Hello, Sophie here. Iām an illustrator,
and I first started using Blender to create models and scenes, to use as reference for
my 2D work. I never intended to make any final pieces in 3D. Then I discovered grease pencil,
and I was hooked. Then came a few months of banging my head into a wall as I discovered
this completely new software, but since that initial learning curve itās been a true
joy to use grease pencil. With this beginner tutorial, my hope is that it can help you
to bypass that painful learning curve, so you can just dive right in to having a great
time. This is intended for complete beginners to intermediate users, and even if youāre
more advanced I hope that you can still learn some new tricks. Alsoā¦ who doesnāt want
to make a 3D bonsai tree? So this is my final product of this tutorial. Also, here is my
test project, from back when I was just planning it. Fun fact, it is made completely with a
mouse. So while I highly recommend a drawing tablet, even just a cheap one to get you started,
this tutorial CAN also be followed with just a mouse. If you are able and willing to support
me financially, the link at the top of the description box will take you to a gumroad
page with some bonus content. This includes download of my .Blend files and also this
video, but what Iām most excited about is youāll get access to a real time version
of this tutorial. Itās the same information, but whereas this video is as condensed as
possible, and any clips of me working are highly sped up, with this other version you
can follow along with me in real time and we can work on our bonsais together. Iāll
be using Blender 2.93 throughout this tutorial, and Iāll have a pinned comment letting you
know if any updates have resulted in a big change to the tutorial. If, throughout this
tutorial, your file starts to get really slow, hereās a quick tip that can help. By the
way, if youāre a complete beginner this will sound like gibberish, thatās okay just
make a note to come back to this timestamp if you need it. What we can do is add a simplify
modifier, and then you want to check off this box so that it wonāt show up in the final
render. You should be able to raise the iteration count to 3 without having it drastically change
the look of your piece. And so what this does, is it just reduces the vertex count, which
is what usually helps me when my file starts to get slow. So fingers crossed that you wonāt
need this trick, but you can come back to this timestamp when and if you do. So letās
start by opening up a new 2D animation file. Now, draw a stroke. Woohoo, isnāt she beautiful!
Now before we start making magic, Iāll give a quick introduction to Blenderās interface.
So here is what weāll cover. If this isnāt your first time using Blender and you prefer
to skip all that, you can head on over to this time stamp. So this big window is our
3D viewport. This is where weāll draw. Just underneath we have the timeline, but we wonāt
be animating anything today. The default shortcut is that when you press spacebar your animation
will start playing. So we can see on the timeline the frames are moving forward. And by default
auto-keying is turned on. So this means that if weāre on a different frame and we try
to draw, it will create a new keyframe. So this is useful for 2D animation, but we wonāt
be doing any of that today, and so we can just turn that off down here in the timeline
by pressing on the dot icon so that itās no longer blue. Then Iāll just select my
new keyframe and delete it. Now if I draw, no matter where I am in the timeline it will
continue to draw in the same frame. To the right at the top we have the scene collection.
This lists everything that our 3D scene contains. Right now, we just have our grease pencil
stroke object and our camera. What the camera sees is what will become our final image,
but weāll look at that more at the end. And so below that, we have the properties,
which has a lot of different windows. Like most things with Blender, you donāt need
to know everything right away, and we are going to look at a few of them in this tutorial
today. So right now, itās open to the active tool. And for us grease pencil users, this
is where we can change our brushes and our colours. Another way to see the active tool
is by using the shortcut N to make this window visible, and then we can find ātoolā just
underneath āitemā. Grease pencil strokes exist in 3D space, so itās important you
know how to navigate around the 3D viewport. You can move your canvas with Shift and middle
mouse button, you can zoom in and out with Ctrl middle mouse button - you can also use the scroll
wheel - and middle mouse
button on its own allows you to rotate around the 3D canvas. But if youāre using a pen pad you may need to set a button to act as the middle
mouse button. If you go into your tablet properties, you can see what buttons you have. And, if
none are set to middle click, you can see if thereās one that you can change. Right
click is also a really useful one to have, because this is how you cancel something.
And so if you only have 1 button, I think I would suggest having it be right click.
Another option would be to go into Edit, into Preferences. And then if you go to Input,
you can check the box that says Emulate 3 button mouse. So now you can hold Alt to make
any click act like the middle mouse button. So Alt to rotate, Alt Ctrl to zoom in and
out, Alt Shift to move around. There is also another way to move around your 3D scene,
and that is with these gizmos up here. So with this, we can rotate around our 3D scene.
With this, we can zoom in and out. And with this, we can pan around your scene. Then we
can hit numpad 0 or use this gizmo to return to looking at our scene through our camera.
