This weekend I knew about this great new feature being developed by Alligorith: Greasepencil.
But... what does is do?
It allows us to directly draw into the 3D view, making it possible to sketch our posing and acting ideas right into Blender. The first time I heard about such feature was when Pixar made it in order to allow the director Brad Bird to draw on top of what the animators showed him, so he could visually explain what he wanted. You can here more on this PDF.
Alligorith has been publishing new versions of his patch on this thread at BlenderArtists. There are even some ready to go builds available on GraphicAll.org.
And what if you want to make your own build with the latest patch without waiting for one to make and upload one?
If you are on Windows, Macouno has made a pretty cool compiling tutorial on his site. To apply the patch you can use Patch for Windows, which I guess that is used the exact same way that the Unix version shown below.
If you are using Ubuntu Linux as I am, do the following:
- Open a terminal;
- Create a folder where you will put the Blender source.
Ex: mkdir /home/your_username/blender
- Enter into that folder:
cd /home/your_username/blender
- Install the packages required to build Blender (depending on what you already have installed, it may take a while):
sudo apt-get build-dep blender
- Download the latest source code from SVN (it also may take a while):
svn checkout https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/blender
- After it has finished, enter into blender directory:
cd blender
- Download the patch (as I write this, the latest version is the 13th):
wget http://aligorith.googlepages.com/greasepencil_13.patch
- Apply the patch (which is basically modifications on the original code):
patch -p0 ‹greasepencil_13.patch
- Now you are ready to compile:
scons
- Wait another while until it's finished and, if you don't get any errors, you will have the new folder /home/your_username/install/linux2. Get into it:
cd /home/your_username/install/linux2
- Now you can enjoy it:
./blender
"Ok, nice... now I have already compiled/downloaded that Greasepencil version. How do I use it?"
Well... since you have already opened Blender:
- Go to the 3D view menu and select "Grease Pencil..."
- Click "Use Grease Pencil"
- Click "Add New" and adjust the settings like color and thickness
- Notice that will be created a new mode for the 3D view called "Grease Pencil". Select it.
- Voilá! You are ready to draw on the screen =D
You are a great! your improvements on blender animation tools are simply great, so close to that an animator wants.
Hello, Pepeland! =)
Unfortunately (for me) I'm not who developed this great tool. I just wrote this short article on its usage. Aligorith (linked above) is the developer of Greasepencil.
But, anyway, thanks for visiting and commenting into my blog. =)
The link to http://www.alienhelpdesk.com/ is down :-(
I am newbie and trying to lean how to do all kinds of things with Blender.
Would be nice to learn how to install this neat tool.
Blender is Great!
Yeah, it's pretty awesome! You can also animate with this. Just move to another frame and draw. I read that an onion skin feature has been added as well as the ability to render the drawing with the Blender scene (opengl render).
With this, and maybe just a few more features, you could use Blender as a replacement for tools like Pencil. I think this could make a great tool for very quick storyboarding, too. There really are a lot of creative uses for this!