Blender Grease Pencil: Character Turnaround Sheet - Redux

hey everybody Paul here once again back in 2018 I did a tutorial on making a character turnaround sheet using the then-new grease pencil tool inside of blender it's still a very popular video on my channel but I think it's probably time that we had a revisit is a year and a half since there have been a lot of improvements to workflow as well as under the hood in general in the grease pencil so in the following video I'm going to reintroduce you to the grease pencil and take you through some steps to help you manage your assets in a simple and effective way to draw and create a character turnaround sheet I hope you're ready why don't we get started so what we'll be creating today is this character turnaround sheet now this is the character Carl from my home based webcomic and I've created a very simple asset with a few layers here and the materials that I've used are in my materials tab for my grease pencil we're looking through the camera right now and a camera is essential for rendering out an image and because grease pencil is an object it doesn't depend on a resolution think of it more like a vector graphic that the more you zoom in it's still a very crisp clear line that's because these are you know sort of like points on a curve when they get created the closest analog that's probably out there is something like Adobe Illustrator or Inkscape where you're drawing with vector art but of course you have the advantage of drawing in 3d space so you can see that this exists on a plane and this also has its advantages for 3d workflow and so what I'm going to take you through today is how to set up your grease pencil object very quickly and then a nice little time lapse of the the drawing process that I like to go through in creating this file so when you open up blender for the first time you get this splash screen and you get the nice default cube this is an optional thing but you can maybe make yourself a layout just for drawing however if you delete or add any objects they will appear across all of your tabs or you can just hit this little plus buttons change your layout and then go ahead but you know it's not entirely necessary because the modifications that we're making are very very simple I'm gonna leave this camera here but I'm going to remove this lamp it's not necessary for our purposes the first things you want to do when setting up a file is you want to go down to your scene properties and set your units now I'm in Australia so I use the metric system and my unit scale is going to be set to 1 but I'm going to change my lengths from meters to centimeters so if I go down to my if I hit T if your left hand toolbox isn't showing and you go down to your measurement tool you can click and drag a length to see how many centimeters these units are basically representing so for two meters each of these squares here represent about what would that be 10 centimeters I guess yes 10 centimeters so that 20 of these would be about 2 meters and this is probably a good idea because what we want to do is create a grid on which to draw our character and have the grid represent a real-world value now the other thing I like to do is go into my world property settings and if I'm in viewport shading material preview I can click on this little arrow here and click on scene world and in my world settings if I just click on that color swatch and brighten that up now it's almost like I can be working on a nice white piece of paper or I generally like to warm up my background a little bit so I have a little bit off-white in the warm tones but that's completely up to you whatever you can create to make the drawing of your strokes more visible to you that's basically the idea and so that's all I do to set up my blender settings in order to draw okay so why don't we go ahead and create a grease pencil object we just simply go shift a grease pencil and I'm going to select blank I'm going to go over into draw mode here so that I can set up my grease pencil to work to maximum efficiency now the first thing that I like to do is go over here to my View tab and enable my tool settings this gives me a nice tall shelf up here from which I can access my draw tools I can change the radius of my pencil and you can see a few other options here to further customize your brush the other thing I like to do is to set my view to front because I will be drawing in the XZ plane and that basically means in front view now a lot of people like to draw in top view that's basically drawing top-down just quickly switch my drawing plane to view here and do a quick sketch you can see that that draws in the XY axis and then if I was to go into my front view and draw a squid quick sketch you can see how that draws in the X z axis right and so that's what the having it on the view property does you can go into any sort of orthographic view or if I'm here in perspective and I decide to sketch that basically floats her if the view that I decided to have my camera set at that time that's why it can get a little bit tricky so what I'm gonna do is just gonna erase those strokes for a second go back into only drawing to front XZ which means it locks it off so if I'm in perspective view and I begin to draw it only draws in that particular axis and so you've got no issue with drawing in some axis that you didn't mean to draw in our next protocol is to go over to our grease pencil properties tab now because I started drawing it's automatically