This white area is our camera area, and this is what will be rendered in our final image
or animation. Letās start doing stuff. If you clicked on the timestamp and are just
rejoining the group now, just make sure to turn off the autokeying function, down here.
Now, letās cover how to convert our grease pencil stroke into a mesh. So out of this
single line, weāll create a tree trunk. First, weāll go into Object Data Properties,
this green icon third from the bottom. This is where we find our grease pencil layers.
Currently the āLinesā layer is selected and thatās where our line was drawn. So
we can double-click on the layer and rename it ātreetrunkā. Now, weāre currently
in Draw Mode within this grease pencil stroke. We can access all the modes up here. For now,
letās go into Object Mode. Object mode allows us to select and switch between different
objects in our scene, whereas the other modes are specific to the different objects. For
example, if we select a grease penci object and go to Draw mode, we are able to draw within
this object, and Edit mode allows us to edit the geometry of an object. So now, our grease
pencil stroke is selected, and we can go into Object, up here, go down to Convert, and convert
it into a bezier curve. This created a new type of object in our scene collection, and...
the name looks familiar, doesnāt it? So it converted the active grease pencil layer.
And so it converted our ātreetrunkā layer because that is the layer that we had selected
at the time. Now I can hide the stroke object up here in the scene collection by turning
off the eye icon. This hides it from the 3D viewport. And the camera icon next to it determines
whether it will show up in the final render, so I tend to click them both on or off at
the same time. So letās select our tree trunk. Now Iāll go, once again, into Object,
Convert, to Mesh. So yes, we converted it to a curve just because thereās no direct
way to go from grease pencil to mesh. But now we can go into Edit Mode of our new mesh.
With the shortcut A we can select everything, and now we want to seriously clean up this
mess of vertices. And so we can do that by going into Mesh, up here, go to Clean Up and
select Limited Dissolve. Then open up this little box down here. And click and drag on
the max angle to increase it until there are about 10 or so vertices left. Then we can
go into the Modifiers Properties Tab over here. So grease pencil objects have a few
modifiers specific to them, and meshes have even more. But today we just want the skin
modifier, which can be found under āGenerateā. And then, up here, Iāll go into Solid View
Mode so that I have a better view of the form I just created. So weāve created this mesh,
but underneath it all we still have the same vertices, exactly as they were. And so at
any point we can turn off or hide our skin modifier. So thatās the beauty of modifiers,
unless you apply them, theyāre not permanent. And you can always return to how your object
originally was. So now letās turn this into an actual nice tree trunkā¦ no offence, mesh.
So we can toggle X ray mode up here. This allows us to see through our mesh at the vertices
underneath. Then we can select individual vertices and move them around with G. So in order to
resize the mesh, we can do this by selecting a vertex and pressing Ctrl A and dragging.
Holding shift makes this and any movement more subtle. And remember what I said earlier,
right click to cancel a transformation. So Iām liking this base for the trunk. So,
for the top, we can drag to select all the vertices within this box. And then, to get
a tapered top, we can do this with proportional editing - so I can turn that on up here. Then
I can select the top vertex and resize all of the top ones. For mouse users you can resize
the radius of the proportional editing with the scroll wheel, and for pen pad users you
can use Page Up and Page Down. Then Iāll play around with this a bit more, moving vertices
with G, resizing the skin with Ctrl A, toggling proportional editing on and off with the shortcut
O. And I think thatās a pretty cute looking tree trunk. So now I can just turn off X Ray
mode. So now that weāve done all thatā¦ no better time to do the reverse, right? Now
weāll be looking at converting this mesh into a grease pencil object. So in case Iām
losing you, I find it easiest to make 3D grease pencil paintings when I have a base to build
on top of. And since this isnāt a sculpting tutorial, I wanted to share a simple way to
get a mesh from a grease pencil stroke. But I promise, this is the last step before we
actually start drawing. So letās go back into Object Mode, we have our mesh selected.
