/ Blender 2.82a & Grease Pencil
Jorge Vidal
/ Awesome all in one Open Source
Grease Pencil tool development by Daniel Lara and collaborators within Blender, the not-so-known free 3d software, has impacted me.
This interaction is based on the creation of scenes hosted within the interface, which makes them immediately accessible and exportable.
That is: you can draw a character as it was done in the past on a light table, including keyframes, inbetweens and fill or texturize areas, which is combined with lighting, making non-destructive variations in the style, helping you with resources such as rotoscopes, cameras or any other 3d element that you want to incorporate. Being included in a 3d environment, it also affects the optics that you use, so you can control focus or lens distorsion.
Screenshots from Cloud Render archives, just for information purposes.
These features are not brand new. Softwares like Toon Boom have kind of 3d environment (a nightmare really), and even Flash allowed a more advanced 2.5 d thanks to plugins, capabilities squeezed out in the feature film Waltz with Bashir, 2008 and other projects. Likewise, the 3d softwares themselves have long included tools for painting, creating vectors or having a 2d look (my favorite short Salesman Pete). However, in Grease Pencil we find a much more advanced, interactive interface than Flash and the fusion of an entire digital studio in a single application.
Not only we can create, model, animate and illuminate objects (in real time), environments or characters, but it is also possible sculpt, draw and texturize, also composition, tracking and editing which would correspond to another payment software.
In summary, is a revolution for independent artists and an excellent complement for production companies, pointing to VR and storyboarding.
Grease Pencil is like transform Flash into a 3d environment, allowing to draw in a depth canvas, animate strokes and real interaction with 3d elements or simulations.
The application opens instantly and once you are familiar with the layout you can work much faster, eliminating import-export headaches of material, formats and other compatibilities.
I recommend the subscription to Cloud Render, which is a digital cloud sharing all the resources used in the artistic and technical development of Blender. Incredible work samples of excellent short films and a fully commercial animated film project (Agent 327).
Now that Netfilx has bought the Chinese-Canadian movie Robot 7723 made with Blender (with the exception of complex simulations) it is time to consider the validity of this Open Source as a competitor to other software packages. I have attached some screenshots of the new Blender interface with the Tears of Steel and Hero projects, accessible from Cloud Render.
From here, many thanks to those who make these tools possible and make them available to us.