created a grease pencil layer our first grease pencil layer will probably see some blue lines so I'm gonna double click on where it says GP layer and I'm going to call this blue line so the next thing we want to look at is materials and this is where we begin to create a number of materials which we will use to assign to our pencils or pens or inks what we have to do is go new and I'm going to call this one blue line I'm going to go down here to stroke and the color I'm going to change that color to something like a blue and then I'm going to add a couple more so you have to add a material to this particular window over here and not just add materials here because this material will basically be where you select them from but this will basically be a drop-down of all the materials available for this grease pencil object so I'm going to add another material I might as well just modify blue line by selecting blue line there and then hitting this numeral 2 you'll see a little 0:01 appear I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna call this black Oh inks black and I'm going to change that color back to black and I'm just going to create a third one for our grid layer based on our blue line click on that to again and call this grey line and let's just set this one to maybe like a mid-tone gray okay now of course aside from just strokes you can also create fills and they are very very useful so we're going to create another material and I'm gonna base this on my inks black material I'm gonna hit that numeral two and I'm gonna re label it and call it fill black and I'm gonna change my surface from stroke to fill what this essentially does is if I was to select that fills black material is as I draw a shape it is filled in as the fill name suggests and of course anyone coming from Inkscape or illustrator knows just how a stroke and a fill work and these materials can be very useful as well so aside from just our materials we have a couple of other options such as the the brush set the default one is just fine for our purposes what I tend to like to do is to draw my inks with the draw ink brush but the draw pencil I like to assign the blue line to it with this pin so that if I'm say in draw ink and I'm in inks black and then I switch over to fills black and then I go over to my pencil my pencil will automatically have that material assigned to it okay and so if I have to do any more blue line work I can just go into my pencil and I know that that material is assigned now aside from just the brushes and obviously the race and this fill tool you also have a number of primitives which can sometimes come in handy so I'm going to select that gray line material here to demonstrate this so obviously we're going to have to make a grid so if I click and I drag I can draw a line and if I hold down shift I can lock that line to a horizontal a diagonal or a vertical line and so this comes in very handy especially if we want to make some sort of grid to draw our character on you can further edit these lines because let's just go into solid mode over here so that we can get a darker background and we can see this in edit mode you can see that these points are like vertices on a mesh and you can even do things like proportional fall off on a stroke also if you have a fairly complex line drawn and you go into edit mode you'll notice that this line has got a lot of vertices to it you can do something like a cleanup and to you know emerge by distance let's say 0.4 and you can see how that line now simplifies you can also do things like smooth you can add the amount it repeats or you know change the factor of that smoothness for that line but let's not cover everything because we want to get on to the actual drawing so now that we've covered the basics it's time to get to drawing so what I'm going to do is I'm over in my object data properties for the grease pencil line I'm going to add another layer I'm going to call this grid and I'm going to move it to my bottom layer this will be the first one that I draw runs let's just lock off the blue line layer mate so that we don't draw on this and just draw on this grid hey in our measurement tool we know that we've got roughly two meters about here and if we go into a solid we can sort of see what squares make up what height and so this will help us in drawing we see that this square over here is one meter and this is one meter well go over into draw mode and using our draw ink set to gray line I'm going to enable the line primitive click and holding down shift I'm gonna drag to draw a line roughly at the zero mark again at the one meter again at its su meter and then in between at the sort of half a metre mark I did it rough because I know that I can then go into edit mode and select all of those dots and using shift s just like you would with vertices or a curve I can snap these two grid and now once they're snapped to the grid you know that they are going to exist at these precise location 0 15 centimeters one meter one point five and two meters okay I'm just going to go into my material preview over here go back into draw mode and with my draw ink set to pencil over here I can go 0 meters 0.5 1 meter 1 point 5 2 meters nice and roughly okay and that's my grid what I wanted then do is lock that off and drop the opacity and now unlock my blue line that's where I'm going to be drawing my character now you'll know that we've got our cursor still set at this center over here I'm going to go over to my draw pencil on