Letās go back into Object, Convert, to grease pencil. If this box isnāt open, you can
open it up, and we want to check the box that says āKeep Originalā. For now, letās
hide our tree trunk mesh and rename our new grease pencil object āTree.ā Or āBonsai.ā Now, we can go back into Object
Data Properties, where we have our layers. And we can see that a layer was created for
both the fills, so this would be the faces of the original mesh, and the lines, so the
edges between those faces. So we donāt want the lines layer, so I can select it and press
this minus icon, and then Iāll rename the fills āTrunkā. Now letās go into the
Materials properties tab, just below it. So when working with grease pencil, there are
3 kinds of materials that you can have. So we can have just stroke materials - so think
lines, lineart. We could have just fill materials. And we could also have a combination of strokes
and fills. And then, at any point, you can change a materialās setting, and it will
change all of the strokes in your scene that have that material. For today, we will mainly
stick to fill materials for the trunk, and stroke materials for everything else. So Iāll
keep our trunk as just a simple fill material. And then you can also give your materials
a colour, so letās change the base colour of our tree trunk fill to something moreā¦
tree trunk-y. Iām going a little purpleā¦ cause I can, cause I wanna. So now, we can
start drawing. So letās select our grease pencil object and go into draw mode. For the
branches, weāll draw using a stroke material, and so we can select the treetrunk_Stroke
material, which is just a solid line. But we want to change the colour so that it matches
the trunk. So we can do this by pressing on the base colour and using the eyedropper to
copy the colour of the tree. So now, weāll go into Object Data Properties, press the
+ icon to create a new layer and name it ābranchesā. Then one other thing to note, is that down
at the bottom we have this section for strokes, and if we open that we can see that the stroke
depth order is currently set to 3D location. This seems to be the default whenever you
convert a mesh into grease pencil, and if ever itās set to something different, just
make sure that for you it is also set to 3D location. So stroke depth order affects how
strokes are layered on top of one another, and this mode means that strokes that are
closer to us in 3D space will appear on top of strokes that are further away. And weāll
look at the other mode a bit later on in the video. Another thing I like to do is I like
to go into this dropdown menu, over here where we have our layers, and to choose the option
that says Autolock Inactive Layers. This makes so that I canāt accidentally select and
delete something from a different layer than the one Iām currently drawing in. And you
can see, as I toggle between these two layers, as the lock icon locks and unlocks. Also,
for this first step, weāll stick to making strokes at full opacity. So letās change
from the default pencil brush - you can change brushes just by clicking on the brush icon.
And weāāll use the ink pen brush. For pen pad users, the radius of the stroke will
be affected by pen pressure. We can see that this icon up here, which has to do with pen
pressure, is blue, meaning that itās active. But the strength is not affected by pen pressure.
And we can very easily change the radius of our stroke with the shortcut F and then dragging
to resize it. And then itās up here, in this menu, that we can change the stroke placement
and the first setting weāll look at - is actually the last setting - stroke. So we
get a list of targets, and weāll look at the them all, but, once again, letās start
with the last one, which is āFirst Pointā. And then, next to that, weāll change the
drawing plane to view. So how stroke placement of strokes works is that you build your strokes
on top of other grease pencil strokes, In this case, weāll be building our branches
on top of the tree trunk. And by selecting āfirst pointā this makes so that only
the first point will stick to whatever grease pencil stroke is closest to it and then continue
freestyle based on from what angle youāre looking at your scene. So weāll use this
to start building the branches of our tree. So I recommend going into this with an open
mind. Take your time - weāre definitely starting with one of the more finicky drawing
modes. And donāt worry right now about how thin the branches are looking. Just focus
on building up the branches for now. And I recommend rotating a lot to get a lot of 3
dimensionality in your branches. And so really vary the angle from which you look at your
tree while youāre drawing. So something thatās really cool about drawing with grease
pencil is that there are all kinds of ways that you can modify the strokes. So earlier,
I wasnāt loving the shape of the tree, and so I was able to go into Sculpt mode, and
personally I mainly use the grab and the push tools to move the strokes around - I guess
the equivalent for a drawing program could be the liquify tool. And so for the tree trunk
I used the push tool, and I was really quickly able to change the whole shape of the tree.
Another way to move strokes is in Edit mode. Here, I personally prefer to use the lasso
tool, so I can get that by holding down here and selecting it at the bottom of the list.
And so I want to move these branches a bit further down the tree trunk. And so for this
I can press this second icon so that my selection will select strokes as a whole. So I donāt
need to go over the full stroke with my lasso, for the whole stroke to be selected. And so
I can very easily select and reposition these strokes with Gā¦ and R to rotate. Also, I
recommend erasing strokes in Edit mode as well. Grease pencil does have an eraser tool,
but since our strokes exist in 3D space, I donāt know, I find it tricky to erase only
the exact strokes I want without having it overlap other strokes. Whereas in Edit* mode
when you select something you can see exactly what you get. And you can also select something,
rotate to get another view, and Shift select to add to your selection. And so when I want
to do this, I typically press on this icon, which is vertex select and so that I select
only individual vertices, and then I can just select and delete parts of my lines that Iām
not loving. And of course, if you havenāt already, make sure to save!! Save often! So
once youāre happy, we can start thickening the branches. So Iāll go back into draw
mode, back into the Stroke Placement, up here, and now weāll change the Target to āAll
pointsā. So now the strokes in their entirety will stick to whatever other strokes they
intercept. This can get a bit tricky, if your view of the stroke has it intercept with other
strokes, and the stroke that youāre drawing tries to stick to them. But like I mentioned
earlier, I tend to just constantly be rotating around my scene, and so I usually catch them
immediately and I just Ctrl Z. You could also go into edit mode and select the stroke and
delete it. So in this case, when you hit delete, you can go to the next option and delete the
stroke as a whole, even if not the whole stroke is selected. So this does take a bit of thought
and consideration, and a lot of rotating around your canvas, but itās not too bad. And so
I take this chance to get the branches to split seamlessly off from the tree, and to
get narrower as they extend out further. Iām liking it! So now the only version of this
stroke placement we havenāt seen yet is āEnd Points.ā When you hover over it the
description is āSnap to first and last points and interpolate.ā So when I read this, I
thought this would be perfect for adding vines to the branches. So letās see if Iām right.
