Blender 4.0: Intermediate Grease Pencil Techniques

ah I got the wrong blender from the store oh this is so embarrassing oh my gosh hey everybody welcome to another blender grease pencil tutorial thank you so much for the response on my beginner tutorial I got a lot of really nice feedback on that I also got some really good constructive feedback so I'm excited to make this intermediate grease pencil tutorial going over some cool tips and tricks that I've learned using grease pencil for the last 3 years and just stuff that's fun to play with if you have a little bit of blender knoow if you watch my beginner grease pencil tutorial you shouldn't have too much trouble following along with this but it would be good to have some 3D fundamentals down so maybe go check out some 3D tutorials and then come check this one out again here's a brief overview of some of the techniques I'm going to talk about in this video some of them more complicated than others I hope that you'll enjoy these if there's any of them that catch your eye feel free to check the description and Skip ahead to the timestamp before we get to the video here's a quick message from me every day people are always talking to me saying Bryson Bryson I got to know how how do I take your art make it sticky and put it on something and I tell them the same answer every time I say pal you just got to go over to patreon.com brcb and join the sticker Club every month you get a a little sticker sheet in the mail for just like eight bucks with your support Bryson can keep making cool art and YouTube videos where he talks about himself in the third person and then they say to me oh that was a weird answer that's a weird way to ask me for money I was say yeah I'm a weird guy I'm weird thanks so much to everybody that supported the sticker Club in the last year we've been running it for over a year now I'm really excited about how much it's grown you guys have made it possible for me to do so many cool things so thank you so much and back to the video thanks so much me now with all that out of the way let's get to the first technique of this video which is drawing on surfaces I wanted to start with this technique because it's probably one of the most stylistic and definitive features of Grease pencil you've probably seen it in work of artists like toos or worthy kids and it's just a really cool way to integrate 2D illustration into a 3D environment and it's really great for trying to make a 3D model look a little bit more natural next to 2D elements so if you have painted backgrounds maybe you have a little bit of Grease pencil stylized lines similar to stuff that they might do in into the spiderverse to add little details to the character's faces so here we have this little weird Sunfish model that I made and I have all these little details drawn on it and if we go into edit mode you can see that these are actually Strokes instanced in 3D space let me turn off this mirror modifier so these Strokes are just kind of sitting right on the model there's a little bit of an offset the most simple way of putting it is that when you have a grease pencil object selected you go into draw mode and then up here at the top you can see it usually says origin I had it on 3D cursor it'll say like origin front something like that to enable drawing on Surface you just go up to origin and then select surface and it'll have a little offset I think it defaults to like 150 which is just huge it's better to keep the offset pretty small otherwise if it's really high you'll draw on your model and then your stroke is like super far away from it so I'll just bring my offset down to like 009 and then if you draw on your model boom you see that it sits pretty snugly on the face of the the model and you can just add little details and going around you can draw your details from any perspective and it'll project them onto the model from The View that you draw it at a couple things to note is that if you draw a stroke that's a little bit too big you'll probably see it clip into the model because the way that grease pencil works is it basically takes any stroke and it turns it into a plane where all of the vertices make up the like the perimeter of the plane in a case like this if I really wanted to add a pink surface to this model I would have to make a new material get rid of the stroke on it and then I would just start laying in all of these patches of pink to put over the model and you have to do it pretty small because uh you're essentially retopologizing your model but with grease pencil Strokes I don't necessarily recommend this technique I think it's better to use materials in cases like this where I would go into the model and take the geometry and maybe cut it up to create this shape and then just give it a different material to give it the color and then you can go in and lay the black line in a separate material and that would just add the details like that one other quick tip I want to give you guys about drawing on surfaces is that if you really want your offset to be consistent um you might run into a problem where you zoom out of your model maybe you have a really big model that you're drawing on you know some like a train or a ship or something and you zoom out to draw some details and you'll notice that if we zoom out a lot and then Zoom back in you'll see that our offset is way bigger now the reason that our offset changes based on how zoomed in we are is because the scale of the offset is based on the scale of the viewport that you're drawing on so if we zoom in really close you'll see our freaking things start clipping into here and and that looks weird and then if we zoom out too much we draw a little nose oh his nostrils floating off his face so how do we fix this problem well there's a great video by Sophie jantac that explains that exactly um I I will try to very briefly summarize it in case you have the blender know how to do it otherwise go check out Sophie's video for a much more detailed rundown of how you can get a constant offset from any view any uh distance with your grease pencil object but for the super quick rundown of how you get a constant offset when you're drawing on surfaces first we just need to add a new material to our object that we're drawing onto and we're going to grab a hold out material and then we're going to enable backf coling then we'll go over to our modifiers tab add a solidify modifier we're going to set it to maybe about I think that kind of thickness is going to be enough you kind of want to see where your your strok start clipping into the model so if you're covering it up completely you'll probably be fine then we're going to go over to materials and we're going to turn up material offset by one that should now make it where the uh the stroke is actually being assigned to this hold out material oh right then we have to enable flip normals there we go now you can see there's this little little bit of a outline around our object which is a pretty cool effect but if we did it right it should achieve for us that we can set our surface to zero and then if we draw on the model from any distance it should be a constant offset which looks like we have achieved so now we can zoom out however we please adding all kinds of details to our guy but yeah and that's pretty much all there is to know to drawing onto a surface of a model with grease pencil I forgot to mention I use a hold out material here for the solidify modifier but if you don't want it to have this outline kind of