How To Do 2d Animation In Blender

By Antonio Vazquez

Leap 2016, I was playing around with Blender two.77 grease pencil when I noticed a problems in the stroke filling, so I decided try to gear up it and contribute to the Blender project. Since then, I take washed more than 1,100 commits for grease pencil as a volunteer and I think information technology's time to write my first blog entry.

Grease pencil has something very special, because y'all need to go along the feeling of a second blitheness within a 3D surroundings, integrating these ii worlds smoothly. Merely this claiming makes more exciting to piece of work in an area that tin alter how second animation will work in the future.

Christmas is effectually the corner and the Hero open moving picture directed by Daniel M. Lara is on production for several weeks already, working in a daily basis with the Grease Pencil branch.

Working in a real production is the best way to fine melody a software and notice the existent creative requirements also as to smooth workflows. Therefore the Hero open motion picture is a perfect way to improve grease pencil.

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

Let's review some of these new features and changes we take been working on. Cheers to Daniel Lara and Matias Mendiola for providing the demonstration videos of this article.

Multi frame editing falloff

When you are doing a 2D animation, it's very mutual to need to redraw or touch on several frames in society to get a shine animation. You unremarkably utilize the onion skinning available (I added support for more onion skinning modes too). The problem with onion skinning is that you can only "run across" the blitheness, only you cannot edit the drawings.

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

After thinking about the problem, Daniel came with the idea of a falloff effect. A few tests later, and I implemented a style to calculate a polish transition for sculpted frames. Now, if you move the stroke some units in the current frame, the previous and next selected frames will also be affected, based on an interpolation curve.

With this arroyo you can become smooth transitions. And past adjusting the interpolation curve, a slow in/out effect tin be at present hands achieved.

Modifiers

Modifiers are something we use everyday in 3D, but it's something totally new in grease pencil.

The kickoff step to implement this for grease pencil was to decide how to reuse the current infrastructure, while customizing it to the 2D requirements. I did an initial blueprint and later on a lot of trial and error, I got something that worked, only after some review by other developers, the initial design required some changes to keep better aligned with the full general Blender modifiers design. Finally, with the aid of Joshua (Leung), we got a improve pattern 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, withal, the modifier was not modifying the stroke backdrop, as all 3D meshes modifiers exercise, but changing their look just.

To solve this "look only" modifiers, I designed the VFX modifiers, that work in a like way to the Eevee viewport furnishings, affecting the wait of the paradigm of the grease pencil object. This is washed using a full screen shader that works as a filter for the image. The VFX modifiers can be different for each object, so we can activate VFX mistiness for one object while keeping other objects precipitous.

VFX Lite

Since I started to develop for grease pencil, one of my offset idea was to add some blazon of lighting support.

Lighting is a circuitous topic, especially when you are working with 2D elements in a 3D world. In 2nd, the concepts of normals, faces and so on changes a little, so you demand to notice a mode to mimic all these things in a 2D environment.

Equally existent lighting was out of scope at this moment (it would require more than work on Eevee which has its own priorities at the moment), I decided to implement some fashion of 2D lighting using a special VFX shader.

VFX tin be applied to a single object and get absurd effects, but this lighting has no relation with other objects. In the futurity, a full Eevee integration of grease pencil could be implemented, but for now, something is better than goose egg.

The main problem in the development was how to manage the light position and how to catechumen this to the 2nd world. Finally, I got an algorithm to summate the distance to an "invisible" plane represented by the strokes and after some debugging I got a skilful effect.

Build modifier

Build modifier is something all animators want. Here Joshua comes with a great implementation.

The build modifier allows to breathing the cartoon of the strokes in a similar style of the Build modifier for 3D objects.

Simplify modifier

The simplify process was something y'all retrieve is necessary from the first stages of the design, but it was one that shows how important it is to have real talented artists working in the evolution procedure.

The initial idea of this modifier was to use the aforementioned algorithm that I've used in my grease pencil add-on final yr. I was investigating and the almost used i 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, merely after several weeks, the Hero team requested a more elementary way of "cleaning" the drawings, so I had to implement a simple mode to remove a point for every 2 points. Finally, I added a parameter to apply recursively the fixed simplify logic to speed up cleaning.

This new simplify stock-still mode was something that as programmer I have never idea, but for artists, it shows upward as a natural requirement for production workflow.

Offset modifier

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

To solve tasks like this, the offset modifier is a great tool because you lot can filter by layer, pass index or vertex group, so you tin can apply whatever type 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 by weeks that are non visible but have a lot of impact. Here, Joshua did a bully chore refactoring the code to use the new depsgraph and align some parts to be ready to merge with 2.8 branch. I know these are non fancy areas, but we must thanks Joshua for his excellent work again. It's never too much to remind that he is the original developer of grease pencil in Blender, and none of this would be possible without his work.

When?

Blender 2.viii beta in August! If you compile Blender yourself, you tin can already try the new Grease Pencil, as it is currently being developed on carve up branches (the master ane being greasepencil-object).

We have done more things, and continue improving information technology every 24-hour interval. Stay tuned for more than news!

Cheers,
Antonio

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

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

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

Posted by: campbellhadeare.blogspot.com

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