Iāll create a new layer and call this āVinesā. And then Iāll start drawing. I think it
does a perfect job of imitating a vine and swooping between two branches. The only thing
is that, unlike the branches, we donāt just want the vines to go off in any direction.
Theyāre suspended, so gravity should pull them down. So just try to make sure that youāre
looking at the tree from the side while youāre drawing it. If ever you find the camera is
in the way you can always hide it in the scene collection. So I donāt know about you, but
I think these are some ugly brown vines. Which means itās the perfect time to introduce
you to our first grease pencil modifier. So letās go back to the modifiers tab, and
add a tint modifier - which can be found in the last category: color. Uummm nothing happened,
and thatās because so far weāve only been drawing with material colours. So remember,
both the line and the fill material that weāve used have this brown colour. So these material
colours are visible in solid view mode, which is the mode that weāre currently in. But
when we want to give our grease pencil drawing colours beyond just the material colours,
we need to be in render view mode. So when you add a modifier, by default
it affects your grease pencil object as a whole. And so we can open up this section
that says influence, and have it influence just our āVinesā layer. Now I can click
on the colour and find just a green that I like. And then we can play around with this
strength slider. So I donāt want my vines to stand out too much, so Iāll keep the
strength quite low. Donāt forget to take a break if you need it, stretch, get some
water, look out a window to give your eyes a break from looking at a screen. Continue
this tutorial over as many days as you need to. Iām sure the lighting gives it away,
but I certainly did not make this in 1 go. Even though I tried to fool you by wearing
the same shirt. The next stroke placement mode weāll be looking at is origin. And
it has no subcategories so you know itās gonna be simple. So, origin - what does that
mean? To show you, I need to go back into Object Mode. The origin is this yellow dot.
All objects have one - the camera, if I make it visible again and select it, has an origin.
The origin is where in space the object is located. In this box, we can go to item. At
the top we have the location values along all of the axes, the rotation along all of
the axes, and the scale as well. So this is different from going into edit mode and doing
any of these transforms on the strokes within the object. The origin, as you can see, does
not move. So only in object mode can you transform an objectās origin. And then if youāre
internally gasping at this abomination, donāt worry, you can reset everything by hovering
over and backspacing. So when a new object is created, it gets created at the 3D cursor,
which is currently invisible, but I can click that on if I open up overlays here, and select
3D cursor. So by default the 3D cursor is at the world origin. I can also click on all
of the axes to show you that the world origin is where all the axes, the X Y and Z, meet.
So how is this useful for us? The origin can give you an anchor when drawing with grease
pencil. Letās go back into draw mode - remember, our origin is still at our world origin. And
letās change the drawing plane to front. The front plane is along the X and Z axes.
So we can see that with this gizmo up here. So now if we draw, two things happen. Our
stroke is always along this front plane, no matter what angle weāre looking at our scene
from when we draw it. Also, it is always in line with the world origin. To help us see
what weāre doing, we can turn on a canvas that will show us the exact plane that weāll
be drawing on. So we can do that the same place where we made our 3D canvas visible,
down here in the section that says Draw Grease Pencil. We can check on the canvas. And now
we can see, itās along the front, in line with our objectās origin. So Iāll create
a new layer for the leaves and Iāll also go into the material properties tab. Iāll
press the plus icon to make a new material slot and I can fill it by pressing on this
icon over here and select solid stroke. We wonāt colour this material - instead, letās
start looking at vertex paint. So we can turn vertex paint on with this icon up here. If
we go back to tool, this has unlocked the colour wheel and also this beautiful palette.