obscuring the uh the color blockiness of it you can instead go over your material and just set it to transparent which still is not do I need Alpha blend oh yeah transparent and then set it to Alpha blend and now you should have a perfectly transparent outline which lets you have the constant offset for the next grease pencil technique I'll show you guys the line art modifier now we kind of got an outline with this material we could set this to anything we could set it to an emission and give it like a a darker blue if we want um and that's just with the solidify modifier that I was showing you guys with the normals flipped um you get a pretty cool very smooth outline um by by using this technique and maybe we want the color to be black just to kind of match with our our line art this is a very a tried andrue very classic way of getting line art on a uh NPR blender model or or non-photo realistic you you notice we have like these lines are all they're jittering around they have all this like Dynamic life to them because of the handrawn feel and that I have these noise modifiers and stuff going on with the lines and that's just not happening with the lines created by the solidify modifier so let's go ahead and get rid of the solidify modifier uh I'll just switch the material back to something transparent and set it to Alpha blend and now with our grease pencil object selected I'm going to add a modifier say line art modifier we're going to select our collection that everything's in which is collection we're going to select a layer I think I'll just choose GP layer 2 and then give it a material so we'll choose the black lines and you see that it generates these lines which look pretty wonky but that's because we have a solidify model uh modifier on the uh material and you also notice that the lines don't update when we move our viewport around that's because the lines are always being generated based on where the camera is from the line art modifier we can edit stuff like the line thickness to give it thicker lines to kind of match where our uh our handrawn lines are and then we can even move the line art modifier up and because it has the same modifiers as our handdrawn lines you see that we get this sort of jittery look to the lines however I'm noticing that the lines on the outline aren't necessarily moving around as much uh they they don't have as much geometry is the handdrawn lines which is creating a less jittery look for the line art modifier lines so what I'll do here and what you probably usually want to do when adding a line art modifier is I'm just going to duplicate our object and I'll right click and then I'm going to go ahead and delete all of the geometry and then on our main grease pencil object I'll just get rid of that line art modifier so now there's a new grease pencil object that just has the line art modifier lines on it there's no handdrawn stuff on it and then what we can do let's go ahead and add a subdivide modifier we'll just set it right after the line art modifier we'll set it to simple and we'll just add like three or four subdivisions and what that does is it subdivides the lines generated by the line art modifier to give it more geometry so that it can flicker around a little bit more which gives us a pretty close look to where we are with these lines over here we can even change the noise scale give it a little bit more grit and then if you want to see how your shape looks from different angles with the uh End menu open you can just hit lock camera to view which you can read yeah lock camera to view and then when you move your viewport around it'll follow with your camera so you can see the way that grease pencil updates the line art modifier based on where the camera is so this technique isn't as simple as the solidify modifier technique however it does give you a lot more control over like the colors or The Masks or so many things that you could do with the grease pencil line art modifier and you only get a little bit of artifacting like around here on the edges where we see that the line's kind of thicken up a lot because it's calculating the edge kind of weird over there but other than that you get pretty smooth lines and you can add modifiers or change the colors I think you can do vertex painting stuff if you bake the line art which is a whole other thing it's a different video probably but it's pretty cool being able to add lines to your models in the same object that you're hand drawing all the the touch up elements and stuff onto a model up next we're going to jump into the custom materials uh this is probably one of the coolest most underrated things about grease pencil I think a lot of the really sort of Mainline grease pencil artists you'll see generally just use the default materials because they're more classic animation style you know if you ever watched a studio ji grease pencil style tutorial they're all using pretty flat materials they're not necessarily talking about like custom uh technical brushes or custom watercolor brushes and stuff like that but grease pencil is very capable of making some pretty cool textures and different effects just with the custom materials you can create in grease pencil so looking at this uh concept which you already saw the rendered view it it just looks like big circles um and these huge blobs that you see maintain their spherical shape as we rotate around those are individual stroke points just like a single dot of geometry that uh is instancing this huge stroke um which is kind of nifty in itself to look at in 3D but if we enable rendered view you'll see that I have this like paint splatter effect on the model which I mean is just so cool and and the way that you get an effect like this is you just go create a new material and grease pencil for something like a brush texture that you want to instance in 3D sort of billboarding the texture around as you rotate you would enable stroke and then hit squares or dot I think dots or squares will both give you pretty good effect and then we're just going to enable texture under the style then you're just going to go grab a transparent file with any kind of black texture usually um something that I've done in the past is I'll go into procreate and just take any of the brushes that are like default and procreate and just make a DOT with it just you know tapping the the Basse texture on like a PNG and then exporting that to Discord and then putting it into grease pencil and it immediately instances the texture that you want so I'm just going to grab this paint splatter texture that I got online and I'm going to set the blend all the way to one and that's going to let us manipulate the color based on just any color that we want then I'll go into draw mode with my new material and you'll see if I have the radius really high that's going to change the scale of the image that's being instanced on our stroke so if I just draw you'll see we now have these little paint splatter effects and they look even more fun when you enable a noise modifier you can even paint around with the brush to kind of create like a more of a wash of texture and usually I draw with color palettes so I'll use the material mode for picking colors but you can also enable vertex color mode I don't know why I call it vertex color mode it is called color attribute mode which basically lets you change the color per uh vertex rather than buy a material on the stroke I have another cool brush in here though it's not very significant it doesn't doesn't exactly