.  Make sure you are in perspective view, if  you are viewing from the camera when you drag   your footage, it will be added as a camera  background and you cannot do the tracing. If you want to reset the transformation,  you can press ALT + G, ALT + R and ALT + S.  Then you can rotate it to match  your view by pressing R X and 90.  Then you can go to Object /  Trace image to grease pencil.  This will give you a variety of options to tweak. You can set the thickness to be anything you like.  Increasing the resolution  can produce better results.  Playing with the sample value can  produce quite stylized results.  Color threshold will determine  how the image is read. Turn policy how the image is resolved. You  can hold control and scroll the middle mouse   to browse through the settings. Now you have traced your image. Alpha values will be preserved so you don’t  need to worry about things like gaps with text.  Trace accuracy might not be the best, but  it is super cool to get a grease pencil   object you can edit and animate from  your footage in a matter of seconds. With video footage, you need to choose  this sequence option for it to work.  And videos only work with blender 2.92 and above. If you get any glitches, you just  have to go and fix them manually.  At the point of recording color  images and videos don’t work well,  Only darker parts are converted. You can bake 3D objects and their  animations to grease pencil. Before converting. You can choose your 3D object,   go to edit mode, you can select edges you want  to be converted to stroke and mark them as seams.  Then you can go to Object -  Convert to - Grease pencil. Open this settings tab down  here and check only seam edges.  You can play with thickness and  stroke offset to fit your needs. If you check to keep the original,   you can mix grease pencil with  3D to get some stylized results.  You might have to tweak the new grease  pencil object to get desired results. For your 3D animations, go to Object ->  Animation -> Bake animation to grease pencil,  you can test these settings  to get the look that you want. I suggest you only make a quick test by converting  only a few frames (Blender 2.92+), Playing   with multiframe editing and proportional  editing is awesome for this. Try it out! You can make interesting grease  pencil shapes from 3D curves.  If you go to preferences, add-ons,  you can enable Curves: extra objects. Now when you press SHIFT + A and go to the curves tab.  You can select curve profiles.  There's also a lot more to choose.  Even if you select one, you can select the type  here without adding a new object every time.  You can make so many things  procedurally here it’s crazy. Let’s make a star for the sake of the tutorial. You can tweak the points, twist and radius. When you are done. Go to object mode.  Select the curve. Press R X 90  to rotate it to match your view. Convert it to grease pencil.  You have to add material to it.  Then you can increase the stroke radius radius. And there can be only one sheriff in this town,   you got that BOE. Blender supports expression-like drivers that  you can drive things like transformations with   time or parented with other objects. You can  do some quick and dirty animations very easily.  You can also make driver based rigs like a  car that tires move when it goes forward. Easiest way to make this kind  of back and forth animation   is to have a separate object  that you want to animate.  Check that the origin point is at the  right place depending what you are doing.  Check what transformation value  you want to add to the driver.  For this demo it’s the rotation Y axis. Select the field and type in   this text #cos(frame*pi/20) And you get this back and forth animation.  Playing with the values here  will get you different speeds. You can also change the text to be  frame/20 to get this straight rotation.  You don’t need to type hash at front  if you already have a driver added. If you want to change direction,  you can add a minus to your value.  These are so cool. In this demo we have a car frame,  and a tire on a separate object.  Tire has its origin point  placed right in the center. Select the tire. Test out which  rotation axis we want to affect.  For this it’s the Y rotation again. Add a driver.  This menu will pop up, if you move  your mouse the menu will go away   so we can also open the drivers  editor and change the things here. We want out type to be scripted expression Let's use a Transform channel,   type set to X location, world space. (target object must move in   X axis for it to work) Let’s choose our car object.  Now the car moves but the tire doesn’t  so lets parent the tire to the car.  If we want to make the tire move  faster, we need to edit the driver. Var is the expression driving this rotation,  if we add like plus 5 here and press enter.  The speed is changed. Your object size can also áffect   how much you need to add to the var value. You can also use multiply and so on.  Now we can just duplicate the  tire and off we gooooooooooo. If something goes wrong, you can add a empty  object and parent everything to the empty.  You can also change the target object  to the empty instead of the car.  It helps sometimes. You can learn more about drivers at blender wiki. Adding sound to your projects will help you a lot  with finding the right pacing for your animation.  Will it be music, you talking about  stuff or just random sound effects.  You can record sounds with an  open-source software like audacity.  Once you have saved and  exported your sound to mp3.  Open up a Video editing workspace, go to  the frame where you want the sound to start.  Press SHIFT + A and select your sound. You can display waveform by checking this box.  You can also tweak volume and pitch here,  but I recommend you do this in the audio   program of your choosing. Now you should hear sound   when you playback your animation. If you can’t hear anything for some reason.  Check that the sound file hasn’t been moved. Check that your sound settings are ok.  Or that your playback settings  aren't muted for some reason. If your pc is slow and the animation  and the audio isn’t matching.  You can choose frame dropping and  sync to audio at the playback menu. At your default view. You can drag a new  area and change it to be a video sequencer.  You can easily move your sound clips with  G and place them where you want them.  You can also press K to make  a cut and make adjustments. This makes animating so many  things much easier (AND FUN!) Render settings, these totally  depend on what you are doing,   but i'm going to go over some  settings I use all the time.  Render settings are divided into two panels.  Render properties and output properties.  