Blender Grease Pencil For Beginners #Blender #GreasePencil #Beginner

here's an outline of what we're going to be covering in this video first we're going to be looking at the ui of blender where things are laid out how to customize it workspaces things of that nature then we're going to move into the 3d view and how to navigate using your three button mouse then how to move objects around inside of your 3d scene then we're going to discuss different work modes that you're going to be using inside of blender then we'll get to grease pencil we'll start by talking about strokes and just kind of lay out all the concepts related to them and then we're going to progress to talk about animation how how you animate first of all objects in the scene so you understand the animation workflow and blender and then how to animate strokes and grease pencil after that i'm going to do a demo drawing a bouncing ball where i'm utilizing all the tools that we've discussed up to that point so you could see it all working to towards uh doing the full animation then we throw some effects on the drawings and then we are going to create a second scene so we can see how to compose multiple scenes in a single blender file uh bring them together in the video editor and start working with multiple scenes so that we can do our final render from the same blender file and it will be our full animation cutting to uh the different scenes so let's get started as soon as you open blender you're greeted by this splash screen so depending on which version you have it's going to be different once you click anywhere off of the splash screen it goes away and then you're greeted by the default scene which has this camera cube and light so the first thing i want to talk about is just generally the layout assuming it's your first time you've opened blender it might be a little overwhelming to see all of these uh different options and menus and you know what's going on so the first big concept is the view panels so once you get more familiar with blender you're going to start noticing these boundary regions where you see the icon changes to this double arrow and then what you're going to see is that you can change the size of these view panels well another thing you can do is change what the view panel is looking at so a view panel you change its type uh right over here so what type of view panel is it gonna be and you can make them for example all all be 3d viewports if you so desired and then you'll see that this is also 3d viewport now this is a 3d viewport down here so the point with this is to let you know that a view panel is just a general thing that can be of any of the many types so when you open a blender file at first let's just go ahead and start a new file i'm not going to save so you're greeted by this default layout with the 3d view panel the outliner the properties and the timeline so another thing that's important about view panels is that you can customize them as much as you want so one way to do that is when you have this double arrow icon while you're over some boundary you can right click and then you can do for example a vertical split and now you've just created a new view panel you can also do a horizontal split and the nice thing is that when you go into any area you can basically split very generally so let's drop one in here now let's say you've created too many of these view panels and you want to reduce the view panels well actually before that a cool trick to know is that when your mouse is over any one of the view panels if you hit control space and control space it's a toggle to maximize that particular view panel so this will come in real handy when you're drawing because you immediately notice how it kind of gets rid of a lot of ui noise like that you might not be using at the moment and it just maximizes what you're working with so that's control space um for that behavior so now let's say we want to get rid of these so you do the same thing you look for the double arrow and then you right click and then you just say join areas and it'll allow you to join areas if it's a feasible joint if it's possible to join i'm going to hit escape to get out of here so you'll see when i click here i don't have the option to join areas because it wouldn't know how to join two view panels into one view panel but it does know how to join one into one so sometimes you'll see the join areas sometimes you won't and it's just a matter of whether or not it makes sense so let's just get rid of some of these uh view panels and then you just once you've clicked and then you just move your mouse over so i recommend playing around with that just get comfortable with that idea and then in general you'll be more comfortable with the ui you'll be able to look at this and say okay these are just four view panels one is showing the outliner 3d view timeline and the properties which i will explain the specific view panels in more details later on okay so now that you know that what a view panel is how to create them how to delete them now you'll understand these tabs up here these are just pre-configured view panels and they're pre-configured for the particular workflow that you might be working in whether you're sculpting modeling uv editing what have you i'm going to use my middle mouse button and the scroll wheel and i'm going to scroll to show more tabs so these tabs again are just pre-configured layouts you could set this up by yourself by showing different parts of the menus setting different types for the view panels dragging and moving them but these are just convenience pre-packaged pre-laid out things for common workflows that you're going to be working with inside of blender so that's what those are those are the view panels the final trick or that trick but the final feature of the view panels is when you hover over a corner and you see a plus you can also get the same behavior by drag by clicking and dragging i find it a lot easier to just hover and right click to to do these things but the one thing that you can't do with the hover and right click with the double arrow icon that you need from the corner is if you actually want to pop up a view panel which is very helpful if you have dual monitors so i can just if i hold shift then click and drag now i've popped up this view panel and i can pretty much customize it i can um here i'll have to since i don't have that split icon on this view panel i'll have to use the technique of clicking here in the corner and dragging to create a new one so basically you can set up now now i have this border now i can look at the double arrow and click and then maybe do another um i didn't want to do that i'm going to hit escape i didn't want a vertical split i want a horizontal split and then maybe here i want the outliner and here i want the properties for whatever reason and then i can move this off to another uh view panel the benefit of this is of course if you have dual monitors you can basically have uh utilize your entire uh screen real estate like maybe you'll be just displaying the renders in one thing or maybe just the shot camera etc etc so that's the essence of view panels i recommend play with that and then the next part we're going to talk about is specifically this 3d view view panel its features and what it does so now we're going to talk about some features of the 3d view panel um when you start blender up this is the default layouts it gives you has these four view panels the outliner properties timeline and the uh the 3d view panel so once you're when you're working with the 3d view panel the obviously the most important thing is being able to navigate inside of your 3d scene so your scene is effectively an infinitely large space and you can put things into that infinitely large space of course you're limited by your computer's memory your ability to store values away from the origin which is zero zero zero in x y and z um so you can just put anything anywhere of course there's hardware limitations but just as a concept it's an infinite world as you can see it stretches out to forever in all directions and you could put objects in there and the center of this world is called the origin which is zero x zero y zero z so the first thing you wanna learn is how to navigate inside of this 3d scene so it all revolves around the middle mouse button on a three button mouse there are ways of setting it up for a two button mouse via your preferences but i'm not gonna cover that you should have a three button mouse it just makes your life a lot easier um so now that you have your three button mouse what you can do is if you click and hold the middle mouse button and sometimes it's a scroll wheel like it is from for me so i just click and hold it now i could tumble around the scene this is called tumbling where you're just kind of rotating around some arbitrary pivot in the scene in this case it's the origin and the the cube is at the origin so the next thing you can do is if you hold shift middle mouse button click and drag so you're clicking and holding and then you're dragging this is called uh panning so you're just basically moving side to side uh here's a cool thing about blender if you look at the arrow uh the mouse icon you'll notice that as it reaches the edge it's not like it stops but it comes back on the other side so i can effectively keep scrolling in one direction for a long time this is really cool really useful because let's say i needed to move a lot it would if it didn't have this behavior i would actually have to let go and reclick again and the same thing for going up or going down uh okay so you just click cold and now you're panning uh the next thing is control and then middle mouse button click and hold and then you're zooming so you can zoom into a knob towards an object you can also do the zoom with the scroll wheel another way to do all this is with these helpful little icons here but of course there you have to then move your mouse off of what you're doing come over here to activate them uh well to use them so if i click and hold the zoom and drag and then i can do the same thing if i click and hold the pan now i can pan around my scene so i can either do it with middle mouse button shift and hold middle mouse button control and or middle mouse button tumbling there's no i guess you could tumble this way using this 3d gizmo which shows you your orientation so this is telling you this is going forward in x this is going forward and y this is going up in z so as you click and navigate around you can see that now the number pad is really useful in the sense that um you can get a perfectly like side view if you click on x so now we're looking down the x-axis it's like shooting out through the screen into our brains or you can click y to be looking down the z the y-axis you could click z so you're effectively looking at it from the top now uh or you could click in here and just do like freely tumble around