How To Make 2d Animations In Blender

Past Antonio Vazquez

Jump 2016, I was playing around with Blender ii.77 grease pencil when I noticed a bug in the stroke filling, and so I decided try to prepare it and contribute to the Blender project. Since then, I take done more than ane,100 commits for grease pencil every bit a volunteer and I retrieve it's time to write my first web log entry.

Grease pencil has something very special, because you need to keep the feeling of a 2nd animation within a 3D environment, integrating these two worlds smoothly. But this challenge makes more exciting to piece of work in an expanse that can modify how second animation will work in the future.

Christmas is around the corner and the Hero open moving-picture show directed past Daniel G. Lara is on product for several weeks already, working in a daily footing with the Grease Pencil branch.

Working in a real production is the best style to fine tune a software and discover the real artistic requirements as well as to smoothen workflows. Therefore the Hero open up movie is a perfect manner to meliorate grease pencil.

During these weeks the Hero team has requested a lot of new features and adjustments to adjust grease pencil to the product workflow. Sometimes the changes were simple modifications of default values but other times the changes were bigger similar the multi frame editing falloff.

Let's review some of these new features and changes we have been working on. Thanks to Daniel Lara and Matias Mendiola for providing the sit-in videos of this commodity.

Multi frame editing falloff

When you are doing a 2nd blitheness, it's very common to need to redraw or touch several frames in order to get a smooth animation. You lot unremarkably use the onion skinning available (I added support for more than onion skinning modes too). The problem with onion skinning is that you tin but "encounter" the animation, only you cannot edit the drawings.

The Hero squad requested a style to change multiple frames at the same time, then I developed a new multi frame edition mode that allows changing several frames at the aforementioned time. You can select the frames afflicted using the Dopesheet. This multi frame edition saves a lot of time to animators.

Afterwards thinking about the problem, Daniel came with the thought of a falloff effect. A few tests afterward, and I implemented a style to calculate a smooth transition for sculpted frames. At present, if you lot movement the stroke some units in the current frame, the previous and next selected frames volition besides be affected, based on an interpolation curve.

With this approach y'all can get shine transitions. And by adjusting the interpolation curve, a tedious in/out effect can be at present hands accomplished.

Modifiers

Modifiers are something nosotros employ everyday in 3D, but it'due south something totally new in grease pencil.

The first step to implement this for grease pencil was to determine how to reuse the current infrastructure, while customizing information technology to the second requirements. I did an initial design and after a lot of trial and mistake, I got something that worked, but subsequently some review by other developers, the initial pattern required some changes to keep meliorate aligned with the general Blender modifiers design. Finally, with the help of Joshua (Leung), we got a better blueprint and implementation.

This is the current list of the new modifiers.

Grease pencil has some special requirements that could be handled with modifiers. In some cases, however, the modifier was not modifying the stroke backdrop, as all 3D meshes modifiers do, but changing their wait only.

To solve this "look merely" modifiers, I designed the VFX modifiers, that piece of work in a like way to the Eevee viewport effects, affecting the look of the image of the grease pencil object. This is done using a full screen shader that works as a filter for the image. The VFX modifiers can exist unlike for each object, so we can activate VFX blur for one object while keeping other objects sharp.

VFX Light

Since I started to develop for grease pencil, 1 of my first idea was to add together some blazon of lighting support.

Lighting is a complex topic, especially when yous are working with second elements in a 3D globe. In 2D, the concepts of normals, faces and then on changes a footling, so you demand to detect a fashion to mimic all these things in a 2nd environment.

As existent lighting was out of telescopic at this moment (information technology would require more than work on Eevee which has its ain priorities at the moment), I decided to implement some way of second lighting using a special VFX shader.

VFX can be applied to a single object and become cool effects, merely this lighting has no relation with other objects. In the future, a total Eevee integration of grease pencil could be implemented, but for now, something is improve than cypher.

The primary problem in the evolution was how to manage the light position and how to convert this to the 2D world. Finally, I got an algorithm to calculate the distance to an "invisible" plane represented by the strokes and later on some debugging I got a practiced effect.

Build modifier

Build modifier is something all animators want. Here Joshua comes with a bang-up implementation.

The build modifier allows to animate the drawing of the strokes in a similar fashion of the Build modifier for 3D objects.

Simplify modifier

The simplify process was something y'all call back is necessary from the first stages of the design, merely it was one that shows how of import it is to accept existent talented artists working in the development process.

The initial idea of this modifier was to use the same algorithm that I've used in my grease pencil add together-on last year. I was investigating and the most used one was the Ramer–Douglas–Peucker algorithm. This algorithm takes a line and simplify it keeping as much as possible of the original shape.

The start implementation of the modifier worked using the RDP algorithm, only later several weeks, the Hero team requested a more simple way of "cleaning" the drawings, then I had to implement a simple way to remove a point for every 2 points. Finally, I added a parameter to utilize recursively the stock-still simplify logic to speed up cleaning.

This new simplify fixed fashion was something that as developer I take never thought, but for artists, it shows upwardly as a natural requirement for production workflow.

Offset modifier

To be able to motility some strokes of the same object in a free fashion was something that came to my mind thinking in how to move the eyebrows of a character without affecting other areas.

To solve tasks like this, the offset modifier is a bully tool because yous can filter by layer, pass alphabetize or vertex group, so you lot can utilize whatsoever blazon of transformation to selected areas of the drawing or create cool effects as showed in the following video.

Update: Shader FX

Other changes

There were a lot of things that were modified during these past weeks that are not visible but take a lot of impact. Here, Joshua did a great job refactoring the lawmaking to apply the new depsgraph and marshal some parts to be ready to merge with 2.8 branch. I know these are non fancy areas, only we must thanks Joshua for his excellent work again. It's never likewise much to remind that he is the original developer of grease pencil in Blender, and none of this would be possible without his piece of work.

When?

Blender 2.8 beta in August! If you lot compile Blender yourself, you can already effort the new Grease Pencil, equally information technology is currently existence developed on separate branches (the principal one being greasepencil-object).

We have done more things, and proceed improving it every twenty-four hour period. Stay tuned for more news!

Cheers,
Antonio

Grease Pencil Developers:
Antonio Vazquez (@antonioya_blend)
Joshua Leung (@aligorith)

Artists:
Daniel Thousand. Lara (@_pepeland_)
Matias Mendiola (@mmendio)

Source: https://code.blender.org/2017/12/drawing-2d-animation-in-blender-2-8/

Posted by: grimesmorningard.blogspot.com

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