What is Grease Pencil and What is it Used for

we bet you know blender as a 3d package and it might even sound strange to think of making 2d art in a 3d environment however blender offers you the possibility to do just that with the grease pencil object and although it seems rather pointless since there are many software dedicated especially for 2d art it can actually provide huge value in this video we will break down the grease pencil object and shed the light on how powerful it is and how can you use it to your advantage in your projects first off let's have a quick overview on what this feature is for those of you who are not very familiar with it grease pencil is a 2d drawing object that comes integrated in the 3d package itself so it doesn't require any separate install using it in the 3d viewport is simple you just need to activate it hold down the d button of your keyboard maintain the left click of your mouse and drag the cursor around the 3d space just like all blender objects grease pencil offers you a range of advanced options for modeling simulation rendering animation and compositing we'll get into this more in depth in a bit but before that let's look at what you can do with this tool on a practical level grease pencil might seem too simple to be seriously used in most types of projects or even counter-intuitive and rather useless but it's actually quite the opposite when you become aware of its power as it can serve many purposes and it can be adopted in many industries we can mention for example sketching especially the type of sketching that can stand for brainstorming before starting a project that will be eventually modeled in blender itself drawing not only the classic form of drawing but also the one that serves end-to-end integration for example many concept and graphic artists rely on 3d models for things like character poses depth environment perspective and so on merging both of these dimensions in one single package can boost the workflow tremendously animation since the sole purpose of the grease pencil first and foremost was bringing to the animation to blender we can see the tangible proof of this great advantage in many open 2d animation movies like hero for example moreover we have seen blender and its grease pencil find their way to many graphic design ends some of them include media production advertisement marketing and many others now that you have a general idea on what you can do with grease pencil let's dive more into the depth of what makes it so unique once you launch blender going to the 2d animation section is the only step to open the grease pencil workspace taken a closer look at the structure it's composed of three main elements first you have the point which is a single point in the 3d space that saves all the properties like weight texture thickness location and so on these properties are responsible of the stroke's final appearance besides its location in the 3d space next you have the edit lines that represent the links between the different points they're generally invisible but you can display them in the edit mode or the wireframe view finally you have the strokes that represent the final result of both points and lines combined after rendering just like the default cube in the 3d section there's an equivalent in the 2d one called primitives it's a nice staging phase when you start a new project a lot better than the overwhelming empty 3d space you get to add three types of primitives the first one is the blank you can add an object without any stroke the second is the stroke you can add a simple one as a reference the third and final one is monkey remember susan it's known by the community as blender's mascot there's a 2d version of her and you can use it as a standard test when it comes to the actual workflow grease pencil offers you three modes that you can access from the mode menu located on the 3d view header first you have the draw mode which is the only mode that allows you to add and draw a new stroke in the 3d view once you activate it the cursor will turn into a circle with the same color of the material you can either choose the freehand drawing option or you can just pick one of the basic shapes such as lines curves circles and boxes the edit mode is used to alter the shape of the drawing but the workflow is kind of different it doesn't deal with points and edit lines instead of that it functions with the area of the model and it alters it using a brush the sculpt mode manipulates the drawing in the brush region of influence it has specific panels and once it's activated the cursor will turn into a red circle in the 3d view the join process with grease pencil is quite unique besides being backed up with awesome tools and features we can mention a few of them that stand out for drawing you have the draw on back option for example it allows you to draw a stroke on the very back of all the other strokes there's also the add weight data option and you can use it when you want to create a stroke according to the current vertex group and weight the last option to mention is the additive drawing which you can use to include strokes from the previous frame when creating a new one for sculpting you first have the selection mask it allows you to select a bunch of strokes and work on them exclusively without affecting the rest it can be very handy when you want to restrict the effect on specific areas and second you have the multi-frame option that can be super useful when you want to work on many frames at the same time for rigging you can benefit from the deformation tools you simply have to manipulate the points and that's pretty much it there's also the weight data system that can prove itself to be very useful it adds points to any stroke to pre-stage it for rigging not to mention the modifiers that can add fantastic effects to your objects for animation you have all the necessary tools to perform any kind of animation you're aiming for whether it be traditional frame by frame or cutout animation it grants you full control over the objects so you can change the size orientation position and so on the onion skin feature will make things a lot smoother and easier by helping you display multiple frames in one single scene not to mention that you can use the inherited animations to your advantage by building layer parenting relations between objects one final feature that is worth mentioning is the ability to add notes in the 3d viewport which is very handy when working on collaborative projects with other artists there's no doubt that the power of this tool has become very obvious and tangible to you by now but there's still one rather unpleasant question that starts creeping in can you learn this innovative thing grease pencil as well as blender are being used by professionals and talented artists you've certainly came across them on youtube blender market blender nation pretty much everywhere it might overwhelm you and lure you into thinking that you need their potential to achieve the same results the answer is no grease pencil follows the same pattern as its container blender 3d it's known to be suitable for beginners with a fine learning curve especially when armed with motivation and perseverance as we mentioned before grease pencil comes integrated in the 3d package itself since blender is fully free and open source this makes the 2d object fall under the same description but you can still make donations if you want to support the development team or even contribute at improving the core software if you have skills with code we hope you found this video useful and informative comment below if you think that we've missed something or if you have any other suggestions thank you for watching

Channel: InspirationTuts 2D

Views: 13,662

Keywords: What is Grease Pencil and What is it Used for, Grease pencil, Blender Grease pencil, Blender, 2d animation software easy to use, android 2d animation software, best 2d animation program for beginners, 2d animation software, Best 2D animation software, 2D animation, Best 2D software, is Grease pencil hard to use, what is Grease pencil used for

Id: Z6j7nwAoCBI

Length: 8min 40sec (520 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 29 2021