or you could click in here and do the same thing so this helps you kind of get an orientation of the of the scene um a lot of these overlays and features you can enable or disable here so if i don't want navigation i can just turn these guys off get myself a little bit more screen real estate let's say because you know i'm comfortable with the uh with the keyboard and and using it for navigation um but in the meanwhile if you need these they're helpful this other one here what it does is it puts you into your camera view which as you can see we do have a camera in the scene there's a camera in our scene um this is what's actually going to render what we're looking through right now is like a god camera it's just there but it really has no representation it's just like it allows you to view your world but it's not a physical camera that you can select it's called your view so if you want to look through your camera if you click this icon here it puts you in that space and the reason this is important of course this is what you're gonna render so this is uh effectively the areas that you're gonna be outputting your renders to so if i tell if i move my mouse and then it takes me out of the camera so i can again click that icon to come in here or click and get out i could also hit the number pad 0 which again is nice if you have your numpad in your keyboard then you don't have to like move your mouse all the way here to click it it's just a matter of like let's say you're working and then you just hit zero on your number pad and it and you can keep your mouse kind of in the area where it was um so that's hitting number pad 0 and an important thing you can do is if you hit the letter n it opens these side panels here a lot of viewports have tools that are activated by either n or t so you see it's toggling my tools on the left side so it's n and t so if i hit n in the 3d viewport what it shows me is the item tool and view again view is like that god camera that it you don't see view here it's just a default way for you to look at your scene that's not the camera that's been created so you can't render from a view but it allows you to look and navigate around your scene so if you wanted to let's say i wanted to change the way i'm looking at this cube i want to frame my shot differently what i'm going to render if i try to move now then i have to do this but let's say i want to actually move what the camera is looking at um i could actually go into my camera view and then click lock camera to view so now as i move around you're gonna notice that it doesn't kick me out of the camera i'm moving the camera with me as i'm moving so now i can reframe my shot as it were and then i can unclick that and now i'm it pops me back out of the camera so this is pretty powerful it allows you to set up once i hit zero it allows you to set up uh what your what you're going to render now for grease pencil i understand it's 3d but sometimes you are going to do camera movements so these things are still relevant and important because grease pencil is fundamentally just any other object inside of your 3d scene which will of course get into the details so that's how you would lock your camera view to this area and that's that's the essence of navigation and looking around your scene um one more thing is if you see this grid here what that does is it changes from ortho isometric to perspective or orthographic to perspective uh yes orthographic it says it right there uh to perspective so you can see perspective it has vanishing points so everything is kind of going towards a vanishing point orthographic does not everything is all the lines are parallel to one another along the axises so you've seen some games that use this type of orthographic view or you can do that you can also hit the number pad 5 to switch between the the different modes and the number pad here comes in use again because if you press let's say the number one it takes you to the front now you're looking down the y-axis three you're looking at the side you're looking down the x seven you're looking at the top and then nine i guess you're looking at the bottom now of course when you when you're in one of these views you can get out of it just by click and dragging your middle mouse button again so you want to get really comfortable with navigating around your scene and in order to do that the other thing is being able to select an object so you can click select the object that's a right click sorry left click to select the object and what you could do is you could hit number pad the dot on the number pad and it'll zoom you into your object and make your camera kind of tumble around the object that you've selected so let's say for example so that makes sense like i have my camera selected now but if i tumble it's still around this cube and at the origin and it's not tumbling around my camera so i can hit the dot and now i'm going to be tumbling around my camera same thing with the light if i select the light and i hit the dot in my number pad now i'm tumbling around the light so this comes in handy when you want to focus in on some work you're doing and keep your camera relevant to that work that's about it for navigation so i definitely suggest practicing those things so that you can you know quickly get into something and feel comfortable with just moving around and selecting things and getting to see what you're doing and just keep in mind this is an infinite space that you're placing objects in uh so next up we'll be talking about the different tools and how to move these objects around and where that information is so now we're going to look at moving objects in the 3d space so as we said before again your space is a theoretically infinite scene that goes on to infinity in all directions but now you have objects in it and the center of your scene is the origin meaning it's zero zero zero so let's look at where this information is because fundamentally it's all numbers uh how far along are you in the x how far along are you in the y how far are you along the z axis so if you hit the n key and you see this item it'll show you the location rotation and scale of the currently selected item so if i select the light you'll see now i have more information because i'm away from the origin or if i select the camera this is basically telling me how far away from the origin i am so it's negative y in this direction uh it's positive x meaning it went positive in this direction and you could see that the negative y goes this way so that's why it's negative y six and positive seven and x and then it moves up so it's positive z uh about five meters so just to drive the point home let's select this this object happens to be our default cube and i can click and drag along the x-axis and this is going to determine where it's going to be along the x-axis so i'm going to ctrl z that now here i can click and drag for the y ctrl z and then click and drag for the z control z so here is all the information now the way you're going to normally move objects is not going to be by clicking and dragging here unless you really need precision like if i just click once and i say i really want it to be 0.5 meters in the x and then we'll see it's just slightly moved along the x so if you want position you'll type here or if it's going to be explicitly along an axis you can use these fields here you can also rotate along the different axises and scale along the different axises but the real way you're going to be working with things primarily is while you're in your 3d view you're going to be grabbing it with the letter g and drag sorry not drag you just left click select the object hit the letter g and you're not pressing anything and then all you do is move your mouse and it's going to move along there as you want it and then when you click when you left click it leaves it there so we're going to do that again we're going to grab it with g we're going to move our mouse now you can also restrict this movement to accesses once you're moving the object already now if you hit the letter x it'll restrict the movement to x if you hit y it restricts it to y if you hit z it restricts the movement to the z axis um the next one is of course you might want to rotate it so you hit r and it's going to rotate when you rotate i'm going to hit escape to get out of here without actually changing it when you rotate if you're too close it's a little uncomfortable because it just rotates so fast so you want to be a little bit a little bit of distance away so when you hit r it's gonna you can control the rotation a little bit better and of course you can also constrain it to the axises x y and z and then when you click that's where it is next up you can scale so again you want to be a little bit away because it's based on how far you move from the from the origin so if you're right here any movement it's just going to scale very fast so i'm going to hit escape i want to be out here now i'm going to hit s and now i can it's it's a little easier to control the the scaling then i just click to get out of it of course i can constrain it before i click to x now we have some shearing because it's not exactly perfectly aligned to accesses i could do it along the y and i could do long to z so let's just click and there we have it so i'm going to g to grab and move and that's how you move the objects and this is where you see the information of what you've changed so here i can un-rotate it by hitting zero i could set the scale back to to be uniform so it's one one one and then i can put it back at the origin of the scene by so what i did here was i clicked and dragged to select the three fields and then i hit zero so now i'm updating the three fields and it puts me back at the origin of the scene so that means i'm at the very center of the scene so that's how you move scale rotate objects and how you use this item properties here you also notice if you have your property view panel when you have the object selected you have the same capabilities here as you do through here so if you hit the letter n that goes away you can use the properties here if you want to so if i g grab move r rotate s scale i have values throughout here i can click and drag make these zero click and drag make the zero click and drag and make this one so what you see here is going to be the same it's going to be based on what you have selected and that's how you place objects in your infinite 3d scene every value of where it is along an axis is basically a distance from the origin point up next we're going to talk about different modes that you'll be working with inside of this 3d view space and now of course this is still relevant to 2d grease pencil because fundamentally as we'll see soon the grease pencil drawings that you're going to be doing are still 3d objects inside of the scene it's just that we're looking at a camera down one side so that we're looking at it straight down one axis