get the effect I want I just took like a pencil texture online and tried to create like a pencil brush but you see it's not necessarily uh it's not doing it maybe because I didn't have the blend all the way up it's got a little bit of grit to it but you know it kind of leaves you wanting and then if we make it really small you just start to see the detail of the the brush kind of fall apart for something like this you can get a pretty cool uh pencil brush texture though it's not uh not so defined that I think it would make it worth using something like this over the regular uh base material with Vector illustration you really don't get a lot out of trying to get like a pencil brush texture um though as far as like the more painterly textures I think you can get a lot of really cool Effects by instancing those kinds of things another thing that you can do with materials is adding fill material image textures so I'm just going to add a new material I'll get rid of the stroke and add a fill and then change the style to texture and I have this folder of some pretty cool watercolor textures so maybe we'll grab this one set the blend up a bit and then we'll just pick a Vertex color and then if we start drawing you'll see that it's instancing this image based on the fill material now the the image I grabbed didn't fill up the whole canvas there was a lot of transparency in it so you'd have to draw pretty big to see fall off you can also adjust the scale of your image texture and you'll see we start getting it uh looping a bit which uh could be a cool effect though it's not necessarily what I'm going for here I think by scaling it up we can probably get some pretty cool effects though that's maybe too much but yeah this isn't a super amazing example but you can see some simple like a star like this even just having that little bit of texture around the uh the edges gives it a really nice look even though you're not going to get a super fuzzy outline just a little bit of fuzz from the material can make it look pretty cool if you had a texture that took up the full image you'd get a lot more consistent of a texture for your fill materials and I'm no expert about about working with materials but uh Sophie jantech once again is an amazing blender grease pencil artist who uh actually just put out a new video today showing off a new brush pack um Sophie just dropped it's like $5 on gumroad there's a lot of really cool materials that you can using grease pencil in there I picked it up so quick it's wild to think that you could get like a really cool watercolor look in grease pencil but uh you know the artist mind of someone like Sophie jantac makes it very possible so go check out those brushes in the description anyways that's all the information I have to share about custom materials but we can go ahead and move on to the next topic which is masks mask are probably going to sound very familiar to any digital artist watching this video that haven't used blender it's usually used in Photoshop for making a mask around your character so that you can color them in or you know creating certain shapes or exclusions from an image based on a different layer and they work very similar in grease pencil now in this little demo scene that I made um you can see that there's there's this geometry for this fish over here but you're only able to see the face where there's this uh paint splatter texture around his face the way that we can reveal him a little bit more clearly is if we go back into edit mode grab this and we move it over you can see that he is illuminated by the light and then we can even stretch it out so it's a little bit more sparse lighting but yeah I think this is a super cool effect I was very pleased with how it came together thought it was a cool uh illustration of the way masks work um so to to show you guys let's go ahead and look at the layers layers are where you're going to be managing your masks and that's controlled by this icon right here um I actually don't need this this one turned on to use a mask usually you take the layer with your object that you want to be manipulated by The Mask so in my case that's the layer that has my little fish character on right here I just select that layer enable masks with this button right here you can see that when I I disable the mask uh the fish becomes fully visible in full color with not really any Dynamic looking lighting going on but when we turn it back on it hides every part of the fish that doesn't have uh opacity from The Mask layer over it um which is controlled right down here in The Mask menu which you can see is enabled here if we just get rid of what I have here see he's still visible so the way that you create a mask is by adding a different layer to be your mask in my case that's GP layer 3 if I delete everything in GP layer 3 you see that the fish is now not visible but if I go in and I start drawing you can see that he is revealed by by the paint Strokes which you can get very creative with if we go into edit mode we can grab our mask and move it around and see how that affects our our creature's visibility maybe a more practical use of mask rather than just for something like this where you're trying to make like a spotlight effect would be adding Shadows to a character so if we want to add Shadows to something like our little fish character here pretty good way to do that would be let's just delete all of those uh lighting effects with our lighting layer selected we will enable masks and we will select our fish layer which is just GP layer and I'm going to change this to multiply and I'll set the opacity about 0.5 for the layer that I'm adding lighting effects to and I'll just grab a darker material and now you'll see with the mask enabled so that our lighting layer is only showing up where our character is we can go in and just start laying out little details to add this sort of Shadow and I'm just going to turn the uh actually I think if we just lower the uh strength all the way to zero we can still get the fill but our our stroke will be invisible which is Nifty for this and then we can just start adding like little subtle Shadow lighting details and we don't have to worry about uh drawing outside of the lines of our character because the mask is doing all the work for us and then we can grab a lighter color oh well it's set to multiply so that's not doing much let's just set it to regular or maybe not maybe it does need to be on multiply so for lighter elements I'm going to add a new layer and we're just going to do the same thing grab GP layer for the masks and we're going to set that layer to add and then I you can see that it it's also adding to The Strokes of our uh our fish guy here so maybe not the the look that I'd want to go for but it's the look that we have so but yeah that's a super quick rundown of how to use mask and blender it's great for adding little Shadows or highlights to a character where you don't want the lighting to wrap over the character you want it to just sit on the lines and over the fill materials that make up your character super intuitive to do that in a grease pencil you can even animate it with stuff in edit mode or using sculpt tools just going keep frame by frame adding like a sort of jiggly look to to the lighting and you can just sculpt it around all willy-nilly and it's going to always stay wrapped to where your where your characters geometry is where you could get like a weird warpy water look which I actually really like I think that looks kind