Now select a green, or whatever colour you want your treeās leaves to have, and letās
fill in the first layer of leaves, the leaves at the very center of the tree. Feel free
to play around with opacity for this step - you can turn on pen pressure for opacity
with this icon, and you can also change the opacity with Shift F and dragging. If you
overlap multiple strokes that arenāt fully opaque you may get some weirdnessā¦ it kind
of makes for an interesting, dappled tree look, like the strokes are moving around and
the leaves are blowing in the wind. Is that just me? I wasnāt expecting this but Iām
kind of in love with it. Donāt worry if, you know, most of your branches arenāt in
line with your object origin. Just do however much makes sense for your tree. Weāre about
to see a stroke placement mode thatās a lot more handy, no offence origin. So one
last thing, whenever I use a colour, I like to save it, so if I want to reuse it I can
find it again. I do this by pressing on this + icon, above the colour palette. This adds
the colour to the bottom of the palette. Yes, now itās in my palette twice. But whatās
important is I know that every colour at the bottom, past the dark blue, is a colour Iāve
used. And so, if you want to delete a colour from your palette, you can do that with the
minus icon. The next stroke placement down the list is 3D cursor. It also has no subcategories.
Phew, itās almost as if we got the hardest one out of the way first. So while our origin
is hidden in Draw Mode, our 3D cursor is still visible. If you didnāt make it visible earlier,
we can do that up here, in overlays, check the box next to 3D cursor. So this drawing
mode works in much the same way, but the difference is that, while you need to go into Object
mode to move your objectās origin, moving the 3D cursor can be done without leaving
Draw Mode. And itās generally not something that you want to do very often, move the origin,
because if you have certain modifiers, this can affect them. The 3D cursor, on the other
hand, can be moved around as much as you want. The shortcut to move the 3D cursor is Shift
Right click. But how does that work, moving the cursor in 3D space? Itās a bit tricky
and Iām not a fan of just eyeballing it like this. So letās open up a new drawing
window. And so what you want to do is, up here, between the 3D viewport and the scene
collection, where their curved edges meet, right click, and select Vertical Split, and
then move it so that it splits down the 3D viewport. This awful looking dead tree is
because by default it opened up into solid view mode, and remember, our leaves just have
this solid stroke black material. So because this window is smaller, some of these menu
items at the top are hidden, and so we can either scroll to get to the end and return
to Render View Mode, or if you donāt have a scroll wheel, you can also just hold middle
mouse button over here and drag. So, while weāre hovering over this new window, we
want to hit numpad 7 to look at our tree straight down from the top. If you donāt have a numpad,
you can use the rotation gizmo, and just press on the blue Z button. So why are we looking
at our tree from an unarguably unappealing angle? Well, when youāre just floating in
3D space and you place the 3D cursor, it can go a bit anywhere. But if you give it only
2 axes, you can know it will move only along those 2 axes. And so we are going to use the
3D cursor to draw the rest of the leaves. So in my main 3D viewport, I can shift S at
roughly the height that I want. And then in my second window, I can place it at different
spots around the tree, and the height will not change. You can also
hold shift and right click to move it around. So now, letās look at what happens if we
change the drawing plane to Side. I mean itās not a surprise what happens - the strokes
will now draw along the Y and the Z axes. So now, I can place the 3D cursor over here
and draw some strokes on the far side of our tree. Before we move on, is anyone else as
sick of these two boring colours as I am? I need some hue variation. We can do that
up here, to the right of the radius and strength, in Stroke, and then check the box that says
Randomize. Letās bring the hue value up. Press this button to have it affect the stroke
as a whole. And, if youāre a pen pad user, I recommend checking this box, so that the
hue randomization will be stronger the harder you press, and this means that you can make
the value larger without having it feel too disjointed. If youāre a mouse user, however,
youāll want to keep the randomization value relatively small, between 0.2 and 0.4 Iād
say. So now, letās place our 3D cursor here, and do the same thing at the other end of
our tree. Iām a big fan of scribbles, so Iāll work those in as well. And then for this area down here, once again I
can move the 3D cursor height-wise in this window, and then with the second window I
can just make sure that, along that height, itās where I want it. So weāre starting
to get some interesting looks from mulitple angles. Letās keep looking at the different
settings. So we can change the drawing plane to top, move the 3D cursor to around the top
of the tree and draw some leaves at the crown of our tree. So that it doesnāt get too
repetitive-looking, letās move the 3D cursor around quite a bit during this step. Alright,
so the last drawing plane we havenāt met yet is cursor. So letās see how this looks
if we place the 3D cursor. Thank goodness we have the canvas, because this shows us
that the drawing plane is whatever angle we were looking at our scene from when we placed
the 3D cursor. This is really cool! For this to work best, I find it best to stay fresh,
not stay in one area for too long. So now weāre starting to get some interesting variation
in our work, but I struggle with how unpredictable the placing of the 3D cursor is, and using
our second window doesnāt really work because then we get a drawing plane thatās just
along the top -and so I find that too limiting. But now youāve seen all of the different
drawing plane options, so you can choose whichever one or ones you want to use to continue fleshing
out your foliage. My personal favourite is to set the drawing plane to view, and to use
the combination of the 2 windows to keep moving the 3D cursor and keep drawing strokes at
different angles. Also, with view, once the 3D cursor is placed we can still rotate around
it - and you can see our canvas rotates with us - and we can use this to get even more
variation. Donāt be discouraged if the stroke placement is a bit tricky to get the hang
of, I use Ctrl Z a lot while I draw. Just go at it with an open mind and keep rotating
as often as possible. I personally really like the combination of getting those big,
faded strokes, those medium opaque strokes and also a whole bunch of scribbles. As Iām
filling out the foliage, I also like to switch between 3D cursor and stroke placement with
the target at first point. This can be especially useful if you notice a bare branch that you
havenāt managed to hit with your 3D cursor strokes. So far weāve seen all the drawing
planes, and 3 of the stroke placement modes. So that means all we have left isā¦ surface!
