Giving Blender and Grease Pencil another try

i set a challenge for myself can i remake my youtube intro using free software let's give it a shot [Music] hey guys it's cynical pantua and today i'm just going to talk about how i remade my youtube opening for the second time meaning that there's three versions of this thing i kind of had an idea of what i wanted this third version to look like i wanted to look like it was coming from either a miniature set it had some cg and it was very minimalistic simple all that jazz but one thing i want to try is to make it all using free software for the last two versions of the opening i used flash or also known as adobe animate to animate the characters to color them and to ink them the backgrounds were done in photoshop and i composited it all together using after effects now the reason why there's a huge jump from 2015 to 2016 in terms of looking quality was because the 2015 was just made casually it was just made just to test the grounds of what this youtube channel would have been i just created the mascot at the time so the designs were super early now the second version i spent a lot more time with i made a whole process video a tutorial course based off it where it came from thumbnailing to planning and to actually animating you can actually find that in the gumroad store but for the third version there is a specific look that i'm going for and i've always wanted to learn more about blender and grease pencil so i decided to use blender and its grease pencil a few years ago i did a video of me using blender and using grease pencil in my honest conclusion of grease pencil was something that i would probably not switch my choice of 2d animation software completely with grease pencil and i have my own opinions about it like the biggest one was that drawing on it didn't feel good amongst other opinions that were considered standard in a lot of 2d animation software that i used that wasn't present in grease pencil a lot of people thought that i was being biased unfair and that i hated greased pencil which wasn't true kind of like how that one time i joked about richard williams and suddenly everyone thought that i hated richard williams that i was disrespectful to the man but to get so riled up and upset about software choice i mean come on so i decided to hold off on the whole grease pencil stuff but i have been using blender for many purposes i like blender i would say i'm a casual user blender i can rotate stuff i can just create simple things i can just use it just for the sake of work i experimented with 3d scans that i took from a park put them in blender and added my dancing dog animations in it i played around with modeling and i used it for my layout passes for animation where if i just didn't want to paint the background or sketch a layout of the background i could just model it and then paint over it sometime but lately at work we've been using blender for 3d sets and stuff overall it just added another layer of autonomy for my line of work whether it's storyboarding or animation i feel a bit more powerful using blender now i tried making little animation tests using grease pencil a few times and for me it was always cumbersome because i would actually do things some things wouldn't work unless i pushed a certain button i mean these are all technical stuff but again the biggest thing was that i just did not like drawing in it especially with the pen pressure it felt waxy i've joined in tv paint clip studio they're great but maybe i have to switch things up for me to actually feel like i'm using grease pencil to my advantage so for my case you know i don't really care about line weight and all that stuff especially if i just want to make casual things so i usually just turn off the pen pressure for the size and opacity and then it feels quite decent it took me a while to get used to the lines and the fill setting and the materials but once you get used to it it's actually pretty cool i don't use the sculpt option as much only for correcting drawings but i don't really sculpt to like change the drawings during animation like just sculpting an arm instead of like redrawing it for animation i haven't really done that and every time i do it looks stupid but there's something cool about the grease pencil modifiers and effects that are pretty cool and i'll get to that soon but for me to be able to utilize grease pencil something that i didn't really do as much is to adjust my shortcuts luckily i have a torque box peripheral here it's like a little device with a bunch of buttons and widgets here and there i use it for almost all my programs it made me faster i can flip super fast i can scroll through my frames so i just had to adjust that with my grease pencil settings and then now i have a bit more power with grease pencil so the first thing i did was animate the dog and before i animate i always thumbnail thumbnailing is doing these series of little drawings just to sort of like brainstorm what the poses could be or the overall vibe and energy that i want and i have to explore that before i animate and i would get a clear picture of what my drawings would look like or what i want to pose out now i've seen people when they use grease pencil they draw right on the 3d set but i don't want to do that i'm just going to animate with the preset 2d animation on blender and just animate flat and i can always import that into a 3d set later on i kind of have an idea of what i want it doesn't really like move around the background as much so i'm not really concerned about that then i would animate really rough so it would look like a very sketchy flar sack with dotty eyes and just like indications of ears and stuff like that i'll only maybe have a few key poses that look a bit more detailed everything else is just movement information sometimes i'll chart it out sometimes i won't but in most cases i try my best not to in between my drawings here because i'm just going to be wasting energy and i can save that on the clean lines then let's move on to the cleanup so again i'm just using a brush that has no pen pressure sensitivity on opacity and size so i'm just going to be drawing with a hard round brush just like a good artist would in photoshop and then just draw away and you know my clean up is usually very wobbly and sure it could be my skills as a cleanup is lacking but at the same time i'm kind of just going through this fast because i just want to get it done and i know super cleanup isn't really important to me now before i would do the rough animation and i would do a rough tie down but for this one i've been trying to teach myself to do less steps so just rough animation and