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Blender 2.93: Grease Pencil

LineArt Modifier

New Line Art modifier is now included to provide functionality of generating stylized lines from geometries in the scene. (3e87d8a431)

Line art demonstration render of a 727 cut-away drawing.

  • Produce accurate occlusion result from any geometry.
  • Intersection lines can be generated and selected separately for styling.
  • Chaining allows strokes to be connected thus allow smooth display of grease pencil styles and textures.
  • Vertex weight in the mesh can be transferred into grease pencil to allow further style control of generated strokes.
  • Strokes can be baked to allow further edits in the viewport.

Import/Export

  • New operators to Import SVG to grease pencil objects and export grease pencil objects in SVG and PDF format. (a8a92cd15a)
  • SVG Importer use vertex color for colors.

Demo Video

User Interface

  • IMPORTANT CHANGE: Now Autokey button must be enabled to generate new keyframes in Draw, Edit or Sculpt mode. If the Autokey button is disabled, the last available frame is used. This is more aligned with how Blender works and with other 2D softwares. Also, 2D template has now Autokey button enabled by default. (6a662ffda8)
    • Note: Old files are not changed. Enable Autokey button manually to get the old behavior.
  • Now the multiframe is disabled when play animation. Before, it was impossible to see the animation because all frames were visible. (e7c36ce43c)
  • Swap positions of Pie menu options for Vertex Paint and Weight Paint. (20d0bb43af)
  • New multiframe display mode. Keyframes before or after of the active frame are displayed using onion colors. This can be disable using Onion overlay options.
  • Dopesheet now display a bar between keyframes to indicate that keyframe is still used. (e44b2ada3e) (296984b40e)
  • Dopesheet context menu has been reorganized and some options added. (15a4ed3aff)
  • Materials Options panel renamed to Settings to keep consinstency. (51c7ff9222)
  • Annotations now has a Opacity parameter (this was removed during the refactor and never was added again). (c62e60f01f)

Operators

  • Resolution parameter for Fill Tool has been renamed to Precision and allows values below 1. This is very handy for storyboarding. (6704372f04)
  • New operator to Duplicate Layers but with empty Keyframes. This operator is very useful to duplicate the keyframes but don't copy the strokes to be used in cleanup or painting works. (cfd54ad7d7)
  • New option to Trace images starting in the current frame and not always 1. (e747c07156)

Tools

  • New Layer transform parameters. (e02d84eb3b)
  • New Multiframe support in Draw mode (included in fill tool refactor commit).

Fill Tool

A refactor of the fill tool has been done inorder to solve several problems we had since the first version of the tool. (1352d81b17)

Changes:

  • The filling speed has been improved for each step of the process with the optimization of each algorithm/function.
  • New AutoFit option to fill areas outside of the viewport. When enable, the total size of the frame is calculated to fit the filling area.
  • New support multiframe filling. Now it is possible to fill multiple similar frames in one go.
  • New Stroke Extension option to create temporary closing strokes. These strokes can be displayed and adjusted dynamically using wheel mouse or PageUp/Down keys. Use Wheel + Shift key for precise adjustments.
  • Parameter Resolution now is named Precision and has been moved to topbar.
  • Resolution now has decimals and can be lower than 1 to allow quick filling in storyboarding workflows. Maximum value has been set as 5.
  • Parameter Simplify has been moved to Advanced panel.
  • Improved fill outline detection. In some cases, the outline penetrated the area to be filled with unexpected results.
  • Fill is canceled if the filled area is not closed. This avoids ugly full screen fill. (c489bb7c01)
  • Fixes some corner case bugs with infinite loops.

Demo Video

Interpolate Tools

Following with the changes included to interpolate strokes of different number of points, a full review has been done in the interpolation tools. (6bba830589)

  • Interpolate now is a tool and not an operator. It was not logic to have this tool as a button.
  • Interpolate tool parameters have been moved to topbar.
  • Interpolate popover has been removed from topbar and interpolate Sequence operator has been moved to grease pencil menu.
  • Interpolate Sequence now include a Redo panel.
  • Interpolate tool now allows to select the strokes by pairs. This allows to interpolate any stroke with any stroke and not as before that it was only possible by drawing order. If no stroke is selected, the interpolation is done as before.
  • Now is possible interpolate again if a previous keyframe exist. Before, it was impossible to interpolate two times in same frame and this made impossible to do the interpolation by groups of frames.
  • New automatic option to Flip strokes if the initial stroke and end stroke are not in the right position because direction is different. Also the flip can be set manually for corner cases.
  • Cleanup of menus related to interpolate.
  • Fixed some bugs and removed parameters from scene because now all are tool or operator contained.
  • Some code cleanup and function renames.

Demo Video

This commit also includes the some codebase to future implementation of the concept Vertex Active that now does not exist in grease pencil.

Modifiers and VFX

  • Seed parameter moved outside Randomize panel in Noise Modifier. (3191b76eb5)
  • New Noise Offset parameter in Noise Modifier. (7a4bdc3a4f)
  • Remove limitation to use only one Lattice modifier. (670c1fdf64)

Python

  • New API to force the stroke recalculation. In some scripts, the coordinates of the points are manipulated and there was no way to update the stroke. (faf45091b4)
  • New API to manipulate weight points. The old RNA prop was wrong and never was usable. (71e63153eb)