so it's going to look flat but it's still going to be three-dimensional and you could use that to your advantage by you know doing overlapping shapes introducing 3d objects to your 2d animations things of that nature so it's really powerful once you're comfortable with navigating and moving objects in your scene um and up next we're going to be um talking about the different modes that you can work in with blender all right so now you've had a brief introduction to the ui you understand the view panels how to change their type how to create them you've also understand how to do navigation inside of the 3d viewport and also how to move objects inside of your 3d scene so now we're going to look at the next layer of manipulation of data or information which is going to be the modes so they're broadly speaking two modes you're going to be thinking about one of them is the fairly straightforward one which is your shading mode which is how this viewport displays to you as a user so you could say show me what it would look like if i were to have rendered by clicking this button here or don't do the rendering because right now it's very easy because it's just a cube so it's pretty instantaneous also i'm in ev which you can see which render you are here in the which render you're in here in the properties so here i'm using ev i could switch to cycles and then you'll see that it's as i move around it's actually rendering it looks fuzzy for a moment as it calculates what it looks like it's pretty fast and responsive because it's just a cube as soon as your scene gets more complex it's more intense evie itself is a real-time render engine kind of like a unity or uh unreal or godot so it's i guess more efficient than its calculations it also has a few more limitations it it doesn't do the the ray tracing and depth and like sub surface scattering to depth and all that as you can with cycles but just the fact that it's so fast is pretty good but anyway this render mode here is telling you show me what it would look like if it's rendered and then of course it's going to depend on what type of render you're using next up is material preview mode and if i had textures on this cube now i would still be able to see the texture on the cube but i wouldn't have all the lighting ray tracing etc so i'm not i want to see a full render i would just see kind of what's the surface what are the surface colors on this thing based on my texture and then finally the most the most common mode because it's faster it's easier to display is the solid shading and actually finally finally uh the fastest and easiest is the wireframe where you're just seeing an outline of the geometry that you're working with you're just seeing the edges so the more common is solid mode so that's it for modes there's more information you could get into particularly if you're sculpting you might want to check out matcap and what all these different things are about um but for grease pencil as far as i known it this really isn't going to be that useful so you could of course look at the manual for more information about that i don't want to make this video longer than it already is so those are your shading modes how you're going to preview things here in the 3d view panel and of course it depends on your render when you select the render mode alright so we're back in solid shading mode now the next type of mode that's important is your work mode what type of work are you doing on an object so remember when we move an object rotate or scale it's so any movement is relative to the origin so if i hit g and i move it it's just telling me values along x along the y and along the z of how far away i am from the origin i can click here in my properties to see that so i'm minus almost 8 in x 0.33 approximately up in the y or sorry forward and the y i should say nope uh yes i'm just slightly forward so this is the positive y has an actual letter the negative would have this one and i'm up approximately four in the z axis so that's what this information is saying so let's set it back to zero i clicked and dragged to select the three and then i hit enter or zero and enter put it back at the origin so now we wanna work obviously what we see in 3d are like just these amazing uh you know characters and scenes and all this stuff so it's not just built with cubes they're obviously manipulating the geometry at some point and the way that comes into play is you switch your mode so we're going to change from object mode to edit mode so once we're in edit mode we're able to actually manipulate the vertices so i can select the vertex now i can grab a vertex and move the vertex edges so i can grab an edge of course move an edge rotate an edge scale an edge and faces so now i can grab faces i can grab rotate scale so this isn't a 3d modeling video so i'm not going to get into all these tools because you'll notice that when i change mode my tools also change i'm going to drag this out just so i can see the names and you can scroll here with your mouse button so here you have all these different tools you can use for modeling but we're not going to get into modeling but the reason why i'm giving this example of the different modes with the cube is because a stroke which is what you're going to be using to draw for grease pencil is very is is an object in your scene and then you go into edit mode to do certain manipulations and then it has more modes that you can do so for example this a geometry it has multiple modes it also has sculpt vertex weight paint and texture modes the texture paint modes so if i hit tab it's a toggle between object and edit mode so here's an illustration i made to kind of help you see this this information it's also going to talk a little bit about the outliner and the properties panel so again in object mode that's really where you just grab rotate and scale an object and as we saw translation is your distance away from the origin rotation is kind of relative to the origin of the object itself and then of course scale so these are the object mode icons are the orange ones here and they're also the orange ones here in your properties and of course this is relevant to what you have selected in edit mode uh this should probably be one word here but once in edit mode for a camera you'll be able to work on focal length clipping planes near foreign that that type of stuff so it's relevant to what you have selected for geometry you'll be able to work with vertices edges faces uvs normals etc for lights you'll be able to work with intensity color radius and other attributes that are specific to a light and then for a stroke which is a grease pencil it's fundamental object it's data you'll be able to work with materials layers blend mode and opacity and all that's going to be uh here in your properties so these these menus change based on what you have selected these menus do not change like for example this is where we were defining our renderer so that doesn't change depending on whether you have a cube a camera or stroke or a light selected these are consistent they're they're attributes of the scene properties of the scene let's say and these are the properties of the current selection so they they change around so let's look at that let's go back into blender so now i'm gonna if you if you don't see all the menus or you see some kind of clipping here you can use your scroll wheel to scroll the menu just like we did with the tabs up here so if i scroll this here i can see all the menus here now keep your eye on this area as i change my selection now i'm going to select the camera you're going to notice that these did not change but these did change i mean there's still the object that that's consistent throughout if you're in the 3d scene you're an object and you're always going to have that orange tab but the rest of the tabs change based on what you have selected so if you have a light you'll see you have properties for the light if you have a camera you'll see you have properties for the camera if you have an object selected you have properties for a geometry vertex group shapes key uv maps vertex colors normals etc all that type of stuff and materials modifiers uh particles uh so all of that all of these tabs here are based on what you have selected so hopefully that demystifies a good chunk of what this menu does it doesn't tell you explicitly in detail what every single tab does we will get into details when we talk about grease pencil but i think it's important just to know what what it means why they change and what they represent so fundamentally what they represent is unique data to a particular object so back to this image here so we have object mode which is moving the thing around inside of the scene we have edit mode which is uh properties of the particular object that we have selected but then for example in some cases we have more modes so here when we have a grease pencil stroke on the layers we can have draw mode sculpt mode vertex paint mode and weight paint mode and you can work with the layers here in the outliner but you can also you'll primarily be working with them here in the properties view and the dope sheet which we'll talk about later once we get into actually drawing and doing stuff which is coming up so bear with me so hopefully that demystifies the properties panel and the outliner so you get a sense of what's what so now that you're a little bit more oriented and where the information is let's actually go ahead and add a stroke and start explaining uh its properties so when you're going to add an object you have this like red and white circle thing um that's the uh 3d cursor and that's where things are going to happen uh you could move the 3d cursor around um i usually move it around by mistake right now i can't remember oh so i have to click cursor here and i can move my cursor and then if i hold if i say shift c i believe yes it centers the cursor and centers my view the reason again why this 3d cursor is important is because that's where things are going to be placed and sometimes you can do things relative to that 3d cursor so now i'm going to you can add something to the scene by either clicking add or by doing shift a so i'm going to add a grease pencil stroke now i could add a blank but that means that i have to build things up from scratch i have to create my own layers create my own materials if i create a stroke it's going to have a couple layers already pre-made and a couple materials pre-made let me just show you let me make a blank one then i'm going to grab it move it along the x over here and that's just this orange dot which represents the origin of that object but there's nothing to it um i'm going to do shift a again i'm going to add another grease pad so i'm going to add a stroke and then i'm going to grab and move along the x this way so this was the blank we added let me just move it down here if i can can i move it down there oh popped it out all