then just move on to clean up immediately just so that i can be more decisive in my lines i can think more about my drawing i can be a bit more bold but if you want super solid drawings then i would recommend doing a rough tie down with solid primitives and then do the cleanup but i'm just doing this just for the sake of myself and i do want to explore the world of limited animation eventually so less steps baby now the best advantage of vector programs for animation is that there's a lot more autonomy and modifications that you can make so for example in greased pencils case i could just change the color of my line art just by changing the settings of the color swatch with raster-based programs you kind of have to do this whole replace color filter thing or make the changes yourself by locking the alpha channel and stuff like that harmony for example if you use the pencil tool you can change the line width you can change the line style which is all very cool so here's the thing about color swatches and materials for a grease pencil you can make a line material which just draws lines and then you can make a fill material which is for like filling stuff in they can even be both so when you draw a shape it's going to draw both the line and fill it automatically so just for the purpose of filling you would just disable the line settings and then just have to fill only and this is great for like creating shapes just in case you want to fill those grommets of negative space at first i didn't really understand why this had to be but the more i use grease pencil the more i really appreciate it and i think it's a great idea that they implemented it was so useful that i looked at tv paint and tried to find adjustments and settings that were quite similar and luckily i found some of that so the guys who did develop grease pencil this one's a smart one so i'm not going to talk much about coloring because it's pretty much the same in how i color and let's say adobe animate or toon boom harmony it's just a paint bucket tool or sometimes i'd have to draw the film myself all i can say is this step is always really tedious and laborous however one thing that i failed to mention and this is the biggest thing that would actually motivate me to switch to grease pencil completely is grease pencil summary keys so a summary key basically groups the pencil lines the colors all under one key so if i wanted to change the timing of the whole animation i could just modify the summary keys i don't have to move the color keys and the line keys independently and match them manually the summary key basically groups them all together so this is really good i don't think i personally found anything like that in toon boom harmony or tv paint or even flash but as someone who wants to make independent stuff and i want to make them fast and using as little steps as possible this would make me switch over no lie so in compositing especially in after effects there are settings that you can add like layer styles you can add automated highlights automated drop shadows some inner fills without having to draw them now grease pencil has that and the cool thing about this is that they can also interact with the light settings so if you have like let's say a rim light setting on the character it'll change depending on where your light is in the scene or where your light source is in within the scene but i will also say that there's still quite some limitations that i wish that they did work on like the strength of these effects the opacity of these settings because sometimes when i you know finagle with it sometimes it's too strong sometimes it's too weak there's no way to manually set it up where you can get just that right moment but you can get really cool imagery so sometimes i like to turn down the iterations or the passes to like maybe two or three and it makes things look a bit more stepped and a bit choppy which actually i kind of like the look it looks a bit more stylized i don't like things when they look too smooth for me so while i do think that it alone the flat shades does look good i'm gonna see what i can do with these automatic effects and shadows and things like that i did have to sort of improvise so some things that just were meant for like light settings you know i kind of reverse it so the rim lights would be like drop shadows at one point or the inner shades of the character overall i just spent a lot of time just playing around with it finagling with it until i got an effect that looked interesting to me and i will say okay now i'm ready to put this character into a 3d set so let's do that so now i'm ready to 3d model the background now the thing is that i did a bit of studies i did studies of standing desks i looked at old computers because i do want to have like an old apple ii looking computer just lying around i kind of wanted to feel a bit retro but something about studying and drawing the objects before 3d modeling them actually gives me an understanding of how i would approach modeling it how i would plan modeling it and understanding the thing in general i even drew out some plants and figured out how i want the actual leaves to look like because the thing is i've decided i'm going to model all this without complex shaders without complex materials or even textures it's just gonna be like a few solid colors some light material properties like metallic reflection and all that but at the end of the day i'm keeping the shaders relatively simple now the thing that stopped me from actually pursuing 3d modeling with blender is that i got so intimidated with the shaders and the materials but i think that i should just enjoy 3d modeling the thing without worrying about uv mapping texture coordinates or all that stuff which i've dabbled with previous experimentations but i think for this one i just want to treat it like lego anyways i started a new project file i import the 2d animation from a different file and now i have the grease pencil animation in this new project and guess what it reacts to light sources but sadly it still doesn't cast shadows i think this is just a grease pencil thing that i have to accept first i modeled the desk and it's really made of really simple boxes and cubes and six sided cylinders very low poly stuff nothing too complex honestly i'm just using the bds betis of bdsf i think shaders and i'm really just changing the color and just changing a bit of the properties then i would go on to mod the plant so first i modeled the pot which is just another six sided cylinder and i extruded it reversed it created another hole within the pot and then you can apply a different material to a certain face this is something