of cool not my best animated work but still a really Nifty tool for grease pencil now let's move on to the next technique which is Parallax everybody's favorite LAX to illustrate Parallax I'll just show you guys little animated sequence of this cat character which you can already see over at the bottom of the screen over there the thing about this scene is that I've already separated a few of these things into different objects which is going to be really Nifty for adding parallx so what I'll do is I'll just bring this guy kind of up to the front and then bring the surfboard up a bit and then if we go to the camera view you'll see the scale of things has changed so I'm going to scale stuff down roughly to where it was before I added the depth now when we move the character around you can see that the character moves around a bit faster than the wave behind it this is something that's achieved in a lot of other 2D illustration animation programs just by having the background element that you're moving around move slower or manually adjusted at a less of a rate than the stuff in the foreground um you don't necessarily need a 3D engine to do this you don't necessarily need a 3D engine to achieve this effect but being that blender is already a 3D engine that gives you a lot of tools for adjusting depth or even like rotation in 3D space in this example I'm separating the elements into different objects which makes handling depth information very easy um blender can sometimes be a little bit wonky when rendering one Grease pencil object in front of another sometimes it depends on the vertex information sometimes it just depends on where the origin is at and if it's in the same grease pencil object it's either going to be just dependent on the 2D layers like the layer order or uh the actual 3D location of your Ed edges depending on the setting that you have for that specific layer within just one Grease pencil object the order that Strokes appear in depends either on the 2D layers or the 3D location of those strokes and that's controlled in this little setting box down here you can see that if I turn this cat character uh into the stroke depth order 3D location now uh the fill is like clipping Into The Strokes and it looks weird the reason for that is this character is made up of geometry that is instancing the stroke and fill at the same time if we were to put it back on 2D layers you see everything appears just fine in edit mode you can even grab Strokes right click hit arrange and send to back and now it it looks kind of like he has eyes but uh if we look at the back of the model you see the sunglasses aren't there it's that the sunglasses are on the exact same 2D plane uh exact same uh realm of geometry that we're seeing if we go to edit mode you can see I have the sunglasses right here but they're not going to appear behind here and that's because it's just looking at the 2D layer information and 2D layers doesn't just mean the layers in the layer menu it's also the order of strokes and the arrangement of those Strokes in that independent grease pencil object so even though we can see the the vertex information here we can see it if we pull it over to the side if it is in line with the other Strokes that are ahead of it in priority we can't see the the sunglasses however if we turned on 3D location you can see that we can see the The Strokes just fine under or above uh the character now I want to show you some more in-depth techniques for actually drawing a parallax you could do what I did here of separating the objects into different grease pencil objects I found that's just a more effective way of controlling uh the depth information without having to do a lot of uh manipulating fill materials separate from stroke materials and stuff I like drawing with fill materials that have a stroke on them because it makes managing the geometry a lot easier rather than having the geometry of the stroke and then bucket tooling it and having a whole new set of geometry instance inside the stroke but it's not very good for when you're trying to add a 3D depth information to a grease pencil object without breaking it up into a bunch of different objects but for the sake of showing off Parallax in just one Grease pencil object I'll go ahead and just delete our cat guy and then we'll just take this wave and I'll just delete all of the frames a good technique for drawing at different depths in 3D is just orbiting your camera around and then I'm going to set our stroke placement to 3D cursor and you can see our 3D cursor is notated here by this sort of a life life preserver uh floating in the middle of the screen but if we hold shift and right click you can see that our 3D cursor moves based on where our cursor is so we could set it really high up closer to the camera so we're going to start by setting our 3D cursor maybe about 3 M below the origin of the world I'll go back to camera view I'm going to start by just adding this sort of bubbly blue background next I'm going to move our cursor up just a little bit go back to camera view and now I'll add some little clouds that's a pretty big cloud now if we go ahead and rotate you're not going to notice too much Parallax going on unless you really push it to the extremes we'll keep going and we'll put our 3D cursor right about at the world origin I'm just going to add a little Hill like a mountain thing and I'm going to go in here with our white material we're just going to add like a little snow then we'll bring our 3D cursor even closer just a little bit add another Mountain thing now we're going to move our 3D cursor even closer probably want to be a lot closer to the camera for this one and I don't really know what I want to draw in front of this I think I'll just draw a little grassy Hill a little bit closer to the foreground and we'll just draw a little pink house sitting on this hill and a little door on the back nice and then if we look at it in perspective view you can see we have a pretty effective little Parallax setup so the perspective works just fine since we've drawn this all in one one object however if I rotate our model all the way around you see that the perspective breaks because the house is still showing up in front of everything even though we should just be seeing the sky from that perspective so probably the best way of going about fixing that is separating stuff into separate objects like I said so we're just going to go layer by layer select everything hit p and say selected points to separate that into a different object and we will just do that for each layer and that should put everything into separate objects now when we look at all our grease pencil objects they all appear in front of each other in the right order since we've separated our different planes into different objects one other weird looking thing is because we're using Parallax um the the actual size of The Strokes is relative to their uh closeness to the camera so uh our house has a really thick lines while this guy back here has really tiny lines compared to the house um pretty simple fix is to just add a thickness modifier and bring your thickness of your foreground stuff down and then maybe bring the thickness of the background stuff up just a little bit so just object by object I'd go through and uh change the thickness a little bit and then uh our our stroke density looks a little bit more like a a flat illustration probably spend more time on this than we needed to but I thought it'd be helpful to share some tips