Blender Grease Pencil: Working with vertex color palettes

everybody Paul here now as you may not be aware some of you might but the end of this month blender 2.83 should be out in official release and so going forward for the duration of this month all my videos will be basically working in V 2.83 beta now if you want to follow along with any of the videos I would highly recommend you go over to the blender website click on their downloads link and scroll to the bottom of the page where it says go experimental clicking on this will send you to a slightly different download page where you will be able to download the blender 2.83 beta and try what has been Amin well it just means that all of the features have been locked off these are the features and the feature sets that are going to be available in the official release but they're just doing general bug tracking and crash reporting and all those sorts of technical things which we don't normally concern ourselves with but which are vitally important before an official release I'm really excited today because it's a tutorial is got to do with a new feature in grease pencil and that is vertex coloring which is already present in some form but in the new version they've introduced color palettes and I really want to show you how to work with those color palettes when working with vertex coloring on your groups pencil design and also where the pros and cons of still working in materials versus working in vertex colors live so why don't we jump into blender version 2.8 3 beta and take a look [Music] so today I'm gonna take a look at a new feature and that is called vertex coloring in the blender 2.83 beta normally what we would do to color a particular picture such as this let's take a look at this one for instance is to create a bunch of custom materials each with their own stroke and fill properties and base color and the advantage of this method is that at anytime we could go in and edit that base color and it would automatically show up what's more we could probably make a duplicate let's say we do this skin tone - I'm going to actually leave skin tone one here because this one is assigned to this color already and I'm going to assign skin tone to here and then change the color what that means is that skin tone one is still preserved but skin tone two is now being created as this alternate color that we can use and so materials are still very very versatile now with vertex colors the process is a little bit different and what I'm going to do is I'm gonna hit the end key over here to get our sort properties window up over here so we can still see our grease pencil and materials properties over here as we're working and this particular grease pencil tool has only got a few materials assigned to it a stroke and a fill a white fill and a black fill now the white and black fills on this particular object basically highlights and shading which we won't touch right now so I'm just gonna make them invisible so I'm just gonna have my inks there and my solids layer that I'm going to be working with we could probably just shrink this down a little bit and in terms of materials we're just going to be working with stroke and fill I'm gonna go into draw mode over here and as we know the conventional way of working let's just unpinned that would be to add a material let's go with skin tone here and with our bucket fill tool we would click on that area and it would fill it based on the boundaries of the inks or any other grease pencil objects that are in the area okay so in this case we can do this skin color here now I've actually set my leak size quite high and the thing is that you have to watch this size over here let's just erase these to illustrate this because sometimes if the leak size is too small you will go into other areas and you may even get an error low don't seem to be getting one today which is great now with vertex colors it's a little bit different what I'm gonna do here is on my pen I'm going to assign this stroke material and pin it and on my fill area I'm going to assign the fill material and pin it so that every time I go from stroke to fill it will automatically switch from a fill material to a stroke material I'm now going to switch from material mode to vertex mode and here in our active tool I'm just going to collapse this brush as dialog boxes and open up color and what you will notice is that on the vertex color we now have this palette that we can work with how does this work well let's select a color from this palette let's say we wanted a sort of a brownish skin tone over here with this stroke now we can stroke a line that is this particular color I'm just gonna erase this for a moment and just put this stroke in here where we wanted to create a boundary I'm gonna go over to fill which we know is gray and we should have the same color assigned to it we can now fill with that color and then just by switching between stroke and fill we can use the same pallet color on vertex for both these areas which is kind of handy creating palettes is actually pretty versatile I'm gonna create a new palette here I've already created one for my purposes but I'm going to create a brand new palette to show you how it's done I'm gonna base this palette on this particular image on the left so I'm going to go to this add new palette button you'll see that it goes palette 1 and I'm gonna call this Danny - and you'll see that there are no swatches right now but what I can do is on this color I can go color pick the skin tone and then I can hit this plus button and it creates a swatch based on that particular color eye color pick again for the hair and add and so on for the other colors that I need to create for this color palette and finally I'm going to do a black and white just for tones you can then sort this color palette by value or luminance or hue however you like however you like to work and then you can pin this bout of this palette so you get a sign of a fake user so you don't lose it and then what you have is a custom palette for your character so that then when we're doing applying our fill we've got our skin tone here skin tone boundary there we go skin tone we want the hair color fill that fill that feel that other areas over here for the hair color I'm just gonna get this skin tone going again with this stroke here and it's gonna make this nice boundary down here and then I'm gonna fill in this okay that obviously it's not reading correctly so I'm gonna have to quickly make a little okay and by just quickly adjusting certain parameters we can fill in an area a drawer in a couple of lines here for the lip color 1 2 3 fill in this area for that drawing white for the eyes 1 2 white fill in that and with the irises and I've basically got my color palette here but if I went into solid mode you'll see that the automatic difference is that all of the materials that show up in your solid settings have a color on their right but because we've been using just as gray material in solids only material preview do we actually see those materials but of course things like shadows and highlights work just the same because the same blend modes have been applied and it looks you know just as good now what are the advantages and disadvantages well clearly the main disadvantage is that with this particular method of of painting with vertex color mode the only way you can really replace it is by erasing that created stroke or refilling it so we want a blue hair here you might be left with some small patches of the underlying color okay so replacing stuff is not so simple as with materials but creating custom palettes for your particular character is a lot easier to do and these can be stored in your file for whenever you need to to use a palette and the other of course advantage is that you're working with far fewer materials now one last little trick is that you can actually create a from an image so let's say we went and created a new palette and we loaded an image and then we went extract palette from image we would then have a reference palette with all of the colors that it picked from that image and obviously this is a heck of a lot more than the one we just created and so you know sometimes it's extracting a palette can be good but it can also be problematic and of course rendering is just as good okay you've got this here the material colors versions and the vertex color version look just as good as each other and in the end it's just basically a workflow type of scenario so I hope you got a lot out of that video as always if you like what you saw here and you want to be notified of any upcoming content do consider subscribing to my youtube channel and if you're feeling it all generous why not join the legions of patreon supporters over on my patreon page it is the support that I get through patreon that makes the production of these videos possible thanks again for watching everyone this is Paul signing off bye for now [Music]

Channel: Paul O Caggegi

Views: 14,608

Keywords: blender

Id: z7GMWLk_Czc

Length: 12min 12sec (732 seconds)

Published: Wed May 20 2020