The review of any kind of work is very important for the artist, it gives feedback on the project and could give him some insights of what`s working and not working with the model. Until now, if I want to send a project for review, I had to render a test and send the image or a lot of images. Well, great new feature of Blender is in development that can change this workflow. The feature is called Grease Pencil, coded by Aligorith, and it will allow you do draw directly on the 3D View!
I was curious about it, so I decided to download a test build from graphicall.org to check it out. It`s quite simple to use, but you have to use a new work mode and create an especial layer for the drawings.
Let`s take a look on how it works.
First of all, you have to enable the Grease Pencil. Go to the View menu and choose Grease Pencil.
Then, turn on the “Use Grease Pencil” button.
The next step is to choose a new work mode called Grease Pencil. You will only be able to draw if this mode is active.
One last step before we draw something, add a new layer. All layers can hold draw lines with different colors and thickness, if your team has more than one reviewer, each one can use a unique setup.
That`s it, now you can hold down the left mouse button and draw.
This is a very interesting feature, and I will be probably using a lot of grease pencil for review. You just have to be careful, if your notes are placed right over a model, you can`t move the view or the notes won`t be aligned to the models.
If you want to review a job from a client, a test render is still the best option, unless you want your client to have a copy of the blend file. But for team work, the Grease Pencil will help a lot! I`m looking forward to see the final version of the tool.
Great Idea! very useful, thanks, thanks, thanks.
I just would add a text function.
It can work to check the curves (flow) of an animation too.
spelling correction:
“if your notes are placed right over a model, you can`t moVe the view “
@ms:
Thanks for the warning. I`ve updated the article.
howdy!
awesome! i currently work at a maya house where the anim directors are asking for this feature constantly! there are scripts but evidently, none of them are good enough for their purposes so they just use acetate taped to monitors and draw it out.
if i can make a ridiculously early request, i’d LOOOOoooove to see the ability to make not just single drawings but have the drawings be saved according to “current frame”… so that someone can create a flip book or draw over to give direction over an entire sequence.
having said that though, there are OTHER situations where you want the same drawing to stay on screen as you’re scrubbing through timeline (like when you draw an arc tracing the motion a joint should make across screen) so it would be nice to have the option to either have a “static drawing” or “flip book”.
also, the ability to make NEW flipbooks/drawings and SAVE these and be able to load at any time… that would be awesome.
hahaha, i know that’s asking alot but i just thought i’d drop my wish list on you.
thank you much for your efforts so far. it looks awesome!
wow! awesome feature!
indeed like jin said, if you can have grease pencils by frame (or, even better) grease to a range of frames, you could use it as an awesome tool to plan your moves out. maybe you’d need an option to reset the camera to the position it was in while drawing the frames or something though.
Without sounding negative (hopefully) about a good tutorial, the most important bit about Grease Pencil is its ability no take these lines and clumsy squiggles and turn them into a really meaningful geometry set.
Convert to
Armature
Spline
Path
…and do that non linearly with a completely separate layer system. Wow!
you can convert to bazier and then extrude to make the objects visable. also you can draw paths for objects, and so on. check out super3boys demos on youtube for awesome blender tutorials
oh and in response to flip book, just use the different layers and continue to convert the grease into objects, or you could retain many objects in an archive, also perhaps use transform. I really do encourage you to make the switch to blender.