right i don't think i can reorder it this way anyway my point is so i'm going to minimize this here and if i expand this grease pencil it only has basically object and edit mode it doesn't have any more information but when i added the a stroke it's still a grease pencil object you can change the name of this to whatever you want so it's but you can see by the icon it's the same type of object and it also has the same type of edit mode because you could see by that kind of curve which represents a stroke but when you add a stroke it also has two layers that are added to it and then if you look at that in the properties so now we have two layers and whereas if i were to select my grease pencil stroke here i don't have any layers but i could add layers if i want to so i could do it this is just adding a stroke is just a convenience that pre-populates things the other thing it pre-populates are materials for being able to draw so if i just added an empty a blank see i have no materials and that's basically going to be your inks like which colors you're going to be working with when you draw we'll get into all of that in detail when i get into the demo of doing the bouncing ball but for now let's just stay a little high level regarding the concepts so i'm going to go ahead and delete this guy i'm just going to hit delete so i selected it i hit delete so now looking at the stroke let's talk about the modes that we get into with grease pencil so again the modes are still driven here i'm going to actually hit well now i'm going to leave the tools i was going to hit t to toggle the tools away but i'm going to leave them so we can see how they change based on your mode so now i have the stroke selected i'm clearly in object mode which is the orange icon top level uh placement in the world of the of all the data that's represented by this object here all of its layers uh so now i could hit tab go into edit mode and now i'm going to be working at this level of data and what and then you'll see that my tools changed so i can extrude i can change the radius i can blend shear transform fill um but the mode that we really want to play with is draw so once i'm in draw mode i can select the pen and then again all of my tools change i could select a different type of brush here we're going to get into all the details here later on regarding all these different options right now we're just focusing on the concept of modes of like which work mode you're in what type of data are you manipulating so now i'm in pen mode and i can i can draw but you'll see that it's kind of on a weird plane and as i draw there it's also on a weird plane so we'll we'll figure out how to control what plane uh our drawings are going to be on once we get into that but basically what i've just created i've just created more data more points and strokes through the points that i can later manipulate change the color all that stuff but i'm i put all of these points if you can imagine each drawing is like i'm adding a point point point point point point point point point inside of this layer so if i go to my layers back here here i'm looking at my edit mode stuff i can go i can see i'm working in my lines layers it's just what i happen to have selected when i went into draw mode and i can hide it and it all goes away or bring it back i can lock a layer uh all that stuff so that's draw mode there's also sculpt mode and you're gonna see my tools are gonna change again so i go to sculpt mode so now i have different tools i can like grab parts of my line and move it around i can smooth it out uh etcetera so this is uh yet a different mode but it's still working on the on the point point point point points that i made and the reason why i say 0. is because the stroke is fundamentally a whole bunch of vertices and depending on the material it has it determines how it's drawn how the how the what the quality of the line is so if i were to go back to edit mode and then i can see that i can select the points that make up the line or i could select this other stroke or this stroke here but the reason i can go back and forth amongst them is because they're all on the same layer so that's edit mode uh sculpt mode you saw i had actual brushes i can use to manipulate the stroke draw mode now i can use my pens and my fills change my pen type to be able to draw differently different strokes it's still a series of points it's just that the quality in which they're rendered changes based on the material and the type of pen properties that i use to draw it so if i go to edit mode you'll see again they're just points they're all just points they're just rendered based on the quote-unquote ink or material that i chose while i made the stroke so so that's what that's uh that's all there is to grease pencils so we're kind of like peeling different layers of the onion back right so first it's like we've got this infinite scene we're putting objects in the scene we're navigating in our scene where we're setting different shading modes in our scene based on our needs uh we're placing up new objects in our scene like we created a stroke and then we're working in different modes of with the data so that actually becomes very easy to understand after you've run through it like a couple times and it's like okay which mode i'm in my tool set changes what i'm actually doing changes am i do i want to work on a stroke on a point-by-point basis like i really wanted that fine level of control or do i want to create new strokes by drawing or do i want to manipulate them broadly with with the sculpt with the sculpt tool so it gets easier it might seem like a lot at first but again we just reviewed a lot of basic concepts and once you work with it a few times it'll become more and more clear so so that's it for modes and explaining what the different modes mean again one more quick peek at this uh oh no i closed the image but anyway i think you get the concept so now when we're back here in object mode now i can actually move the whole object so if i hit grab if you can imagine i'm moving this this origin which is a dot and inside of this object is all of this layer information so i could basically have a drawing and really place it in the 3d scene wherever i need to place it now when i'm in object mode i could also animate in object mode um and then and i can also animate my drawing independently so i can have a drawing that's animated and then also animate its placement in the scene and i will show you exactly how to do that once we get into the uh into the demo so up next let's take a slightly closer look at uh strokes so let me go ahead and just restart the scene not going to save anything and up next we're going to be looking at the how you would actually go about using grease pencil in blender all right so now we're getting closer and closer to the demonstration but first i'm gonna give some details and concepts regarding drawing with grease pencil so first of all when you start blending you're in the splash screen you could instead of starting with this general 3d scene you could start with this 2d animation template so let's do that you could also do that when you go here to the new menu to the animation what it does is it exposes um the common tools that are used and it presets the view panels for grease pencil so it has outliner here showing you what's in your scene it has a tool properties here based on what you have uh selected so here's i can see the strokes um and then it has this dope sheet over here for animation which i'm not going to talk about just yet but what i do want to show you is address the first kind of elephant in the room which is could be it was a point of confusion for me where wait a minute so i'm in a 3d viewport but this so this is like a 2d canvas what how is this represented in the scene it feels a little weird but do not fear if you just middle mouse click and tumble around you'll see that this is indeed still a 3d scene with the template that was created using the 2d animation setup is it created a camera that's looking straight down the y the y-axis so that you're drawing in the in the x and z axis which is the setup that it has here so that your strokes will land on the x and z plane so if i hit zero go back into the scene and then i'm just going to quickly make a stroke and i am using a tablet so if i middle mouse button and tumble again i see that my stroke is actually an object in a 3d scene and just like any other object if i get out of draw mode and i go into object mode i can grab and move it around or i can r let's grab it again click r and rotate it or s and scale it so i'm just going to bring the origin back to the origin so it's still 3d it's still a 3d scene and this is actually how you can like put 3d objects and have 2d drawings working together it's just blenders 3d with grease pencil which gives it 2d capabilities that can be placed in the 3d scene so the first concepts we're going to look at i'm going to go back to zero to look through my camera is that a stroke has three modes that you're going to be working with those three modes are primarily well four modes let's say object edit sculpt and draw if you get more advanced and you build armatures and then you'll be working with weight painting you could also do vertex paint for to do your color work differently but i'm just going to be going over these four modes um object as i shown you is your ability to work at object level and move it and place it around in the scene so that those are the orange icons representing the object level so your translation rotation scale next up is your edit mode in your edit mode you're able to select your your your strokes and then you can grab them and move them and you'll notice that the origin isn't moving so that means i'm not moving the entire stroke object i'm just moving a particular stroke which doesn't isn't too obvious so i'll make a few strokes so that it can differentiate better you can see the difference so that's edit mode sculpt mode allows you to change an existing stroke so now i can hold shift and smooth that out i'm going to widen this area here just to see the tool names so if i hit grab an important key is f to increase the radius of the tool shift f to work with the strength where one is maximum strength so now it's moving it a lot if i hold shift f again and i reduce the strength you can see it's not working as strong so if you want to do something subtle and not really change the line you can play with the strength and radius so i'm just going to hold shift and smooth all right so that's the sculpt mode is the ability to to change with using these different tools you can also vary the thickness of the line in a particular section of the stroke if you want and then finally the draw mode this is where we're creating strokes so let me go ahead and make another stroke here and another stroke here and just to hammer the point home they're in the 3d scene so i'm going to