How I Made This 2D Animation in Blender Grease Pencil

hi everyone this is the longest and most detailed 2D animation I've made with blender's grease pencil so far and I'll be showing you how I made this from start to finish links to everything including my blender brush pack are in the description so one of my goals this year is to make more finished animations this was based on the prompt Swift and my original idea was to animate a character with wings to give the animation a bit more structure and set a time limit so I didn't go overboard with story details I decided to set it to a section of the song Fighter by Jack stauber which was around 30 seconds as usual I start with thumbnails everything is super rough and I don't worry about making it look good my goal here is to get every shot down that I can see in my head so I can then go through and pick and choose what I want to take forward into the storyboard in animatic if there are any specific camera angles or movements I want to use I'll add them along with any environment sketches or props that help build the world characters live in because the thumbnails are so simple I can work quickly to get anything I think might work onto the page extreme close-ups and subtle detail shots are my favorite but I made sure to include more full body Dynamic and effects to keep things interesting even if they're not in a proper sequence yet it's always nice to have options to choose from when I use the thumbnails to create digital storyboards while you can make your storyboard straight into your animation program I made the sketches in storyboarder which I then took into DaVinci Resolve to tie them to the music I made a color script to experiment with the palette I wanted to use and how the mood of each scene would affect the color choices when I was making the background this was only Loosely referenced as I changed my mind halfway through a color script is an essential but it's nice to have what was essential was sorting out the character designs so I could refer to them through the animation having references of your characters with different expressions and poses and a different angles helps to keep things consistent it may take a few tries to find an idea you like but keep sketching and testing proportions Styles and shapes don't be afraid to pick and choose your favorite elements from different sketches and mash them together as this can help you get closer to what you want in the end I chose this design something just clicked here so I started testing different hairstyles and outfits until I find the one I liked I did quite a lot of the design process live so if you're interested in real-time process for that they're visible on the live stream section on my channel for the second character the creature that I had in this project I used references I found online of vultures for the body neck and wings while the face took inspiration from snakes sharper angles can help make a character more threatening and by referencing real animals I could use different features and proportions to make something a little more appealing with the animatic and character designs complete it was time to work on the backgrounds which I like to finish before I start animating rough sketches come first based Loosely on the storyboards I'll then lower the opacity and make new layers where I block out the main shapes in grayscale this helps to get the values right I'll then add flat color and texture to the background and add line detail with a flat round brush with the pressure off until I get the look I want the way I structure a background will depend on what camera moves or actions are performed in the shot and how I want it all to move in shot one the sky clouds and floating island are all separate so I can later position and move them individually in object mode changing the timeline from Grease pencil to dope sheet to see the keyframes I made I can drag the panel beneath upwards and click the icon at the very left and select graph Editor to adjust the handles and add easing if I need to canvas sizes varied quite a bit and for this falling shot I had two backgrounds the first was a long gradient which started with soft pinks the end of the first background would be overlapped with the second in time for the character to land to cover the overlap I planned on adding extra clouds as the character fell to help with the transition when I made the storyboards I had been thinking about the positions of the character and tried to reuse backgrounds to save time overall I had around 8 backgrounds across 14 shots which helped reduce the workload a little to bring the backgrounds into blender I imported the layers as planes and switched in and out of camera view to move them closer to or further from the camera scaling up or down as needed if you don't have the option to import as a plane go to edit preferences add-ons type plane in the search bar ticket close the window and then go to file import images as planes I also added my animatic as a plane that I would use to help with timing and layout when I was done I moved the animatic out of the camera view to use as a guide and added my character references as planes ready for animation unfortunately this is where I encountered my first problem with setting out a project like this by not separating individual shots into separate projects the background layers I had added would hold for the entire project at the time I hadn't looked into the storyboard add-on which probably would have made this a whole lot easier so I came up with a workaround I made four keyframes on the background planes two at the start and two at the end of each shot the first and last keyframes would allow me to position the background out of the camera view while the second and third held the backgrounds in place for the duration of their shot I did this for every background in each shot so there were no weird holds or flashing planes that appeared when they shouldn't for backgrounds that were reused later on I would just duplicate the frames to the new section and adjust as needed if I zoom out it looks incredibly messy and though I may use this for something else in the future if you're trying to create a shot by shot project that plays in a single file I would not recommend this now the only thing left to do was add my music to the blender file I went to the video editing tab which if you haven't got it you can click the plus just here and I then dragged in my audio I moved it to the start of the timeline and on the right under sound I selected display waveform in the playback option in the bottom left I ticked scrubbing and from the drop down menu at the top selected sync to audio I then went back to 2D animation and if I go through the timeline the audio played now with all my different backgrounds and layers and music in the project I needed to keep things a bit more organized I made new collections in the outliner tab for each shot I renamed them and added the backgrounds and grease pencil ready for the animation if you have multiple animated elements in a single shot I'd recommend creating a new grease pencil for each as this makes it much easier if you need to move animated sections in front or behind your background layers later on shot one only needed the waterfall animated so I added a grease pencil sketched out the base color and water highlights and used a noise modifier to make it look like it was moving in object mode I added keyframes to make the clouds move across the canvas and switched to the graph Editor to adjust the timing and add easing if I needed to clouds that were closer to the camera would move faster and those