that's super useful an object doesn't have to have one material shading it can have multiple you just select the size and assign that material to that face the leaves and plants themselves are just planes i just modified the curvature the the overall shape i just managed and manipulated some of the vertices then i would just duplicate the same leaf and kind of just like change the orientation and the rotation as i organize them differently now i don't have a stem because you're not really going to see it i just did some leaf rotation and hopefully that hides some of that chicory again going for that minimalistic look the same thing goes for that retro computer that i modeled which is just a box that kind of looks like an apple too it's just a box with an extruded monitor i modified a bit and just assigned a different material to the screen something that's reflective and very specular and then really i just added another little box to act as the power on and off button right on the front as you can tell my modeling skills are super rudimentary but at the end of the day i'm finding this a fun experience on the desk i decided to add another plane and i decided to add a little doodle using grease pencil now for some reason i don't exactly know why it's showing as this transparent stroke i thought it was gonna be a hard round line but maybe there's something that i failed to finagle with but you know what i'm just moving forward i'll figure it out some other time i model a little hexagon shaped carpet it's really just a super flat cylinder that was preset with six sides nothing special the stool the same story a hexagonal c followed along with some three cylinders and then at the bottom of it is this low poly taurus that's about like six sides too maybe less i can't remember but again simple simple simple for the window it's really just a boolean operation so what i did was i got a cube i put it by the wall and i did the whole boolean modifier settings and what that does it's kind of like inverting things so i'm using the box to basically cut a hole or shape within that wall now something i noticed is that even if you hide objects in the view you will still see it as render and this is something that you have to manually configure in the object setting where you have to turn off its visibility when you actually render it but now i want to see something outside of the house maybe a landscape luckily i think if you turn on a few add-ons in the blender presets there's a whole selection of meshes of landscapes so you can select mountains you can select valleys and i just grabbed one of those and just slapped it on there and then gave it a green color then i go on to model the little doors of the windows which is just really rotated small tiny rectangulars so again i'm not really too familiar with how the lights work i'm pretty sure there's some like secret there but i think for some cases i had to do things manually so i would put a light source by the floor to make it seem like there's light bouncing in the room by changing the world color from a muted blue to a more saturated teal it did affect the colors of the shadows that is being portrayed in the room it made the shadows a lot more tealer i know i did a bunch of stuff like on-screen reflections ambient inclusion all the stuff using the radiance volume this is just so that the shadows are a lot more baked in and i even did adjust it so the shadows are a bit stronger there's a lot of steps and experimentations that i did that it's kind of hard to summarize right now but yeah i was doing a lot of stuff to it so i even cranked up the bloom settings and what that is is it kind of gives a radiance of things that are bright within the space so if there's like a really light object it'll emit a glow or bloom around it based on its highest values and you can adjust this the threshold how hard it blooms how big the blue mist etc i think it works well with the scene because it's now giving the impression that light is bouncing all over the place from the ground now i would switch back between two different renderers the eevee and the cycles the eevee is more of a real-time engine and it gives cooler colors where cycles gave deeper colors sometimes even warmer colors now i want the outside to be just a bit more interesting maybe add a building there so i just modeled a giant butt plug just sitting by the mountains so now i'm going to do that whole donut sprinkle technique found in andrew price's donut tutorial it's a classic but you can use the particles and hair modifier to scatter objects that you made around a surface so i modeled a little rock and just sprinkled it all over the terran giving it a sort of like where on the alps kind of feel and here i'm just playing around with the lighting maybe there's light being blasted on the butt plug outside maybe there's more on the terran kind of resembling like little clouds casting light but i just played around with the whole lighting there's a lot of trickery because again i'm pretty sure you can make this a lot more streamlined with lights but my knowledge for that i'm just improvising right now and next i'm just playing with the camera animation so will the camera rotate by the side of our bonbon character does it just drone in from behind one important thing is that it has to stay focused on the character i just don't know how much camera movement there should be don't make it too distracting but don't also make it too mundane also i kind of want to show the depth of the scene you know show a little bit of that butt plug rotating in space parallax style i even adjusted the depth of field so it would mostly just focus on bon bon the dog and everything else would be a bit more blurry and you can adjust this you can set the depth of field to focus on the character and then everything around it will just be a little off focus and you can adjust this to see how intense it is how blurry it is it gives that miniature dioramic look okay next i'm playing around with lighting and i'm thinking what if the room was really dark at first and then as the animation goes on the light from the floor would kind of just drone in sort of like mocking that there's light being bounced in that time and this is where i played around with the grease pencil effects on the dog itself what's awesome is that the grease pencil reacts to light so if there's no light it's darker and this also applies to the rim light settings that you have so if you do have a rim light effect that's like acting as the highlight of the character it won't display or it'll be as weak if the light source isn't there sometimes it would appear too dark for my taste and what's cool