hit zero get back into the camera all right so now let's slow down and look at draw mode a little bit more closely so for draw mode there are three things that are very important number one is selecting which brush you're using and a brush is really just a set of properties that determine the quality of the line so if i were to select ink you'll see that my line is like this if i were to select this guy here and then my line changes it gets thick and thin more um you get the idea so you can make custom brushes just like photoshop but we're not going to get into all that right now so that's the first thing you want to select the brush second thing you want to make sure you're working on the layer that you're intending to work on so if you want to be working in the line layer this is where you select your layer and you'll see which layer you're on in these three places you'll see it in the you can select it and see it in the outliner or select and see it here in the properties for the stroke you could also select it here in this dope sheet so the dope sheet is for animation and i'm i will address this but we'll talk about that later first i want to focus on strokes so what i'm going to do is just hide it for now all right so you've picked your pen type you've picked the layer you want to work on now it's the third part what's the ink you're going to use so these are default inks that were created by the program when you went when you created the 2d animation template the inks have different types you can make a new ink if you want so let's go ahead and make a purple one i'm going to create a new material here and i'm going to rename it to whatever i need and this is usually what you do is basically set up your palette the inks that you're going to be using now an ink can be a stroke so let's look at that i'm going to middle mouse button to scroll this menu so i can see everything let's make it purple so i'm just going to make it purple okay and then i'm going to draw a shape there so you can play with different properties for the stroke you can also set it to have fill so that it fills itself and look at the properties of fill you can change its color as well so there you can have stroke fill you could have just the stroke or you could have just a fill fill can also change its type to be for example gradient and you can also change it to be a texture where you would have to go find the texture file that you want to use to fill in the area that's covered by that fill so again this is how you customize your ink uh of course you can delete things that you're not using um but this is the third component for when you're drawing so again the first one is pick your brush second one make sure you're in the right layer third one pick the ink you want to be using so so that's that's drawing that's how we create things and let's say we want to fill a shape after the fact and maybe i want to work in a separate layer so let's look at layers again layers of course you can create rename do whatever you want you can create as many new layers as you want you can reorder layers and then each layer can have it an independent blend mode and opacity so each one will have their own setting for that you could of course delete layers so it's really flexible and important for controlling what you're drawing so let's say i want to fill the shape now i would select the fill tool and then i would make sure i'm in the right layer of course and then i would pick a fill ink so something that has a fill property set so if i look at here i see that it the fill property is set so when i click it fills the shape so that's how you would use the fill tool i'll show more when we get into the demo so that's the draw mode now let's look at sculpt mode again if we hit f i'm just going to increase the radius and now i can move so here it just moved the fill because of the layer i'm in so i can come back to lines and move oh my strength is down so i'm going to hold shift f note my strength is up oh i was in thickness i thought i was in grab tool so if i grab yeah c so now i can change the shape of my drawing i can smooth it out a little bit etc so that's in general sculpt mode and then finally edit mode i can click select a particular stroke move it i can move it i can rotate it i can scale the stroke so that's what i can generally do in edit mode so those are the those are the uh four modes that you're gonna be working with when you're working with uh with strokes uh again when you're working with drawing you wanna pick your brush pick your layer and then pick your color and we'll be going over this more extensively once we do the practical demo and i'll be talking through all the things i'm doing as i'm doing them let's talk about animation so there are three ways to do well there's more than three ways there's like particle effects physics things like that but generally when you think about objects moving in this in the in a 3d scene there's generally three ways to look at them so the first way of course is just the object so you see everything that is inside of a scene is effectively an object so the first way is let's say you have a model and you've built an armature and then you animate the armature so what you can do is you go into a special mode for armatures for animation that's called pose mode and you go ahead and animate the armature which is bound to the geometry so the geometry now moves all the vertices move based on how you're manipulating that armature so we're not going to get into that in this in this video the next thing of course is just moving an object which is actually true for all for these three types here that i'm talking about so this is just like a plane geometry it doesn't have an armature that means you can't animate the vertices or edges or anything like that you can't really move it um but well you can't move the components of it vertices that just faces but you can move the whole object so you can move the the square uh or the box around um and then next this is what we're going to be looking at which is how conceptually how grease pencil is set up so you can imagine let's say this is frame 1 frame 5 and frame 10 let's say so we know that it's an object in the scene that we can animate broadly but then we're gonna be doing drawings so how are these drawings organized well they're organized instead of frames so when you're in frame one and you draw and then you can move the time slider to frame five make a new drawing move the time slider to frame 10 and make a new drawing so this is how your animation is going to work and then when you play it back you have this sensation that this little ball is moving up in the on the screen so let's look at object level animation first so let's get out of our scene here and i'm going to just go ahead and hide this stroke object that i made for that illustration and then i'm going to do a shift a and i'm going to add a cube so now let's just go ahead and focus on animating at the object level and again this is relevant because you know i'll go ahead and do it right now let's add a stroke right now and then i'm going to g to grab move it along the x just so you can you can see it another thing i'm going to do is i'm going to change my world properties just darken the color just just a smidge um and so now let's look at how we're going to animate these things so we can see that this is an object and this is an object it's represented as things in our scene we already know that we can look at their location rotation and scale information here hitting the end key as a toggle or using this little arrow here we could also see that object information of our current selection here so if i g grab the cube and move it i see that information here now if i grab this stroke it's just showing me that i've moved it along the x 3.9252 meters so now let's talk about animation so animation is about basically recording this information of the object in the scene over a sequence of uh frames so the first thing we want to do is have this viewport set up to be the dope sheet which it already is and the dope sheet has subtypes dope sheet is going to be what you use for object level animation um and then grease pencil is what we're going to use when we are animating the strokes inside of uh the frames and i'll give you an example of that of course so let's go back to dope sheet we are looking at our object so now what we're going to do is we're going to hit the letter i and i'm going to set a key on the location that basically means record all the current information about where i am the location and associate it to frame one in the timeline so again i'm going to hit the letter i and then i can hit the letter l so now i've created a keyframe and it shows me the information now i can go over to a new frame so move forward in time i'll hit g to grab the cube and let's just move it here and then i'm going to say i'm going to hit i again so notice that it was not automatically created sometimes you want that behavior and you could turn that on here with auto key so once something has a keyframe and you're in a new frame and you move it it'll just record it but for now let's just do it the um the i guess the main way so we'll hit i and we'll we can click location so now we've set two keyframes and the cube is going to move across these two keyframes so if we hit play it just goes through the timeline and that's how you animate of course we can animate rotation we can animate scale at the object level as well so of course we can do the same thing with with our stroke so i'm going to grab the stroke i'm going to hit the letter i location and i've just created a keyframe that's basically taking a snapshot of where i am in time and associating it to this key so we'll go forward in time and then i'm going to hit g to grab the stroke and just move it and hit i location so now when i hit play you see that everything is just moving based on how i did it so that's the basics of animation is just setting keys and having the object move from one position to another with an armature and a character of course it's more complex or with grease pencil if you're if you're drawing a character it's going to be a little more complex so let's get into how we can animate with grease pencil so i'm just going to do it a little quick and explain what's happening so first of all let me get rid of the animation we did here otherwise it's going to be tough to draw on it while we're talking so let me look back through the camera i'm going to go to zero i'm going to hit g to grab my object move it in x by hitting the letter x and then i am going to go into draw mode uh so i have the ink pen selected that'll work fine let me see which color i'm using i'm using the black color okay that'll work and then finally what layer am i in i'm in the layer lines okay and you'll see that we have this new icon here showing that hey you've got animation on this object although we we deleted