We donāt have a surface anymore! Letās get us a surface. First we need to go back
into Object Mode. We can hit Shift A and add a mesh and we want to add a UV sphere. It
got created at our 3D cursor, but thatās fine, weāre gonna want to move it anyway,
to the base of our tree. My inspiration for making this piece was very much those little
bonsais you see growing out of a moss ball. So thatās what this sphere will become.
Iāll go back into Solid View mode, up here, to get a better view of it. When you press
G to move something - or R to rotate, or S to scale - you can also press either X, Y
or Z to move that item along only that axis, so I can use Z to get it down to the height
that I want. Then I can also use the shortcut Shift Z to move it along everything BUT the
Z axis - so in this case the Y and the X axes to reposition it without changing its height.
So now, letās create a new grease pencil object. But unlike the sphere, which didnāt
matter where it was created, I want this new object to be created at the world origin.
I can press Shift S and select Cursor to World Origin. To move the 3D cursor back to the
world origin. And so now, if I create a new object, that is where it will appear. So Iāll
press Shift A , and then in grease pencil I want to create a blank. So Grease Pencil
Blank objects start out with nothing, so in Object Data properties letās click on New
Layer and name it āMossā. Then we need to go into the materials, press the plus icon
to create a slot, and in the icon next to ānewā, weāll select the same solid stroke
as before. Now because itās a blank, thereās nothing in the 3D viewport that you can select,
so if you accidentally click out of the blank object you just need to select it again in
the scene collection. Speaking of, would also be a good time to rename the object as well.
And so the shortcut to rename something is F2, and letās call it āMossballā. Now,
with it selected, letās go into Draw Mode, and change the stroke placement to Surface.
This also comes with a setting, which is offset value. This is how far away from the surface
the stroke will be drawn. So thatās pretty far, letās go with around 0.025. So, stroke
offset is weird. Iām not gonna lie. The offset is impacted by how zoomed in you are
when you draw the stroke, meaning that it will change as you zoom in and out if your
piece. Thatās an extreme example. So for really precise work, this can be a big bother,
but what weāre going for today - an imperfect little moss ball with a bunch of moss sticking
out of it - itāll be perfectly fine. So letās scribble on some mossy details on
the top half of our sphere. But for this new grease pencil object, letās approach it
a bit differently. Letās create 2 separate layers, one for our thin strokes, our moss
scribble lines, and another for our thicker strokes. So thereās something different
about this new grease pencil object. And that can be found down here, back in strokes. When
you add a new grease pencil object, the default stroke depth order is 2D layers. This mode
places strokes on top of one another based on, you guessed it, the order of their layers,
up here. So we can change the layer of the orders, with these arrow keys to move them
up or down, and this can result in a lot of different, really interesting looks. I think
I prefer the scribble lines underneath the bigger strokes. I did the opposite for my
test piece, so thereās definitely no right way to do this. So I want the entirety of
my moss ball to be green, of course. We could select the moss ball mesh, and give it a
material colour, but what I donāt like about this is that we still see the shape of the
mesh and the outline of the faces, and so I want this green area to be just a flat colour.