about grease pencil is that you can actually change settings whether it reacts to light or not i turned off its reaction to light and it still seemed good but i don't think it had the warmth of the room itself which i wanted to emit now the modifiers are great the glow the rim lighting all that is great i just wish that there was a setting where you can actually adjust the threshold or the opacity of these things so it's not really a prisoner to the light settings or the scene itself i want more control over that now from here on out i'm really just playing around i'm just changing the lightings i'm just adjusting the lights animating them turning them off turning them on really there's nothing point of interest here i tried experimenting more with the camera movement where it starts really close to bonbon and then zooms out but at the same time when i looked at that that felt way too much too distracting for me i'm cranking up the f-stop and the depth of field just so that it really does feel like we're looking at a miniature taken with like an analog camera i don't know then i started to experiment with the compositing window in blender and this is something that i've never used before so i just improvised it and just played around with it it's node based kind of like toon boom harmony but i can add post filtering effects like lens flares change the color during render the curves the levels the contrast and i'm sure there's a lot of effects i haven't really played around with but it's good to know that it's there and i can just render it without having to make those changes in a program like after effects and i've done multiple render passes one without the effects one with the effects one rendered in cycles that took almost two hours to render oh my god i'm sticking with evie but i do have to admit that i did cheat a bit with the look of this because i did go to premiere and just change the colors so it's a bit more pastelly and added a distortion effect but i'm pretty sure there are settings like that in blender it's just a last minute decision that i made while editing the video together and now i'm pretty much wrapping up this new version of the opening it's 3d it's got a new character animation it's got a new set now what's great is that i can always make changes on the fly like if i don't like the textures of a wall for example or the floor i can just change that and re-render it it's super easy and that's the benefit of using a program like blender or the benefit of keeping all the steps in one program rather than segregate them into different programs like tv paint for animation photoshop for backgrounds after effects for compositing i just did everything in blender and it just makes things easier second is that i do want to evolve this room over time so let's say i accomplished something and i'm proud of it i'll put a memorabilia of it on the walls so an image texture with a poster of a thing that i just recently finished or maybe i collaborate with other youtubers or artists you know maybe i'll keep a sculpted head of them or an action figure of them in the set i think there's something fun and exciting seeing this room kind of grow over time and collecting all this memorabilia now i did a comparison with the first version the second version in this version and i know i've gotten criticism some people think that it was a waste of time for me to remake this because they think the 2016 version is perfect and you know what they're totally entitled to their own opinion when i remade it for the first time with the 2016 version people didn't like the 2016 version and like the 2015 version so i think people just are not used to new things and suddenly they just get used to it and i'm pretty sure there's debatable reasons of like why one is better than the other i've heard arguments where it's just like i'm not a fan of 3d that's why i don't like the new version they're just divided about the new character acting of the character but the important thing is that i learned something out of it i feel like i have a better understanding of blender and grease pencil and i'm generally happy with how it looks and sure i do understand what the criticisms were i could work more on the models and stuff like that and you know they'll probably come over time maybe i'll revisit it make some changes and then update it but updating this feels so much more doable and easier compared to the other versions which i don't really have access to those files anymore well the first one at least i don't have access to but hey the overall point of this video is i remade the opening for the second time using free software kind of without the changes of premiere but most of it was done in one program that is completely free and you can totally do it too will i still switch entirely to grease pencil probably not because the more i learned about grease pencil i was also learning more about tv paint and i found some great features about that program i've never used before i just discovered them and they are great so that's the thing with programs there's no right or wrong program to use it's whatever feels good whatever helps achieve your goals i keep getting asked what software is the best one to use and i hate answering those questions because it really comes down to preference does it hurt to try new software absolutely not but i think the truth is that most of us just really use let's say less than 50 of all the features that the program is capable of and knowing more about the program inside out knowing more about its features you can basically make a film within that program without having other programs to make it so this is something that is beneficial for people who want to make more indie stuff or who just want to whip out stuff and just put it out there without spending that laborous and taxing time of jumping between different software for different reasons anyways that's all by here's the new opening [Music] interested in learning hand-drawn animation or learning how to finish an animated shot from beginning to end have a look at the store where you'll find the complete introduction to 2d animation video course tutorials and other resources learn classical animation approaches drawing lectures techniques and other process videos visit the store through the link in the description below

Channel: Toniko Pantoja

Views: 665,450

Keywords: Toniko Pantoja, Youtube, Animation, Tutorial, Advice, Lesson, Vlog, Adobe, Photoshop, Animate, Flash, After Effetcts, Premiere, Video, Film, Drawing, Tips, Gestures, blender, 3d, grease, pencil

Id: oMViQWnD2Nk

Length: 23min 58sec (1438 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 25 2022