the key that it's moving towards it still has one key here so that's where this information is stored for the object so now i've got my layer selected i've got my color selected my ink and then i have my brush selected so let's just do a quick drawing so first of all since we're working inside of frames for grease pencil we need to go into grease pencil mode of the dope sheet so we could come over to the all right so this moved back because when i grabbed it and moved it i didn't update the the information so let me go back and do that so let's go back to frame one let me get out of draw mode let me hit grab x move it here and then i'm going to hit i again to insert the key location so now it's updated so now when i move it it stays there all right so let's go back into grease pencil mode i'm going to hit control tab so that i see all my modes it's a little easier so i don't have to and i could hit escape to get out of there that would have to keep moving my mouse to come up here so i'll just control tab and go into draw mode so now what i am going to do is i'm just going to draw something right here so now as is shown in the example we are in frame 1 and we've drawn something so it's basically stored this information well i guess in this case it's showing this the squiggly as well but it's it's associating it to a frame the the drawn stroke so we're associating it to frame one we're on the lines layer so now we move over once i start drawing these things are going to disappear here's i'll show you what i mean because i'm creating a brand new frame that frame is empty by default and i just populated it with this object so what happens is grease pencil holds the information of this frame up until it meets a new frame in the timeline and then it shows that so then we're gonna go over to one more frame and then we can see that we have this animation happening so that's the basics of animating uh with the animating a stroke or animating a drawing instead of grease pencil so it's nothing too crazy um what could be a little annoying is the fact that it disappears each time so when i go to draw something new i can't really see where it is or it came from so that's where ghosting comes in so ghosting ghostings if i'm in this middle frame it's going to show me the information of the frame before the one the current frame and after so that i can better you know adjust my timing or you know make sure that it looks similar enough so that it's like the same ball so it helps me plan out my animation um and that's that's basically it that's really all there is to doing the animation now the trick of course is doing you know interesting drawings and you know using fills making it pretty if that's the route you want to go as well um so just super fast recap dope sheet animates at the object level oh well actually yeah let me let me demonstrate this because what's interesting is so i have these framed animations moving along here let me go back to grease pencil turn off the onion skinning and let's say i want to animate my object what's interesting is now i'm moving i'm animating this thing at two levels sorry i was in draw mode on the stroke so let me get out of draw mode go back to object mode so now the strokes are drawing because i've drawn these strokes in different places for the associated frames but now i could actually move the move the whole the entire uh stroke object at a at a higher level so i'll go into dope sheet and then i know i have a key where it sets it here but maybe here i want to grab the stroke and let's just make it move up a little bit so i think that's z and i'm going to hit i uh i location so now that's recorded my location the new location data so the grease pencil animation is still happening but so is the the object like the parent of the whole thing so that can be really confusing at first and i'm hoping this helps kind of demonstrate the difference of how you have two different modes so let me hide this go back to this picture so now we can kind of see i'm gonna hide the cube so now we can see how the cube we can really just move it or animated an object but for grease pencil you can actually animate the whole object which was it moving up and you could also animate individual individually inside of frames that move along with the whole object so now what we're going to talk about is actually the time has come we're going to get into the practical example so you you have all the information you need at this moment technically but it's going to all come home once you see a practical application and how it's going to be used so let's go do that so now what we're going to do is a bouncing ball so we're going to be drawing this bouncing ball i'm not going to do exactly like this and we're also only going to do one arc and then we're going to loop it and animate the object so that it gives the illusion of moving across the the screen so this is i think this is from richard uh williams i think his name is his book on uh animation uh he worked on roger rabbit and he talks about the principles of animation um arcs are an important principle conservation of volume silhouettes um spacing timing squash and stretch these are all principles that you should uh get familiar with they're they're guidelines they're not hard set rules anyhow this is what we're going to be making so let's go to blender this is a brand new 2d animation scene so first thing i want to do is i like to frame up my my scene so i can see the frame i'm going to use my middle mouse button to scroll kind of bring it back here a little bit i'm going to bring this up here so i can see my animation information i'm going to rename my strokes uh it's a simple scene but it's just a good habit to get into name the stuff in your scene so that you can organize and once your scenes get more complex you might have multiple stroke objects and it'll be easy to figure out what's what okay so next thing i'm going to look at my layers so i have lines and fills i'm actually going to create a new layer so i'm going to come over here i'm going to add a layer i'm going to call this guy background i'm going to use this to draw in some reference lines to help guide my animation so now let's just move it down all the way to the back looks good um so my layers are good let's look at my palette how's my palette so i've got a solid black line sure red line i'm not going to use this i'm just going to remove it a solid gray fill okay there's dots i'm not going to use so i'm going to remove it i don't think i need to create anything else i'll just be doing black outlines with gray fills for the for the bouncing ball all right so first off i want to lay in some reference lines so i'm going to be in this background i'm going to select well first let's make sure i have the right brush selected also i'm in draw mode um so let's go and just create a line so that i have a reference ground plane and that did not render well oh because i have the solid i have the wrong material selected so i'm going to control z so yeah with the material i had selected a line has no concept of how it's supposed to do a fill so let me just delete that so i'm going to make select the solid color here now i'll draw the line if i hold shift it just stays straight and then i'll hit enter that looks good to me next off i want to have a reference for the arc just to make sure it looks good so let's say we start here and maybe end over here and just kind of bring it up a little bit so this this will be the arc of our animation so i'll hit enter so now i've got these two references i'm going to lock the layer and let's start drawing the bouncing ball so i'm going to hold shift middle mouse button scroll wheel to zoom in shift middle mouse button to pan scroll wheel to zoom in and now i'm in the right layer i have the right ink and my pencil i don't want a pencil i want to use this i want to get the correct brush all right so we're going to start with a squashed ball whoops i'm still in the arc tool so let me undo that ctrl z go back to the drawing tool and let me expand these out a little so we can see their names so going back to the draw tool i've got my ink so let's just draw okay that's not great uh let's do it i'm gonna control z control z just kind of get a little loose here ctrl z until i get something that i can roughly work with i'm not gonna make the perfect that's good enough all right uh next up we are going to be kind of bouncing away so we're going to elongate be roughly the same size um shift middle mouse button to pan around and then here we're going to be kind of further along on the top of the arc but maybe starting to round out a little bit more and then here [Music] we're getting even closer so we're going to almost be back at our full size here we're at the top of the arc we don't have any squash or anything because we're kind of at a neutral position now we're gonna start squashing uh let's just actually draw it similar to this one you know what i'm going to go into edit mode and i'm going to go to this frame i'm going to select this guy control copy stay in edit mode and then ctrl paste and then g to grab and just move him over here make my life a little easier and then ctrl t go back into draw mode and we can kind of see what's going on so so we're moving along and oh that's what i wanted to mention this onion skinning so onion skinning is pretty helpful you toggle it here with this button you could also do it over here you can also say how many frames you want to show in onion skinning before and after by simply going to the stroke properties scroll down you see onion skinning so i could say show me up to like even ten frames before and or eight frames before and eight frames after so then that way i could get a sense of how the animation's coming along another important note about onion skinning is if you're in rendered mode you're not going to see it so it's going to be really frustrating because you're going to be hitting this like what's going on and it's just because you're in the wrong shading mode you want to be either a material preview or solid in order to be able to see the onion skinning all right so we're coming along and what do we want to do next i could probably just copy this guy you know i can draw that again that's not that hard all right so now we're elongating gravity is starting to pull down pull us down and then we're moving a little faster so our spacing is going to increase or the distance between the drawings is going to increase that's our spacing creates speed and then we're going to have very quickly next to it a contact and then back to our squashed so now i'm going to trim my timeline here but just click and drag so that when i hit play it doesn't go all the way up to 250 it just sleeps on what i've done so then here's our animation so far this is the bouncing ball so now we're going to go into other tools that we can use to kind of clean up and work with this um so first of all