So I want to do like before and convert my mesh to a grease pencil object. But first,
Iāll press Ctrl A and apply all transforms. This places the origin of our moss ball back
at the world origin. And then Object, convert to grease pencil, and yes we do want to keep
the original. And now, I want this new fill layer, to be in the same grease pencil object
as my moss ball, so I can do that in this dropdown menu, at the bottom, copy layer to
object, and move it to the āMossball.ā Then I can delete the new grease pencil object
I created. Now letās select our moss ball, go into the materials, and give this new fill
material a colour - and I want to go quite dark green for this. Now, you may noticeā¦
our scribble layerā¦ has disappeared. So when you move grease pencil layers to other
objects, the layer appears just above whichever layer you had currently selected. So I had
my scribble layer selected, and so itās just above that. And because the stroke depth
order is set to 2D layers, it hides it completely. It would hide everything if I put it to the
top of the list. So letās move it to the bottom. Looking great, but I do want to create
one more stroke layer, because the transition from dark to lightā¦ not that great. So we
can create it just above the fill layer, and letās name this āGradientā. Now letās
go into Draw Mode and make your brush huuuuuge. Iām actually gonna turn pen pressure for
radius off because I really want these strokes to be as giant as possible. But before you
draw, up here, shows us the material that weāre currently using. And so it most likely
got changed to the sphere fill material. And so you just want to change it back to the
solid stroke material. And now Iām gonna draw huge strokes at varying opacities to make
the top half get progressively lighter. I also changed the stroke offset to 0.5 for
this step, it was just feeling a bit too small. So itās really nice, but kind of a mess,
right? Well, let me introduce you to the magic of layer masking. This is actually the biggest
reason that we converted the sphere into a grease pencil object. So, in our layers, we
can check this box that says Masks, open the dropdown, and press the plus icon and select
our fill layer. Ooooh hoo, ahhh. I am loving it. In this section, Iāll be taking you
along with me as I finalize this 3D painting, because there is not nearly enough detail
as I would like. And Iāll be using a bunch of new grease pencil modifiers to get some
really cool looks. Okay, first thingās first, this moss ball is seriously bumming me out.
To start, Iām going to add a thickness modifier. Have it influence the big strokes layer, and
then with this slider I can make them a bit smaller. Iāll be speeding quite a bit through
the process, since itās all the same concepts as weāve seen before. However, this is the
step that I spent the most time on, so if youād like to see that in full, you can
check out the realtime version of this tutorial, linked in the description box below. And then
I also want to add a colour gradient to our moss ball. So I can do that with the tint
modifier, and instead of a uniform colour I can set it to act like a gradient. Then
you need to assign an object to act as the anchor for the gradient, and so I will select
the tree object, because the origin is just at the world origin, and so the gradient will
radiate out from this point in 3D space. And then Iāll make the closer colour a limey,
light green, play with the radius so that I can actually see it, and make the further
colour a darker green. Iāll lower the strength of this a little bit, but I find it really
helps to unify all of the colours. And then I donāt want it to affect all of the layers.
So I think Iāll have it affect layers with a pass index of 1. And then over here in layers,
itās in relations that you find the pass index, so Iāll give a pass index of 1 to
the big strokes, the gradient, and the fill layer. And then
Iāll draw some more details coming off the moss ball, some scribbles that leave the form,
some bits of stringy moss, and also stems and leaves and maybe some flowers. And Iāll
do all this using stroke placement with the target at first point. And I'll make this in a layer at the top. Iām thinking it would
be nice to also have this same gradient on the tree, but for it to do the reverse, so
the lighter green would be closer to the center and the outer leaves are darker. So I can
go into the scene collection, up here, open up the dropdown of the mossball and open up
the modifiers, and then I can find the tint modifier and move it to the bonsai object
to copy it. Now Iāll change the target and the influence to have it affect the tree as
Iām envisioning. So looking at the tree, I think Iāll mostly leave these two sections
alone, but I want to fill in the space in the middle a bit more. And so I think Iāll
just draw in some vines, some leaves dangling, similar to the dangling shapes of the moss
ball. Iām also going to add some details to the tree trunk, some ridges, maybe a bit
of shadows to the underside. What if I had roots that went all the way through the tree.
Oh yes! noise modifier is the last thing that I wanted to add. So this is a really fun modifier
for adding a bit of life to a still piece, so I can find it under the ādeformā category,
and then Iāll set the position to between 0.1 and 0.2, and then I want it to influence
everything but the fill materials, because some weird stuff can happen in this case.
And so I can just select the fill material and press on this icon to have it affect everything
else. So now, there are just a few last things we want to do to make this a final piece that
we can present and share. First, letās select our sphere, and press S to resize it just a
tiny amount. So even though we drew on the surface of the mesh with offset, there are
still some areas where it intersects with the strokes, and this is especially apparent
if we export. So you can see, it doesnāt look exactly like it does in the 3D viewport.
And so Iāll keep the sphere visible, so that it hides the strokes on the other side,
but with S I can scale it down just a really small amount. And so now, we want to export
this as a turnaround animation that shows off all the beautiful angles of our bonsai.
