What is Blender Grease Pencil Used for? | Full In-Depth Review

We bet you know Blender as a 3D package, and it might even sound strange to think of making 2D art in a 3D environment. However, Blender offers you the possibility to do just that with the Blender Grease Pencil object. And although it seems rather pointless since there are many software dedicated especially for 2D art, it can actually provide huge value. You might be asking yourself: what is Blender Grease Pencil and what is it used for? How to use Grease Pencil in Blender?

Grease Pencil is a 2D special type of objects that comes integrated in Blender itself, so you’ll just have to activate it. It allows you to make 2D art in the 3D viewport in a very unique workflow.

In this post, we will break down the Grease Pencil object and shed the light on how powerful it is and how can you use it to your advantage in your projects.

Is Blender Grease Pencil for 2D art as powerful as for 3D?

Blender is an awesome free and open-source 3D software. It has advanced features used for creating animated films, visual effects, art, 3D printed models, motion graphics, interactive 3D applications, virtual reality, and computer games. We talked extensively about its power in 2D animation and even about the overall history that led the 3D package to such an outstanding improvement.

Besides, it has many handy addons – that we categorize them to help you easily navigate them – such as:

• Hard Surface modeling addons to make the most incredible models with intricate details and outstanding accuracy.
• PBR addons and material packs to bake and texture your models like a pro.
• Plants, grass and botanic asset packs that help you populate your scenes quickly and efficiently.
• Management and productivity addons that will make your workflow quicker and smoother. So, you would never miss a deadline or spend hours on cumbersome tasks instead of focusing on the creative process.
• Retopology addons for the best meshes workflow and the most efficient retopology process.
• Rendering addons that will make your renders high-quality pixel perfect, and with the most optimal speed.
• UV unwrapping and UV mapping addons to help you create UV maps quickly and easily in a short period of time.
• Texturing and shading addons to add more depth and realism to your models and scenes.
• Terrain and space scenes addons are a must-have, despite being seemingly niche and too targeted. It can save you hours of work and help you achieve results that are very difficult to deliver otherwise.
• ArchViz addons to help you make the most out of your architectural visualization work.
• Rigging addons to make the process of building puppets, rigs and skeletons tremendously fast and more efficient. These can be especially helpful for character animation.
• Simulation and VFX addons to help you add the most incredible visual effects to your 3D animations with Blender.
• Animation addons to make the animation process with Blender 3D software reach the next level.
• Modeling addons to help you optimize the modeling process and create your models more efficiently.

This is just a glimpse of what can Blender do, and we believe it’s exciting enough to make you want to adopt it for your next 2D animation project.

Does drawing 2D art in 3D space make any sense? The answer is YES! Drawing directly in a 3D viewport makes a lot of sense. Combining 2D with 3D right in the viewport opens unsurpassed workflow freedom for story-boarders and 2D artists. Therefore, InspirationTuts prepared for you this first-ever detailed article about Blender Grease Pencil. 

1. What is Blender Grease Pencil?

First off, let’s have a quick overview on what this feature is for those of you who are not very familiar with it. Blender Grease Pencil is a 2D drawing object that comes integrated in the 3D package itself, so it doesn’t require any separate install. Using it in the 3D viewport is simple, you just need to:

1. activate it.
2. hold down the D button of your keyboard.
3. maintain the left click of your mouse, and drag the cursor around the 3D space.

Just like all Blender objects, Grease Pencil offers you a range of advanced options for modeling, simulation, rendering, animation and compositing. We’ll get into this more in depth in a bit, but before that, let’s look at what you can do with this tool on a practical level.

2. Blender Grease Pencil Usage

Grease pencil might seem too simple to be seriously used in most types of projects, or even counter-intuitive and rather useless. But it’s actually quite the opposite when you become aware of its power, as it can serve many purposes and it can be adopted in many industries. We can mention for example:

• Sketching: especially the type of sketching that can stand for brainstorming, before starting a project that will be eventually modeled in Blender itself.
• Drawing: not only the classic form of drawing, but also the one that serves end-to-end integration. For example, many concept and graphic artists rely on 3D models for things like character poses, depth, environment, perspective and so on. Merging both of these dimensions in one single package can boost the workflow tremendously.
• Animation: since the sole purpose of the Grease Pencil first and foremost was bringing 2D animation to Blender. We can see the tangible proof of this great advantage in many open 2D animation movies, like “Hero” for example.

Moreover, we have seen Blender and its Grease Pencil find their way to many graphic design ends. Some of them include media production, advertisement, marketing, and many others.

3. Components & Options

Now that you have a general idea on what you can do with Grease Pencil, let’s dive more into the depth of what makes it so unique.