i'm gonna control middle mouse button to get in a little bit and then shift middle mouse button to look at this a little bit better so i want to go into sculpt mode on this guy because i want to fix so i'm going to hit f make my radius bigger and just ctrl z this hit f make it a little bit bigger shift f to check the strength so i'm at maximum strength that's what i want alright so now i just want to just improve this shape a little bit on this guy and hold shift to smooth it out and shift so holding shift smooths it out and i'm using the grab tool well it's the push that's why it wasn't really behaving the way i wanted so back to f and grab grab tool i find works a little bit better for me anyhow you get the idea i'm not going to make this perfect uh i just want to show the different tools and how you would use them to kind of refine your work so now let's go up a frame to this guy and let's help him out so let's just smooth this um i i'm gonna trim this guy by you going back to draw mode and using the cutter and cut here okay that just cuts overlapping stroke uh so let's go back shift tab to stroke sculpt sorry um and we want to make it look like it's kind of the same ball so it doesn't lose too much volume and we want the center mass to be moving along the arc so let's bring it kind of back this way shift to smooth shift to smooth uh looks good to me and now let's go up uh and let's just make this guy look a little bit better shift smooth uh let's get to me shift middle mouse button let's progress to the next frame and it feels like it lost a lot of volume so let's give it some volume and still make it just a little bit of elongation shift smooth uh move that out a little bit you could also play with thickness so i can make that a little thicker let me undo let me reduce the strength because it's just coming on way too strong so let me do that okay that feels a little better um so back to grab and there's this guy here shift move and let's go to our next frame and bring in the grab tool that's good let's just make him a little more rounded looks good to me go over to the next frame uh shift smooth just to kind of get the lumpiness out of him then make him round and somewhat elongated uh shift middle mouse button to pan go to 47 make this guy feel like it's the same volume that's the rest of them can actually zoom back a little just to double check good enough here we are should be at our most elongated so it's narrow narrower and longer and then finally we have our contact which is pretty narrow and long it's just before it squashes so that'll help it really get that squash sensation and the squash this guy they look a little different i'm going to hit f to reduce the brush size a little and shift to smooth and i'm gonna increase my onion skinning because i can't actually see this frame it's more than eight so now i can see it uh and i'll say it's good enough so now when we hit play the first thing i notice is that the timing feels off so i can see here that it is about 25 frames per second so it should feel real time ish off by one frame so now let's work on the on the timing so the timing is when things happen i'm going to control middle mouse button to zoom in shift middle mouse button to pan and just kind of rinse and repeat to see the timing a little bit better so now the time it takes to i think that generally all the timing is too slow so i'm going to select these and i'm going to hit s to scale then i just want to watch them make sure they don't completely overlap each other because then i might lose some information so i want this to be a little bit closer to this and then as it's speeding up and then it's going to kind of really slow down here at the arc and then this should happen faster this should happen faster and then this should happen even faster so less space between that means it's happening faster into the into the hit so i'm going to reduce this to here and hit play it's a little better but it still feels slow so i'm just gonna grab them all again and hit s to scale them all down the scaling happens relative to where i'm at so let me bring this back here so that the scale happens relative to that hit s and just scale them in a lot more all right and there we have the bouncing ball so if i just hide my reference plane and there it is there's the bouncing ball so up next what we're going to do is figure out how to um loop the animation and then offset it so we've got our animation and now we want it to loop i'm just going to turn the onion skinning off and we want it to loop it still feels slow let me scale this a little let me just adjust the timing just narrow the space between everything a little bit more and then trim and spacebar all right it's feeling a little better now timings improved so now we're going to make it loop and the way we make it loop is we're going to use a modifier the modifier we're going to add is the time offset modifier and we're going to say custom range and what i want you to loop is between 1 and i'm going to make it 22 so that means that when it hits the end of the loop it's going to come back here which is where we should be looping basically so i'm going to make this 22 hit enter because the last frame is the first frame is the same as the last frame in a in a loop so now if i extend my timeline it should loop uh beyond so let's see i've got regular time offset frame 1 to 22 custom range is selected and let's go into object mode zoom a little bit oops hit zero to get back into the camera shift middle mouse button here so now we see that it's zooming or sorry looping so it's looping so but in order to to get the real effect that we want we have to kind of have it progress right so the way we can do that is by animating it at the object level and just just one little nuance thing that got me stuck when i use this time set time offset modifier you'll notice that when i was in draw mode it and i it let's see and i have the ball selected i don't know it works but sometimes as soon as i applied it it wouldn't be looping here i'd actually have to go out into object mode to make it really uh loop so if you ever get stuck you put the modifier you hit custom and you set the frames of the grease pencil drawings that you want to loop and it's not looping out out of the out of the range of the frames just change your mode go back go out into object and then come back in all right so now we're in object so we're not working with grease pencil frames where we're drawing strokes so we want to use a dope sheet now to animate our stroke object so we wanted to start here so we're going to hit the letter i hit the letter l and then when we get to so i goofed i should set the time offset to 23 to make sure that it comes all the way and makes the contact oh no i think what i can do is at 21 um now at 22 i'm going to grab and move the ball in x to where i think it should be i'm gonna hit i and location so now here's a little uh trick what i want is for this position to just hold i don't want it to actually interpolate between here and the target position i i made so i wanted to hold for this whole time so the way we do that is by by playing with tangents so if we go to the graph editor we can actually see our animation curves and then here i see how it's moving in the x direction my object right so if i grab this guy here i can play with the handle type and then i can set it to actually i want to play with the handle type here at the beginning so i go to handle type and i want to make it interpolation mode constant that's what i want so now you see there's no gradual changing of the x values it's just going to hold hold hold hold hold pop change right so that's gonna stay where it was up until here then it pops changes and now it goes to the next bounce so now we have effectively the bouncing animation so that's why i needed to come into the graph editor you could also set your tangents in in the dope sheet i just wanted to show you because seeing the actual curve before it was this spline that was gradually uh changing but now you see that it's just holding and i can expand here and we're just really playing with our x location and just had a right click and interpolation mode constant so that it held so now let's go back to our dope sheet and now here it's even showing us visually that it's holding this green line wasn't here before it's saying this animation is actually holding up until the new one so we do this um and let's do this one the other way so the next one we want is probably around here and then i'm just going to grab the object move it in x to where i think the contact point would be there i could hit i l for location and again it's going to do the smooth interpolation so the object is moving you could tell when the object is moving by looking at that red point so the object is moving here it's constant the object is not moving because i made it constant interpolation so now let's just change that up again let's right click interpolation mode constant and now it shows us that it's not going to move and it's going to get to this frame so i'm going to hit space bar and there we go we've got our bouncing ball let's trim the timeline to here and there we go we've we've made our animation uh i do think it is uh it's not perfect but i don't want to make this video too long so it's good enough for you to get the idea of how we worked with grease pencil um let me select the object to create frames to make drawings we use the sculpting tool we used editing to copy and generally place things and then we use sculpt mode to refine the line and draw mode to create the lines so that's that's really like the main points that we're focusing on and then we worked in the dope sheet to actually animate at an object level so we're transforming this whole thing we changed our interpolation type here in order to have it hold hold hold hold hold and then snap to this new location where you can see the snap if you're looking at this orange dot right so it just snaps from one frame to the next so here we're at the end of the animation but then we move the whole object over so when it loops back we're back at the beginning of the animation and we just have to make those points match uh they don't match perfectly um it looks kind of like it hits here then it plop flops down and that really robs it of some momentum visually it kind of stutters back for a moment but i'm not going to take too much time refining the animation um so [Music] so now we've done that we've also learned how to use time offset to loop our frames in grease pencil independently of our full scene timeline and again this is all happening here in 3d space if we hit play we can see we've got our app our bouncing ball moving uh moving around so so that's the bouncing ball hope you found that useful and now we're going to create another shot so now we've learned how to create basically one shot this is our character we've got our camera and it's working