about getting a good looking Parallax effect in grease pencil folks we are now halfway through the tutorial with that said we're going to jump into the next technique of this video which is the time offset modifier time offset is essentially just a modifier that lets you change um the the playback of your animation it's not something you would use in illustration typically but there's a couple really cool things about it that I want to share with you so to kind of show off what time offset modifier can do uh I have this little scene I was working on with just this one fish swimming along uh very lonely in this very empty underwater world but with time offset modifier we can turn that one fish into a lot of them all swimming at slightly different uh speeds going through this this underwater area and look I know it doesn't look like the most impressive thing but it's cool and and there's cool stuff you can do with it the way this effect is achieved is by copying the original Grease pencil object object so I could just take it and make a duplicate over here and then I add this time offset modifier to it by changing this Frame offset setting we can loop our animation through all of the frames and uh change the starting point of of this fish just flopping along the the ocean an important note about the time offset modifier is that you want to set a custom range typically um by enabling custom range you can set the start and end frame of your animation so uh if we set it to three uh then it doesn't do any then there's no animation at that point because it's not looping through but by setting it back to 15 you'll see that we get a nice Loop through uh all of the frames of Animation that I Illustrated and then for some of these guys I actually have like a uh a modifier on them that changes the Hue of the fish to also create some variation um very nice for cutting Corners I think I I made this after I watched Pono cuz I was like man how did they animate so many fish there's so many and um I was like well maybe they just copy them and and change the offset of the frame a little bit to make it look like it's a bunch of different fish or jellyfish um they didn't do that they definitely just drew all of them but I am not an animation studio I'm nowhere near as skilled as the folks working at Studio JBL so I just drew a fish one time I drew 15 frames or like six frames over the course of 15 frames and then I just duplicated it in blender and did the frame set so that's how you could take very small amount of work make it look like slightly more work this is all just one fish you could probably get a much more compelling effect by animating two or three and then duplicating those but this was kind of just a proof concept one of my personal favorite things to do with a frame offset modifier outside of just these looping animation things another really cool thing you can do with a frame offset modifier is creating little puppets um that are driven by empties that you can troll manually so to illustrate what I can do with puppets I've animated this little uh alligator guy and it's just four frames of him with with a little Clos mouth and he goes he opens his mou he goes the way that we could achieve like a puppet effect with this character is by changing the time offset mode from regular to fixed frame and now the frame is just going to be dependent on where we set it right here so we can set it to zero where he does not have a head or we can uh control it you know however we want like that to get this alligator acting like a puppet I'm just going to search for an empty to add to my scene and then I'm going to add an object constraint to limit its location I'm going to give it a minimum Z of zero and a maximum Z of one and then I'm going to grab my little alligator's head which has actually been separated from its body for the sake of this uh demonstration and I'm going to go to the time offset modifier and where we have frame we're going to add a driver and when you add a driver it lets you uh take any variable in in the entire scene whether that's rotation scale location whatever from any object and lets you plug it into an animatable key frame uh so that it updates in real time with that other variable so as we change that that that other thing's location it'll change this thing's value so if we just set it to the empty and we're going to take some math and we're going to multiply it our variable by five and make sure that we're using the Z location of our variable and we'll go ahead and uh add one to that now with that driver setup if we grab our empty now you can see that as we move it up and down we can parent our alligator with the driver I don't know I think it's kind of fun he say every time every time I try to do one of these or I show like a cool thunder thing it always devolves into to me [Music] just it's so [Music] scary okay anyway I got way too sidetracked with that you I'm sorry that was my bad it has now been 3 hours of me filming and I just spent like 30 minutes looking at a alligator singing boss NOA what is happening all right now we're going to move on to probably my most excit the most like video worthy thing that we're going to talk about that made me really want to make an intermediate grease pencil tutorial and that is seamless textures seamless patterns really simple it uses a similar um effect that I used to get the uh perfect symmetry in grease pencil where uh the the symmetrical drawing actually updates in real time by using collection instances except we're going to use it in this instance for the sake of perfectly Distributing a drawing on a grid um so we're actually just going to go ahead and use this uh scene I think so first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put our two uh alligator drawing bits into their own collection I think I'll just put them in symmetry doodle um because I I have that set up as a collection which is already generating a symmetry for me even though I don't want it now with my drawings in symmetry doodle I'm just going to select my main collection and I'm going to shift a collection instance and we're going to select symmetry doodle um which has been put onto my 3D cursor location which I don't want so I'm just going to set the location a zero so with my symmetry doodle collection instance selected you can see that uh it's updating at the same time as our bosanova singing alligator to make this seamless pattern uh work we have to duplicate our collection instance to make a grid uh so I'm going to hit shift d and then x and six and that's just going to move it over and I'm going to hit shift R to do that a few more times and then we're going to grab our our first collection instance again shift DX -6 and then we'll shift r a few more times and then we can just grab these guys on the edges we'll say shift d Y6 that moves them forward on the Y AIS and then we'll grab this guy shift d -6 to fill in that spot we'll grab these guys again shift D1 y 6 negative pretty simple just duplicating these guys a bunch we're going to shift Dy -6 and then do it again maybe one more time just to be sure shift dy6 do it a couple times now if we go to camera view you're really not seeing a lot of them but we're going to set it to orthographic and then bring the scale up so that we see a lot more of these guys and now for the payoff of seeing them all singing at the same time but the the really Nifty thing about this is that if I go into any of these grease pencil objects and start drawing you'll see that they