So letās press numpad 0 or we can also use this button to look through our camera. So,
we definitely want to resize this. We can do that in the Output Properties, by changing
the values for the resolution. And, Iām thinking a little bit vertical for this. Thereās
also a value for the resolution. Grease pencil is actually vector-based, so you could make
a final image literally as big as your heart desires. Now to put our tree in the center
of our camera, we can do that in this box, in View. And then, in View Lock, we can check
Lock Camera to View. And now as we move around our scene, as we would move around typically
in the 3D viewport, our camera moves with us. So I find that this is the easiest way
to reposition our grease pencil painting within the frame of our camera. Pay attention to
the 3D cursor at the world origin, because our camera will rotate around this point,
so try to keep it in the center of the frame as much as possible. And then when youāre
happy make sure to uncheck the camera to view box so that you donāt accidentally move
and lose your perfect scene. Now, weāll animate our camera using an empty. So, while
weāre in object mode, we can press shift S and make sure our 3D cursor is at the world
origin, in case itās not. So we can press this button to make it at the world origin.
And then we can press Shift A and add an empty of plain axes. As I understand them, empties
in Blender are mainly used to perform operations on other objects. They are, literally, empty,
nothing, and nothing will show up in your final render. So, in the scene collection,
we can rename our Empty āturnā, and then we can select our camera, and then ctrl select
our new empty, right click, and in parent, select āObject.ā So in our timeline letās
go to frame 1. But, right now this timeline is only showing grease pencil keyframes, so
if I select one of my grease pencil objects, we can see that each layer has a keyframe,
based on what frame I was in when I created it or first made a stroke on it. It may have
happened, while you were drawing, that you accidentally ended up on a new frame without
realizing it. And so all you would need to do it, if necessary, unlock the layers in
the timeline, select on these keyframes, and with G you can move them so that they are
all at 1. With that out of the way, now we can press here to and change the grease pencil
timeline to the dopesheet. We no longer see the grease pencil keyframes, but this will
allow us to to animate the objects in our scene. So now letās select our empty, and
weāll make this box show our item transforms. Then at frame 1, we want to keyframe it exactly
as it is, so we can do that by pressing I, then keyframe the rotation. So now letās go to 1 frame after the end of our animation.
So that would be frame 251 in this case. Then, in the item transforms, letās give the Z
a rotation value of 360, enter and hit I and keyframe the rotation again. Now if we scrub
along the timelineā¦ we see our tree rotate! But by default, Blender creates an animation
that starts slow and ends slow and speeds up in the middle, and so in order to get a
constant turnaround animation, all we need to do is right click between the two keyframes,
go to Interpolation Mode and select ālinearā. And now, we have a grease pencil bonsai that
will just seamlessly keep looping forever. Then of course we need to sign our beautiful
creation. Letās go back to frame 1. And letās go into our mossball grease pencil
object and create a new layer. Name it āSignature.ā
Then go into top view, numpad 7 or by pressing on the Z, and shift right click to place the
3D cursor past the tree, close to the camera. Go back to camera view. Into draw mode, make
the stroke placement 3D cursor and make sure the drawing plane is at view. And sign your
name! Iāll make the noise modifier not affect this layer. And then, in Relations, select
the camera as your parent. And so now as the camera rotates, our signature does not move.
And then reposition if you need to. So now, finally, to export it. We can do that back
in the output properties, and so weāll keep the animation length 250 frames and the frame
rate at 24 frames per second. You can press on this icon to choose which folder it will
be exported into, and then in my experience a grease pencil painting like this really
shouldnāt take too long to export, so we can just export it directly to video, so make
the file format FFMpeg video and then open up Encoding and make the container MP4. And
then we can hit Ctrl F12 and sit back as our animation exports. So after I finished filming,
I looked at my tree a lot more and decided that I wanted to change up the colours a bit.
I added a background colour by going into the World properties, and changing the background
colour here. I also went into Render Properties, opened up color management, at the bottom,
and played around with the curves. Just tweaking them a bit, here and there, until I got something
I was more a fan of. We did it! That is awesome. I would love to know how this tutorial went
for you, and to see your bonsai, if youāre comfortable sharing it. Liking and subscribing,
and especially sharing this video around would be a huge help. Thank you so much for all
of the support, and I hope that my channel has been helpful for you. If youād like
to see more of my work, you can find me on all of the internet at sophiejantak, and if
youāre an instagram kind of person, thatās where I post all of my work, both Blender-related
and otherwise. All of that will be linked below. Thank you so much for being here. I
will see you very soon, bye.
Nice! Keep the content coming š
Thank you so much Sophie! šš