Structure

Once you launch Blender, going to the 2D animation section is the only step to open the Grease Pencil workspace. Taking a closer look at the structure, it’s composed of 3 main elements:

1. First you have the Point, which is a single point in the 3D space that saves all the properties like weight, texture, thickness, location and so on. These properties are responsible of the Stroke’s final appearance besides its location in the 3D space.
2. Next, you have the Edit Lines that represent the links between the different Points. They’re generally invisible but you can display them in the Edit Mode or the Wireframe View.
3. Finally, you have the Strokes that represent the final result of both Points and Lines combined after rendering.

Primitives

Just like the default cube in the 3D section, there’s an equivalent in the 2D one called “Primitives”.  It’s a nice staging phase when you start a new project, a lot better than the overwhelming empty 3D space. You get to add 3 types of Primitives:

1. The first one is the Blank: you can add an object without any stroke.
2. The second is the Stroke: you can add a simple one as a reference.
3. The third and final one is Monkey: remember “Suzanne”? it’s known by the community as Blender’s mascot. There’s a 2D version of her, and you can use it as a standard test.

Modes

When it comes to the actual workflow, Blender Grease Pencil offers you 3 modes that you can access from the Mode Menu located on the 3D View header:

1. First, you have the Draw Mode: which is the only mode that allows you to add and draw a new Stroke in the 3D View. Once you activate it, the cursor will turn into a circle with the same color of the material. You can either choose the free hand drawing option, or you can just pick one of the basic shapes, such as lines, curves, circles and boxes.
2. The Edit Mode is used to alter the shape of the drawing. But the workflow is kinda different: it doesn’t deal with Points and Edit Lines. Instead of that, it functions with the area of the model and it alters it using a brush.
3. The Sculpt Mode manipulates the drawing in the brush region of influence. It has specific panels and once it’s activated, the cursor will turn into a red circle in the 3D View.

Properties

Since making 2D flat drawings in a 3D environment is not very conventional as it is, you’ll end up facing a few challenges. Most of them will be related to choosing 2 stable axes among the X, Y and Z. This is where drawing properties will come in handy:

• To define the location of the base stroke and the ones that follow, you can use the Stroke Placement Selector.
• While to define the orientation, you can use the Drawing Planes Selector to define the plane and the axes that form it.

This process might be a little confusing, so the system provides you with Guides that will assist you along the way. 

4. Tools & Features

The drawing process with Grease Pencil is quite unique, besides being backed up with awesome tools and features. We can mention a few of them that stand out.

• For drawing: you have the Draw on Back option for example. It allows you to draw a Stroke on the very back of all the other strokes. There’s also the Add Weight Data option, and you can use it when you want to create a Stroke according to the current vertex group and weight. The last option to mention is the Additive Drawing, which you can use to include Strokes from the previous frame when creating a new one.
• For sculpting: you first have the Selection Mask. It allows you to select strokes and work on them exclusively without affecting the rest. It can be very handy when you want to restrict the effect on specific areas. And second, you have the multi-frame option that can be super useful when you want to work on many frames at the same time.

• For rigging: you can benefit from the deformation tools. You simply have to manipulate the points and that’s pretty much it. There’s also the weight data system that can prove itself to be very useful: it adds points to any stroke to pre-stage it for rigging. Not to mention the Modifiers that can add fantastic effects to your objects.
• For animation: you have all the necessary tools to perform any kind of animation you’re aiming for, whether it be traditional, frame-by-frame or cut-out animation. It grants you full control over the objects, so you can change the size, orientation, position, and so on. The onion-skin feature will make things a lot smoother and easier by helping you display multiple frames in one single scene. Not to mention that you can use the inherited animations to your advantage, by building layer-parenting relations between objects.

One final feature that is worth mentioning is the ability to add notes in the 3D viewport. Which is very handy when working on collaborative projects with other artists.

5. Learning Curve

There’s no doubt that the power of this tool has become very obvious and tangible to you by now. But there’s still one rather unpleasant question that starts creeping in: can you learn this innovative thing? Grease Pencil as well as Blender are being used by professionals and talented artists, you’ve certainly came across them on YouTube, Blendermarket, Blendernation, pretty much everywhere. It might overwhelm you and lure you into thinking that you need their potential to achieve the same results. The answer is No: Grease Pencil follows the same pattern as its container Blender 3D. It’s known to be suitable for beginners with a fine learning curve, especially when armed with motivation and perseverance.

6. Price and License

As we mentioned before, Grease Pencil comes integrated in the 3D package itself. Since Blender is fully free and open source, this makes the 2D object fall under the same description. But you can still make donation if you wanna support the development team, or even contribute at improving the core software if you have skills with code.

Conclusion

We hope you found this article useful and informative. Comment below if you think that we’ve missed something or if you have any other suggestions. Thank you for reading!