Most settings here affect 3D objects  like ambient occlusion and bloom. Motion blur might work if you are  watching this from the future,   but in this time and space it does not work with  grease pencil. It does work with 3d animations   when you render them with eevee (or cycles). You can fake motion blur with blur effect   by animating the blur value. Under film you can check transparency  which will give you transparent images   when you render them to a format that  supports alpha, like PNG and openEXR.  Transparency is also needed when you want to  use compositing and mix render layers together.  We also have options to simplify our heavy  scenes when we check this simplify and down here   the grease pencil box to  disable modifiers and so on. Grease pencil also has an anti-aliasing  threshold that you can tweak.  Zero is very rough edges, One is default  and two is a bit more smoothness. Freestyle is great for adding outlines to your 3D  objects but it is not a subject for this tutorial.  There are good tutorials out  there if you are interested. Then we have this color management tab. If you want to import palettes or other images   or videos to blender, you want to check that this  view transform is at standard and look to none. Then the image will be displayed  normally and palettes you   import (I have made a tutorial about this) will have the proper colors added to them. After that you can of course change  these depending on your project.  I use filmic and different  contrast looks all the time,   depending what im doing. They add a more vibrant  colors to your scenes. Feel free to explore. Let’s switch to render properties. Did you know you can also type   other values than 100 to zero here? Type a value of 200 here and you get   4K resolution. You can also use math with  these value boxes like divide and multiply. Frame start and end are what you  also find down here at the timeline.  You can also step the frames here,  if you set a value like 4 here,   it will render only every 4th frame  that will get you a stop-motion look.  Frame rate, it depends on your  project. If you select Custom. You can type that 12 frames per  second if you want to go slower. Time remapping is great if  you want to tweak the speed.  If you want to double the length of the animation.   Type a new value of 200, but also  remember to double the end frame amount. Select a folder where you  want to save your renders Output is set to PNG by default. Which is a great choice if you have a   heavy scene or you are using cycles render engine. But normally grease pencil animations are rendered   quite fast. Eevee is totally  viable render engine for it.  I like to render straight to video  using FFmpeg and MPEG-4 container.  You can also render a black and  white colors when you select BW mode. Selecting higher quality will of  course take more hard drive space. And if you have audio added to your  project. Remember to select audio codec.  I like to use Mp3 with the default settings. There’s two ways of rendering your animation. One is here at the render window when you   select render animation. Other is here at the view   menu under viewport render animation. This is little bit faster in my opinion.   Just remember to have the shading set to  rendered and have overlays turned off. Compositing. Once you have render settings done,   you can still make tweaks to how your  renders and animation will be rendered as. In fact, you can do crazy cool things and  there are a lot of great tutorials out there. I’ll show you how to make  this fast vignette effect. Go to compositing and use nodes.  Add a new node with SHIFT + A,  choose search and type ellipse mask  Let’s change the width and height to be  0.8. This will be the size of the vignette. If you CTRL + Click this node, you can see  the backdrop. Make sure this is selected.  You can zoom the backdrop with  ALT + V and zoom out with V Then we can add a blur node. Change the type to  fast gaussian and type a value of 200 to X and Y. Hook up the ellipse mask node to this image slot. Then we can add a mix node  that we can set to multiply.  Hook up the render layers image node to  this upper slot and blur to this lower.  Hook this image node to the composite node.   Changing this fac value and these blur  values will get you different results.  You can move the vignette using these values. Then you can just render your stuff out without   having to open any external programs. So great. Grease pencil already has addons that add  extra functionality and are extremely useful. I want to give a shoutout to Samuel Bernou who  has already made awesome grease pencil addons.  Some of them have made their way into Blender. You can enable this addon by going to properties,  addons and turn on grease pencil addon.  Here are descriptions and shortcuts  on how to use the features. First one is rotate canvas. You  can setup the shortcut here.  You can rotate canvas very easily, making drawing  with a drawing tablet a lot more ergonomic. Second one is box deform.  This works in object mode, edit mode  and in draw mode with last stroke drawn.  Select your object and press CTRL + T, this  will create a deform box, like a small lattice,   press numbers 1 - 9 to increase steps  or hold control and use the arrow keys.  Select the points and you can deform  them easily. Hit enter to confirm. The way you install more  addons is you download the   zip file from github or other reliable sources. Most cases you don’t need to extract the zip file,   but be sure to read the instructions of the addon. Open preferences, add-ons and press install. Navigate to the zip file and  press OK. If everything went well.  You will see the addon at the  list that you need to enable.  If you expand the addon you will usually  see more details or shortcuts for it. If you’re a code wizard, you can also  create your own addons for grease pencil   and Blender all together. DANTTI TEXTURE BRUSHES AND  FILLS FOR GREASE PENCIIIIIIIL You get a good amount of brushes and fill  textures you can use with your own projects.. This is a great way to support this channel  and get something awesome in return. You can get this at Gumroad. Wait, there’s more! I have also made a list of useful grease pencil  shortcuts you can download at gumroad for free. Remember, anything I said in this video  can and most likely will change over time.  You can read the change log at Blender wiki. Sorry if the pacing was too fast, but I really  want to encourage you to make your own projects.  You will learn so much more! Alright THANKS FOR WATCHING, im  Dantti and see you next time!

Channel: Dantti

Views: 63,295

Keywords: Paid software vs Grease pencil, anmate, Grease pencil, Blender Grease pencil, Blender, 2d animation software that is easy to use, 2d animation software that is free, 2d animation software for android, best 2d animation program for beginners, 2d animation software, Best 2D animation software, 2D animation, Best 2D software, is grease pencil hard to learn, is greasepencil hard to use, what is Grease pencil used for, blender grease pencil tutorial, blender 2d tool

Id: z11Sv_kkoUs

Length: 94min 30sec (5670 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020