Having just pushed through the Grease Pencil changes for 2.73 (which, is only "Stage 1"... I've got a bunch of other cool features lined up for "Stage 2" when I get time, to take this up another level still), and currently knee deep in some intensive brain surgery for the new depsgraph code (which should be landing in the depsgraph_refactor branch in the next day or two), that idea kindof had to slide.
Instead, the little scene above (made using, you guessed it, the new GPencil tools - so that I could have a play around with some of the cool ideas I've been seeing for myself). For now, that's all there is to show, but hopefully I'll manage to squeeze out a little skit out of this :)
Go Joshua go!!
ReplyDeleteJur!
Absolutely top job on your Grease Pencil work, it's really improved the tool!
ReplyDeleteA couple of little things I've noticed:
- There seems to be grey borders to the poly tris that are create in the fill stroke, I can see them in your image above and on my PC, they are not there when looking at the same file on my Surface Pro 2.
- The fill option likes to fill in polys outside of a defined shape if the shape in any way has points that are not able to connect with a straight line, any fill object therefore has to be some form of circle/oval/square shape so that the fill doesn't go outside the borders.
- Is there any way to 'stick' grease pencil strokes to an object so they remain 'stuck' even when the object moves around? It would be brilliant to input that functionality into a future update.
Love your work man. Hope you have a great break and continue full steam on this next year!
Thanks for the kind words :)
Delete1) Yeah, I've noticed those borders too. I suspect it's probably the way that the different graphics drivers implement this. IIRC, the Surface Pro's use Intel Graphics, while on my machine, I've wrangled the Nvidia Optimus setup into using the Nvidia card only for Blender. It's a bit annoying/disappointing, but...
2) Again, this is a consequence of relying on OpenGL to figure out how to fill the polygons. The major limitation is that the method OpenGL drivers use ends up filling the convex hull, meaning that any concave shapes will not be filled accurately. I had originally been planning on hacking up my own solution for this, but the OpenGL based solution was easier to implement for initial support for doing this; in this case, I figured it'd be better to have some support (which is functional for a large number of cases, even if it has a few shortcomings) than to delay having support for this.
3) This is/was on my todo list. In the end, this was one of a handful of things which I ended up bumping off to be included after 2.73, since they're rather significant changes which need a bit more time to mature and get the bugs out from.
Brilliant! I'm hoping to be able to use Grease Pencil drawings on poly planes that can then be animated themselves to give animation smooth transitions and use show/hide visibility to be able to sort expressions, hand angles/poses etc. I could do this in Photoshop and then import as textures but it would significantly speed up workflow to have this ability.
DeleteThanks so much for your hard work on this!!
+1 for option 3 this functionality would be really cool! drawing with GP over objects- Surface and the GP strokes stays- remain there when you animate the objects!wow
ReplyDeleteI already made a little test with the new GP tool:I use a rigged cut out 2d Character Girl Margot from Desanimados film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tcj6w9VsPuA
I made this test in 2 minutes nothing special and really bad quality strokes i simply draw a table a Vase and Flowers and the Girl picks up the Flowers interacting with animated Gp Strokes..... it works and looks very good!!! so many possibilities now open with this new GP features. Thank YOU so MUCH!
you can download the blend file from here Margot gp1 if you like to see:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/33431
and sorry for my bad english!?
Now that Stage One is all trunked and official (without any doubt Blender Update Of The Year for me!), could we get an updated roadmap of further development? I don't mean dates of course, just general goals and priorities.
ReplyDeleteRegarding point 3: Are we talkinga about GP-drawings following the Transforms of an associated object, or surface-drawn strokes deforming along with rigged geometry? The first option seems pretty realistic to implement (while extremely useful!), the other one like quite a huge undertaking.
And finally, how do you prefer to get feedback?