are updating perfectly in real time across all of the instances similar to how they would update in real time with the Symmetry trick that I show off in my beginner grease pencil tutorial and this effect is just super fun to illustrate with um I kind of just want to show it off here as a proof of concept but as you saw in the uh preview animation you can actually animate uh with with any of these elements any of it can move around however you want if we grab our grease pencil objects you can see that as we move them around it updates in every single instance so if we sculpt anything to to animate it around you'll see that that uh updates with everything so if if we wanted to actually hand illustrate different frames of this animation it does uh update across everything but yeah that's uh pretty much the effect it's really cool drawing with it and seeing your illustration update in real time instanced across in a perfect grid um you can even have the the seams kind of a bleed together which is fun like where you you're kind of drawing it so that one pattern flows perfectly into the next one it's fun to illustrate these kind of uh backgrounds where they seem to bleed the seams where it's kind of hard to tell where the lines are um and you can even exaggerate that by rotating your camera a bit the the actual seams of of your your distribution of of shapes can kind of be obscured and this is a pretty good example where uh one element actually just goes so far into the next one that it uh really bleeds where where it's you know kind of hard to tell like exactly where the the distribution of uh shapes and and how they repeat is and with an example like this it's just kind of fun seeing these like fish swimming around this would be a pretty fun one to animate though I don't know that I will anyways that was a lot um with that alligator thing let's move on to the next subject which is mesh conversion or specifically converting a mesh into a grease pencil object now this is probably one of the more Advanced Techniques just because it does require a little bit of 3D knowledge but also you got to be comfortable with navigating the 3D model around cuz it can get kind of finicky uh converting a mesh into a grease pencil object and then joining that grease pencil object with a different grease pencil object that has stuff going on in this preview animation that I showed off you can see that our Sunfish model uh has some cool like painterly materials going on but they they actually kind of get hidden by this 3D model of of the of the Sunfish and it's not actually a 3D model per se it's a bunch of Grease pencil objects that were converted from a 3D model uh that are now acting as a mask to reveal uh the weird painter uh brush Strokes that I made for the fish but the technique is pretty weird so let me show you how how you go about it and to do that we'll just go ahead and uh create a whole new everything we're just going to make a new uh 3D model by sending our cursor to our world origin let's just add a sphere if you will we'll scale it down a little bit and what we're going to do with this sphere is we're going to convert it to a grease pencil object and when you do that it just puts some pretty basic materials and layers on it you can see that every single edge has been turned into a stroke every face has been turned into a fill material so it created this black stroke and this white fill and uh there's not much that we really want to do with this this isn't very great for us something to note typically uh with with this effect we want to duplicate our mesh and then convert it into grease pencil I forgotten to do that here so I'm just going to undo until I get back to where I had my mesh so I'm going to duplicate this mesh convert it to grease pencil and then I'll just scale it up just a little bit and then I'm going to go over to my uh layers and I'm going to turn off use lights on these and I think I'm actually going to get rid of the lines layer because I really just want this fill material oh excuse me I sneezed so hard that I stopped recording and went and ate dinner and I'm not recording this later anyways jumping right back into this project once we have our mesh converted into a grease pencil object which we can see here if I just hit Tab and grab the grease pencil and if we go to wireframe view you see that these are grease pencil Strokes um they have this fill material on them and we can set it as a mask for a different layer here so I have this GP layer with the sphere layer set as a m mask um now if we draw anything on this layer it's only going to be visible when it is in line with this fill material that we have set up so just to kind of play around with that and show you what it looks like I'm going to go ahead and hide the the base sphere that we had back here so uh if I can is it yep there it is I'm just going to hide it I'm actually going to add a new material and we're just going to do the same thing we did earlier by adding uh that texture So currently uh my my layer defaulted to 3D location for some reason which is not what I wanted I wanted 2D layers um and now you can see we have this kind of weird thing going on where if I draw in the shape it's it's instanced inside of it as if it were like an orb mask which is actually exactly what it is so you can only ever see uh the illustrations that are actually in line with the uh with the 3D mask that's been generated by converting this mesh into a grease pencil object typically the the way that I've seen artists like Sophie jantac use this uh method is that you would draw uh textures like I'm going to set the 3D cursor back here and then you could draw like painterly kind of textures and stuff in the background that would sort of shift around as your view change so I'm going to set this to where it wraps around from the front and then if I just keep rotating oh wait I I actually wanted to side evidently I don't want the front so then you can move the camera around and see that the mask is revealing these strokes and if we turn the mask off you'll see exactly what's going on we have all these Strokes all over the place it looks like the world's worst street art ever um but then we turn the mask on and then you have this kind of weird orb that has all all this uh this really crisp outline but then a a sort of a sketchy inside which uh could be a cool effect could be used to do a lot of cool things um let's play around with maybe adding a fill material that has a cool texture to it now with this fill material if I just draw a circle you don't really see the texture that much at all I guess I had the blend too high something that could be an especially cool effect to get with a a spherical mask like this is if we just lock our camera to the front orthographic View and then or I think this is the front and then I'll set my cursor right in the middle start drawing with the circle tool and then hit alt and S which will now make it a perfect circle that grows from the middle I'll hit enter and you can see we have this uh texture on it um that kind of creates like a crescent moon if we make it black maybe the white stands out better like a moon but um yeah it it's like a like an eyeball or like a portal and it's got this cool texture to it if we just uh scale up that grease pencil and then we'll just uh set this material to match the background and you see that ends up being a pretty interesting effect um I think what I would do with something like this is uh maybe also add a yellow material just