which I have my blue line material set and I'm going to add a modifier before I draw and the modifier is mirror now you'll notice as soon as you add it the all of the line work mirrors so you've got the grey line and all that and what we want to do is just have the layer blue line mirrored and so here under layer I'm going to select blue line the mirror on the grey grid disappears and we know that if we now begin to draw it will mirror it across the axis as defined by your cursor now why don't we go ahead and begin to draw on our blue line layer with our pencil set to blue line material and I'm going to add pressure sensitivity here and we might go into a little bit of a time lapse as we begin to sketch so I'm just sketching the blue line here using the mirror modifier and sometimes jumping into edit mode to do a little bit of scaling or sculpting you I'm just drawing out some lines here to measure the head height and give myself some markers to draw the side view on so that everything kind of lines up correctly on the character sheet so that if there's a someone who's going to be doing a 3d model they can basically put this front and side and have something that's very close so that they can then build that model to get the back view I just duplicate the front view and then just erase some of the features and then Zaatari draw some of the parts so that it looks like carved from behind this means that all the measurements are accurate and you know all the everything else just sort of lines up correctly now this is optional but I like to do a second pencil pass or a blue line pass just to refine the line work and before I do my inks so that I have a better template to work in sometimes when drawing things like arms and torso instead of going into mirror mode I will just select those vertices duplicate and scale across the x-axis and I'll do that again here with the leg one thing to keep in mind when you do this sometimes the stroke also mirrors so if you have a thick stroke it'll suddenly go really really thin but all you have to do is select all those vertices and here all s and then just to scale up like you would with a curve so now I make that a little bit less opaque and add an ink layer and then using my ink brush I go into using my black inks material and begin to further refine the inks occasionally I'll switch over to the fill black for the eyebrows I've enabled the stabilized feature on this particular brush and I've set it to something around about 15 now the stabilized does is just make it very easier to get a nice even stroke but you have to sort of watch it when you go around sharp corners so it's you know sometimes you might have to do two strokes or you might have to turn it off just to do that little cornering segment or maybe just lower it but it is certainly something that can help you'll see that I often just go back into edit mode just to refine some of those vertices sometimes I just clean them up sometimes I just use a proportional fall-off to just scale or further refine them and I find these tools invaluable to the process because it just makes the work a lot easy you can get nice clean looking inks very very quickly now to do the color feels is very simple I add a fill layer put it under the linework layer and then I make all the other layers invisible just having the inks on then with my bucket fill tool on my fill layer I simply select the color fill that I want to fill it with and click now the inks provide the boundary and grease pencil pretty much does the rest and that's a very quick way of filling your colored areas and there is our finished file of course the final step is to enable a camera and I happen to have one in the scene right about there and looking through it you can basically just place your camera where you want it these text things are basically just text which I wrote I'm not going to get into that part and and render now of course I've got my resolution set to 1920 by 1080 which is essentially HD at a hundred percent but it will inherit your screen resolution so most screens are about 72 dpi some might be 150 I'm going to assume it's 72 so if you want this for sort of some sort of a print resolution you can always just bump up the percentage so to go to something like 400 percent which would be like four times this resolution means you get something close to 300 dpi and then of course you make sure that your output settings are set and then you hit render image now still have a funny way of not rendering you know straight out when you hit that render button sometimes what you have to do is go image save as and that's where I'm just going to say there's edge PNG and give it a name and once that's done you should have a nice final image and this is something that can go into a PDF or be emailed to a production pipeline whoever's going to take that image next and that's pretty much the end of the process so I hope you got a lot out of that tutorial of course as always if you what you see here why not subscribe to my YouTube channel by hitting the subscribe button and if you're feeling at all generous you can join the ranks of my patreon supporters over at patreon calm it's the support I get over there at patreon that makes the production of these videos possible thanks for watching guys bye for now [Music]

Channel: Paul O Caggegi

Views: 24,819

Keywords: blender, grease pencil, character turnaround

Id: MmajxHa-kI8

Length: 20min 29sec (1229 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 20 2020