but now let's say we wanted to cut to another shot that's showing the ball bouncing towards us that's what we're going to be working on next actually before we get into creating a new scene and uh how to cut scenes together inside of the same blender file which is actually really cool let's i forgot to show you how to use the fill tool in the context of this demo so let's select the object now what we want to do is be in our fill layer we can block our lines layer since we don't really want to be messing with it we don't necessarily need the onion skinning so to use the fill tool first of all ctrl tab to get into draw mode select the fill tool a very important part is just to make sure you have something as a stroke that's set to type fill um so let me middle mouse and then shift middle mouse to bring us up here so now what i now that i'm in the right layer i'm in the frame i want to be in i simply click and it fills the the ball move over here next so it's pretty straightforward to do the fill and then once we're done i'm actually going to show you how to use some effects really quickly alright so we are all filled up so now when we play the animation uh we have this solid object so here are some really cool effects that you can use with grease pencil you apply the effects by going to the effect property of the for the grease pencil object the first one we're going to do let's do shadow so now we're going to create a shadow we can't see it yet because unlike onion skinning you need to be in a different mode so now we want to be in rendered mode and you see this slightly offset thing so i'm going to bring it okay that'll bring it back i actually want to bring it down let's go back to frame one and let's have the shadow i'm just clicking and dragging and then i want to kind of squash it oops squash it so the scaling is happening relative to the point and i want to bring it down here so now i've got this contact shadow and i guess i the the stroke that i had selected is determining the color let me see okay so this this this sets it up as if though the light source or you know somewhere over here up here and it's casting the shadow so now we have a shadow in our object we can zoom back and that's all for free so we quickly have a nice shadow we can use and then let's do another effect so let's collapse the shadow now let's do a rim so now you see that it created this rim light we can play around with where it is whether it's coming from the top or the bottom let's say it's coming uh from the top like that now when we animate it we've got a rim light we've got a shadow all for free uh pretty quick and easy so that's what i wanted to cover for for this part here was just that the the filling how to do how to use the fill tool how to create the shadow with the effects and how to create the uh the the rim light now we're going to look at creating a new scene and basically drawing the ball kind of coming towards us as if though the camera came from like a kind of a wide shot to kind of a closer shot looking at the ball uh and then we're going to cut those scenes together render and we're all done and i hope you feel comfortable with using grease pencils all right so i've been working on this demo for creating multiple scenes i've done it several times now because blender is crashing on me sad face so just for full disclosure uh this is my gpu i checked the forums and they do say that blender is having is a little crashy for this gpu so if you don't have this gpu it might not even be an issue for you could be the drivers could be blender who knows so anyhow back to the tutorial so this is where blender does its scene management and what we can do now is just create a new scene so if i were to create a new scene you'll see it's completely blank but what i actually want to do is make a copy so i'm going to do full copy now looks like i have two scenes that are identical because actually that is what it is so let me rename the first scene and let's rename the second scene you guessed it ball02 all right so now here we have two our two scenes so let's change some things i'm going to be deleting some information here so here we see we have animation data on our object we could also see it here in the dope sheet again the orange dot showing that our object is in fact moving so let's kill that clear animation data so now we're not moving we're not progressing anymore because the object is not translating in the scene uh next let's kill these effects and next let's kill the this modifier so now we're just back at our original drawing no looping no fanciness all right so now let's uh clean up the grease pencil let's clear it out so we can do our new drawings so i'm going to unlock these layers select the frames delete delete keyframes so now it's a brand new stroke object that i'm going to use to draw so make sure i'm in the right layer make sure i've got the right ink aka material make sure i go into the right mode to draw and so it's having air going into mode i saw that before so it's starting to get a little buggy fingers crossed we don't crash so i'm going to edit mode went in there smoothly now i think i can go into draw mode okay cool so i'm gonna go to draw and i'm going to start trying so first ball here second one here it's getting closer and let's just say third one here super close uh and i want to close this line for the fill tool to work okay so now let's go ahead and fill it select the solid ink uh go to the fills layer select the fill tool and fill and fill and fill okay so back into object mode alright so now we have these two scenes so if i go come over here we have the ball going off screen and over here to o2 we have the ball kind of coming towards us so now in order to cut these together we're going to have to create a third scene we can call it final cut for example so this one we will do new we don't need to copy the information over we'll call it final cut and we're going to switch our ui mode we're going to go into video editing so if you don't see that maybe if you hit the plus you'll see video editing video editing and that's where we want to go so to add the sequences it's like when you add something into the 3d scene you do shift a well you do shift a here and we're going to be adding our scenes so there we've added our first scene there we are and then we want to shift a add our second scene and there we are so now we can effectively edit a more complicated sequence with multiple shots uh in the same blender file so the advantage of this is i can come back here let's say for example and let's say i want to actually make draw it a little bit closer so i can go back to this scene go back into 2d animation ui layout and come over here where i want the new drawing uh we are in draw mode we shall draw we shall select you uh select the right ink and then we'll draw this guy here oops i was in the fill layer uh let me go back into lines and then we'll go into fill fill pick the solid color fill all right then we'll we can go back to our final cut and again back into video editing and let me zoom the timeline out here navigating this timeline is similar to the scene it's kind of all middle mouse button click centric so if i just click and hold the middle mouse button i could pan scroll wheel brings me out a little bit and shift and click and then i can move it around this way you could also use this for resizing it as well but now you see that the change i just did shows up so that means you have this kind of iterative workflow for your for the shots and you can also be working on cutting your uh your sequence of shots together and then finally we can go into rendering so when we want to um render we have our scene properties here as always uh we'll set our render eve is a real-time render it's pretty fast uh we could reduce our samples let's just say 16 so it goes by pretty quick when we pull the trigger um there's a bunch of options i'm not going to get into because this video is already very long i just want to give you the basic notions and then you can explore on your own here we set up our output properties so our resolution percentage we can reduce it if our renders take too long and we're just trying to maybe just see it and we're not too concerned that it's super high quality we're more concerned that it renders quickly we can reduce the percentage of our renders and then we've said our start and end frame uh you could also send set those right here so we're our current frame is 89 let's let's just set it to 90. then what else we got frame rate frame rate 24 frames per second output it's gonna just default to where this file is so that's where it's going to render to and then we can set it to for example uh ffmpeg video which will allow me to make it uh h.264 set the quality so now everything is pretty much set up for the render and now i can just go to render render animation let me scroll so we can see a little bit better and there we go so it rendered pretty quick because it's eve so i didn't even i didn't speed that up or anything i'm too lazy to do that but let me show you the final result once i find the project folder here we go here we go here we go um okay so it's it made it this mkv type i'll show you how to change that here in a second but anyway here you see the animation so this is how you would render your animation so now you have a sense of the of the workflow a to z for um for grease pencil using blender uh so if you wanted to um if you wanted to make it a an mpeg for an or a quicktime avi you could change that here one thing to look out for when you're working with the video editor is that let's say for example you go back to another to one of your scenes you go into to the animation mode and you you change some information you draw something new whatever and then you come back to your cut scene and you go into video editing mode of course and then you you scrub through or you play through and you don't see your the changes that you've just made in the scene if you notice this red line down here this means that blender has cached the frames so in order to clear the cache you hit control r and now it will force blender to re-evaluate the scene so you should see your changes now so it doesn't happen all the times but if it if you do find yourself in that situation now you know control r just clear the cache and then you'll be good to go so this concludes the tutorial thank you so much for watching uh hopefully you found it useful i certainly found it a lot of fun to make very i learned a lot in this in this whole process so you are now a grease pencil yellow belt so go forth and be inspired make fun stuff i hope to see it and again thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next tutorials coming down the pipeline

Channel: Crafting With Bits

Views: 2,279

Keywords: Blender, Grease Pencil, Beginner, 101

Id: tAH9b_jRWek

Length: 118min 5sec (7085 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021