Blender Tools,Pipeline,Production
Several 2d animators and story(board) artists have been reporting exciting results with the upgraded “Grease Pencil” annotation tool in Blender. What started as a quick way to add notes in the viewport has now grown into a powerful animation tool for sketching storyboards — and even final animations.
Matias Mendiola, who worked here on Cosmos Laundromat storyboarding in September, posted the video below. He could do this minute of film in just half a day. No tedious .jpg file naming and saving, loading, texture mapping, and video editing needed!
According to Matias, the main benefits are:
Download the .blend file here (3 MB). Needs Blender 2.73 to work!
Very interesting ! This feature is far from anecdotic, it’s come a good way towards bridging the gap between 2D and 3D, very promising .. It’s already a big speedup for preprod, but if could probably be used to produce final animations ..
Once again, kudos to the dev team !
i have been doing this since 2.49b …. awesome way of making animatics and storyboard
keep it up
This will be very helpful to add detail to my non photorealistic renders for http://the.amorzorzores.com !
No need to go to Gimp or Inkscape for finishing anymore!! :D
Realy realy interesting this could be the newest way to go when it come to do 2D animatics
keep pushing blender beyond his limit guys !!
Impressive!
Sooner or later, I knew that Blender would come around to being used a boarding tool. Now I’m waiting for somebody to use Blender as a 3D boarding tool. Because that is the future of storyboarding.
Bravo, Pratik! You’re ahead of the game.
Blener has already been used as a 3D bording tool. From wikipedias article about Blender:
“The first large professional project that used Blender was Spider-Man 2, where it was primarily used to create animatics and pre-visualizations for the storyboard department”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blender_%28software%29#Use_in_the_media_industry
Well, Wikipedia doesn’t always get it right. I had a number of friends who worked on that show and from what I understand Proof did the pre-vis and they use Maya.
I stand corrected.
I have recently been reminded that Blender was used as a pre-vis tool on Spiderman 2. Matter of fact, I’ve seen the footage. I believe that Anthony Zierhut used the particle simulator to create a helicopter crashing into a bridge. However, I think Wayback Machine misquotes Anthony by suggesting that he was using Blender to storyboard Spiderman 2. As far as I know, neither Blender nor Maya have ever been used to storyboard a major US motion picture. That is why I think what Matias has done is very forward thinking.
Previz is indeed a different topic. What Matias does is sketching in 3d, using all the fancy benefits of having Blender’s viewport, and yet have all the creative freedom of a storyboard artist!
How can I render the animation? By the screen cast option or is there a better way?
You can render the viewport both as a still shot, and as an animation. There is a button for both in the 3d view port. One looks line a camera, the other looks like a clapper board.
Or you can google ‘blender viewport render’ and look in the wiki.
Hope this helps ☺
You must use OpenGL render animation on render menu
the tool is great but i think without being overwelming
it be nice if the tool has like a paint buket or a fill selection tool
or pre made forms lice a circle o a cube triangle,
and being able to make more 2d aniamtion in blender because
i feel it has the capacity
but still is an awesom tool gret job blender
would be nice to have a video on the workflow he use :)
Seams like really nice way for storyboarding a scene such as this one. :)
I don’t think the line quality is good enough yet too replace my 2d animation software for final animation however. And I don’t really like the way the eraser and line thickness works at the moment. You’ve made some nice improvements to grease pencil still (like the colored onion skin)! :>
Why does grease pencil need a different kind of render to render?
Why doesn’t it render normally?
Can someone explain to me how was the camera switch animated ? AM newish to blender…
found the method…
http://blendersushi.blogspot.in/2011/11/multiple-cameras-switching-with.html