further away would move slower I also added a slight up and down motion to the floating island to finish it off depending on how complex the animation is I might split it up into several different layers so I don't have to redraw the whole character every time I want to move a certain part especially if it's the only part that's moving duplicating frames and then using the lasso move and rotate Tools in edit mode help to keep things consistent this was especially useful in Shot 2 when I realized I hadn't been at all consistent with the rough animation but it was easy enough to fix in new layers shot 3 contained only character animation as the background was a single layer in this shot we have a close-up of the character's face as they turn away from the camera the rough animation was split into three layers the first was Head and Shoulders the hair and then the face I've always found it much easier to work in sections and this meant I could duplicate the layer structure to make things quicker when lining and coloring switching off the other rough layers to focus on filling those sections shot 4 was one of the simpler shots I added movement to the clouds in the same direction as shot one to keep things consistent originally the line detail in the background was all static but I thought for these early backgrounds I would redo the grass lines in blender and add a noise modifier on a low setting to give them a bit more life 30 seconds doesn't seem like a lot of Animation but I ended up streaming for around 30 hours during this project and I did quite a bit of work off camera too when I made the backgrounds comp to the project and animated the last few shots so the total time for this project was around 40 to 50 hours total in shot 5 which was one of the more difficult shots I had the character's hair Wings skirt and body all on different layers the hair and skirt were animated in loops and those frames were selected and duplicated using shift d to copy them across the timeline until it was time to animate their new positions for when the character landed at this point I added some effects and further animation which in future will be made on separate grease pencil objects after trying to fit everything into one layer panel it was just too cluttered and you'll thank yourself for being organized if you split it up and name them properly when I was animating I used god mode a lot this was great for slight adjustments to frames or adding a little overshoot or squash and stretch to a movement my favorite shot to animate was the extreme close-up in shot 6. The Fringe was organized into several layers and animated with the sculpt tool extra layers were added for tiny feathers to flow down from beneath the hair I used my blender brushes to add a little texture to the eyes and face if you want to try my brushes for yourself you can download them through the link in the description now each shot has the noise modifier applied to give the line and color a bit of movement without having to redraw it all myself this is called a boiling line and makes the animation look more alive on slower or static shots which means I can have them last a little longer if I need to in shot 7 I found arranging the planes and grease mental objects took the most time I had both characters in shot there was movement in the buildings when the creature had to lift turn and move through them and smoke effects to make it look cool and also cover up the places where the floor and buildings met at points during this project the planes covered sections of the animation or would still look like they were behind it despite being placed in a different order to get around this I had to select the plane go to material properties and in the settings switch up the blending mode of the plane to get it to work the way I wanted I like to finish all the rough animation in the project before I start lining there's a feature in TV paint called duplicate structure that I use all the time and blender has the equivalent in the layer specials tab called duplicate empty keyframes this along with the auto look inactive layers which means you only erase or edit the layer you're working on help speed things up a lot I turned off the pressure for sizing and strength and used a consistent brush size throughout my character references mattered much more in the lining stage but there were some shots particularly those that featured both characters that I had to reduce the detail a little to keep the designs readable this is something I've seen done in shows like Hilda which I love and would recommend if you haven't seen it if you want smoother lines when drawing hold shift and this will toggle the brush stabilizer which you can adjust in the stroke panel I prefer a lower radius and Factor so there isn't too much of a lag when drawing to make the coloring easier you should close off the line work as much as possible and make sure any gaps aren't too big that they can't be closed off with a stroke extension in the advanced menu coloring and blender is pretty simple though you can use material colors and create new materials for every color you want to use I like to use the color attribute mode instead because it feels closer to a regular drawing or painting program to start out I'll use the fill tool I'll select my line layer and create a new one with duplicated empty frames before hiding any layers I don't want the fill tool to reference I'll change my material to solid fill and start adding color to larger areas if there are any corners or bits that have been missed I'll switch to the draw tool keeping the fill material and start correcting them this one just acts like a lasso fill I can add texture or shadows in blender to my layers by making a new layer ticking The Mask option and adding the layers I want to reference I did this for the eyes in shot six and I like the effect I also use mask to add darker Shades to the Smoke effects I added in other shots which helped Define what would otherwise have been flat color I would like more blending modes for the layers because this is the thing I miss the most when I'm not working in TV paint I did export the animation and take it back into DB paint to add some more texture to certain shots and also some basic camera moves most of the time I use very limited animation because I like the way it looks and it saves time adding a slow Zoom or some camera shake to a shot can help keep your attention and allow a shot to play a little longer I added some camera Shake in shot 5 when the character lands and shot 7 when the creature turns and buildings move which emphasizes the weight and impact of a movement you can watch the final version of the animation with music here as I make more stuff in blender it gets a little less overwhelming I'm looking forward to trying out the storyboard add-on and tackling some other features and tools I've been avoiding I hope you enjoyed the video if you are still overwhelmed or want something more beginner friendly on how I set up blender to create a 2d animation check out this one here

Channel: kdsketch

Views: 33,236

Keywords: art, animation, storytime, 2d, software, tvpaint, tutorial, how, to, how to animate, kdsketch, b3d, blender grease pencil, blender, studio vlog, free animation software, freelance artist, indie animator, independent animator, how I made this blender animation, how I made this, 2d animation, uk animator, self taught, how to animate in blender, make a 2d animation in blender, jack stauber, fighter, animation meme, oc animation, HIMT, indie animation, blender software developers

Id: CksYad76Iyc

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 17 2023