a regular shmegular yellow and then go in with a pencil and just start uh adding some little fun details but yeah now we have this 3D mask that's kind of acting like a moon for our stars um it it's making our sphere kind of act like a crescent moon kind of with these stars that float around in the middle uh which is a pretty nifty little effect um another really cool effect with mask just while I'm playing around with the uh the settings and stuff uh this is something that I picked up from a Duo project where uh Duo essentially started by going into a layer and creating a white box basically something like that and then start moving your 3D cursor back in 3D space behind the box and then in a layer that's being masked by it you could get a different material and just draw like a little guy or something like that give him some eyes and then move your 3D cursor back a little bit more and then you can give him like a little uh chat box like he has something to say and I'm actually just going to send to back and now when we move the camera around in 3D you can see that it's like a little comic panel with depth where you only ever see the comic panel when it lines up with the mass that creates this box which I think is a pretty cool effect he says wow so cool I agree I think this is very cool you know what just for that we're going to give this guy a cool hat there's a lot more fun cool stuff that you can do with converting a mesh to grease pencil that involves like drawing on the surface of the object and then masking textures behind it um Sophie jantac has a lot of really great examples of that so definitely go check out some of her work if that's the kind of techniques that you're really into and want to see some cool work of anyways we can go ahead and move on to our next subject which is compositing compositing is such a fun thing it's it's like Photo filters but they happen in real time in blender so I just put together this little illustration and grease pencil super quick and it looks pretty flat right now I got a little bit of a a wave Distortion animation going on on this reflection to make it look like it's Ripple water flowing from our our character uh standing in some water here um but we're going to use the compositor to add some Pizzazz so to use the compositor and blender uh you go to your compositing tab where you'll have a bunch of nodes um I already have some that I kind of just keep in this file this just adds like a paper texture to stuff um but you have to make sure you have have used nodes enabled once that's done you can go over into your viewport and enable always under the compositor which will make it so that your compositor is actively affecting your viewport and if you look closely you can see there's this uh texture that's on on our illustration now to give it sort of a paper look um but there's a lot of really cool stuff that you can do in the compositor and you can even do it in real time to see how it affects your uh your animation so I'm just going to change this window over here to compositor so when you're working in the compositor you'll be working with nodes um which is usually something you would use with Shader materials in 3D or maybe geometry nodes those are a whole can of worms you can make a ton of videos all about Shader materials there's a ton of great videos out there if you're trying to learn Shader nodes for the sake of this video compositor nodes are pretty straightforward so if you hit shift a to add a node you can see there's stuff like color which would adjust the color settings and you can mix different colors together if you go to filter that's where a lot of really fun stuff is such as glare um which is just a super fun effect to add to any illustration you can see this is immediately um having a very uh cool effect on our animation we can even have the angle of the glare rotating around you can change the mix of it to make it stronger or weaker and it just feels like this this is already so much more Dynamic so much more striking looking it looked before we turned the compositor on you can also apply gradient maps in the compositor similar to how you would in a program like Photoshop or procreate just by searching for a color ramp node and now we have a black and white illustration and we can make it a bit darker this looks really cool I love the way that looks we can check it out with different colors this is a great way if you want to format your uh illustration for like a screen print like if I was thinking about printing a a white print onto a blue tea this is a a cool way of visualizing that and yeah you can just go crazy uh adding all kinds of effects and manipulating the colors of your of your illustration this this looks very cool this like glow that we have around the white parts of the character because of the glare that we put on it and this is just oh man I'm enjoying this this is like one of my favorite things to play around with in grease pencil is just going in the compositor and doing all kinds of fun stuff to it like this looks so fun another really fun setup in the compositor is a pixelate setup which I'll show you how to make super quick there's a lot of great videos of how to do this um it's really good once you have this done to make a a node preset so that you don't have to do all these nodes again but I'll just uh show you for the sake of making your own node preset real quick so you just get a scale node and we'll duplicate that which you would find just by hitting shift a and searching for scale then we're going to grab a value node and this is what's going to control control how much we're pixelating our image then we're going to get a math node and we're going to set this one to divide and then duplicate it and set this one to multiply set that value to one and that value to one then we'll just plug our value node into each of those then for this one this will go right over into these slots and then these will go right here into the X and Y of the prior one and basically what this is doing is is this first scale node is scaling it down by five and then the next one is scaling it back up by five but you'll see there's not really anything going on with our drawing yet but if we add a pixelate node to the middle of the scale nodes you'll see now our uh illustration is being pixelated which has a really cool look this would be a really fun way to create uh game assets if uh you want to use some procedural blender animation uh to create Sprites that would be a really cool application for this this blender actually even has its own game engine which a lot of people don't know about uh it's not good it's I don't think anyone has ever actually published a game with it but it does export to HTML 5 so if the end goal is to just put something up on hio um that's this is something you could do you could just make grease pencil objects and pixelate them and that can be your Sprite so I'm going to zoom this out a bit and then we lower the pixelation rate a bit until it's a bit more legible I think three is probably a good number here a really cool node that just got added recently in 4.0 is the kahara filter essentially tries to emulate a sort of a painter style at least that seems like the usual uh application that I've seen people using this for pretty cool you know it smears some stuff together kind of the way that paint would smear together on a canvas um though I don't think it's always the most convincing effect uh and I found that anistropic usually you can get a bit better of a look if you uh play around with these settings yeah and that's that's looking pretty cool of course you can see it starts to really take on a shape of its own if we set the size super high and I mean even this is kind of cool I me it's a lot this this gets pretty uh CPU intensive I think so if your computer isn't great um this might not be something very fun to play around with um but for the sake of demonstration I think it's pretty cool all right now for the next SL final technique that I'm going to show you in this intermediate grease pencil tutorial is the lattice modifier uh which is a really Nifty tool another great technique for uh implementing 2D illustrations into a 3D environment so in this scene we have a few grease pencil objects kind of layered at different depths and uh there's not much going on animation wise with them they're kind of just uh got a noise modifier on them but with this jellyfish character that we have in the middle if we look at our modifiers you see I have this lattice modifier set up on it and and if I just grab the lattice which is this grid that's behind it and I go into edit mode I can grab vertices on the lattice and move them around to manipulate the uh location of our grease pencil geometry relative to the vertices on the lattice and this isn't just something that you do in 2D you can then stretch it into the uh 3D plane if I just grab like a chunk of these we can see that you get a pretty cool depth effect as it calculates the location of The Strokes it kind of lets it look like the jellyfish is poking out in front of the fish and stuff um and this isn't something uh super practical you know just like for if you're trying to edit you know geometry around like you can do that without a lattice modifier we can just go in here and grab these uh these points you know and then grab it and turn on the proportional editing and you see that we basically get the same effect that the so it leaves you wondering it's like why why would you use a lce modifier well that's because something that the lattice modifier has that regular old uh edit mode Transformations doesn't have is shape keys and shape keys are very cool because you can animate them you can key frame them you can have them controlled by drivers and uh just to kind of show you some examples I I'll go ahead and set up a shape key with this lattice so we start with the lattice selected and we're just going to add a shape key and then with the shape key SEL selected we'll go into edit mode on our lattice and we'll just shift the jellyfish over like well maybe grab a little bit one just shift our jellyfish guy over like this and then with the shape key we can go ahead and lower the minimum uh the range minimum to1 and you can see that we kind of get this inversion of our transformation of the lattice kind of giving him this fun back and forth motion and something that we can do to animate this we're just going to take this value type #f frame which is is going to add a driver and actually what we'll do is we'll put sign frame and maybe we'll divide it by five then close the parenthesis and then divide it by 10 and now we have just this little back and forth jiggle in motion which looks pretty funny uh maybe we'll just divide it by five and that's just a super quick little procedural animation that you can uh slap onto your your GRE pencil objects with a lattice modifier another cool thing about shape Keys is that they can act independently of each other which means that if you have something driving one shape key you could have a totally different operation or even just a manual key framing of an entirely different shape key I'll try to visualize that for you so if we go ahead and grab the lattice that we have and just add a new key we can take the geometry that we had down here or maybe let's just take the geometry at the bottom and just shift it forward and then we can even rotate it on the x axis and scale it on the Z and bring it down something like that so now if if that goes for it it's like that the the tentacles kind of go out maybe maybe we want these these ones over here to actually uh go go to the back and then rotate like that so it's sort of sort of an inverted thing going on here and then we'll put its value at # sign of frame and we'll actually put it at a negative sign just for fun and then we'll divide it by two and now we have a very weird animation going on with that let's divide it by uh let's divide the frame by three then divide it by five and now he's uh doing the the silliest little dance that you ever saw in your life I'm just going to take this guy and set my 3D curs right here so that I can rotate him rotate them on the X a little bit like that and then for the rest of these tentacles we'll rotate them forward a little bit bring them up the whole the whole thing has some pretty cool depth and you notice that if I edit stuff to offset it away from the lattice it maintains its distance from the lattice so even though it's not sitting directly flat on this animated piece of paper in between its legs it's still keeping the distance as if it had like bones shooting out of the piece of paper pushing it around which is pretty neat it's Nifty for uh not having to do too much animation I think this would look even funnier if we put like a wave distortion on it and then # frame / five and now he is oh man what a wiggly guy we've created here but yeah that's an example of how you can use grease pencils lattice modifier to animate your drawing around manipulate the geometry in a way where you could use procedural elements to drive the animation and with that that is the last tip that I have for this very long intermediate grease Pencil video I have been filming for so long today um I am so grateful to everybody that has watched all the way up to this point congratulations to you on learning a lot of cool little grease pencil techniques anyways that's all I got for you guys today thank you so much for watching and thank you so much to my patreon supporters for making videos like this possible if you liked any of the designs that you saw in this video go check out my sticker club I'm going to be making Oceanic cmk themed stickers all month and those will be going out in the mail next month in February so go check out the patreon if you're interested in getting some stickers in the mail and helping me make more videos like this I'm excited to make some more YouTube videos this year so if you'd like to follow along be sure to subscribe maybe share this video with some other friends that are trying to learn blender or that friend that is always saying that they're trying to learn blender but they still haven't yet and they're going to watch this part of the video after you send it to them and it's going to be a little bit awkward maybe that friend's name is Jeffrey that would be really funny if it's your friend that's named Jeffrey this is my impression of Jeffrey I'm going to figure out how to use this thing and I'm going to make some cool stuff someday maybe I'm just joking anyways that's all I got for you guys today thank you so much for watching I hope you have a good one and I'll see you next time your stickers are going on their way [Music] I'm putting all of them in the meal today yeah

Channel: Bryson McBee

Views: 17,693

Keywords: blender, grease pencil, tutorial, techniques, tricks, tips, 2d, animation, art, design, how to

Id: v-CCz2wFmDA

Length: 60min 35sec (3635 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 15 2024