Yes! You are totally right, I have not played around with this feature, but it looks to be the same. I'll have to check this out in my drivers master class series.
I think it would be interesting to have a list of mouth and eye positions as already created key frames. 2D animators work a lot with that and not with so many bones. I love your job.
This was very very informative. I just came to know that blender is advancing very much in 2d animation. Keep up the good work. Waiting for more cool rig tutorials. May be a full body all perspective rig xp
@@LevelPixelLevel I dont Know if you solve the problem completely, But in blender 2.9 you can convert mesh to grease pencil, where you can replace the greace pencil original primitive to mesh with the proper subdivisions to conform to 3d object, drive.google.com/file/d/14vY6oxH5VzqMH21XvR2dcZi1Tyl5vLiK/view?usp=sharing Here is a blend file I made using your tutorials. in blend file the eye is a grease pencil object converted from mesh circle Thank you very much for all the useful information
The lego movies/TV shows had a similar issue with aligning the face rigs to the curve of the head, so the faces are animated with the geo slightly offset away from the head then projected onto the head during rendering
@@LevelPixelLevel might also help if you have a camera inside the head to handle the projection! It'll be more consistent than projecting from the outside.
The video was very good, it was super useful. About the rigging of the eye, at the end, I have a character with whom the same thing happened to me. My solution was to set the shrinkwrap offset to 0 and a Displacement modifier with the value you want to offset. With that I solved it. As long as the mesh has enough resolution. I hope you find it useful.
Thanks I'll give it a shot! I was playing around with this as well, but I found the drawing of the GP Objects with fill to have some issues, I'll keep playing around with what you suggested here!
This is so nice! One day ( after i do all my projects that I want to do in my lifetime, which are perfectly doable and not out of scale at all!) I will do 2D animation. It's nice that by learning basic blender I learn so much around it! Who knows, maybe some day I will learn basic geometry and shapes, I struggle with triangles too ;(
These are fun little contained projects, I also like using a premade IP. That was I mostly focus on animation and function, rather than design and concept.
Please do more Grease pencil content! We need to see how you would approach a full character. At my company, we use Moho for 2D but I experimented with GP for use in an ad and I saw the great potential in creating 2D in a full 3D app. I used your videos for reference but I was filling in blanks as I went and I am a new blender user (Been houdini and c4d all this time). Please consider going through with this character and even if you do a multipart series, it would be epic!
Hehe sounds good, I've been building up to that, here is my face rotation test: ruclips.net/video/AtUbR1kXOQw/видео.html Now that I have this I might break it up into a full character build in the future.
I recall seeing a tutorial (forgive me if it was an older one of yours) where they used a bone to select the different mouth shapes from a chart. By moving the bone it drove the shape key I think. Anyway, the upshot was there was a visual chart where you could select the shape rather than having to remember which number corresponded to which shape. There also used to be a plug-in that used voice recognition in conjunction with text to create key frames with the corresponding mouth shapes, based on phonemes. Of course, with the system your showing you can add mouth shapes that aren’t speech related.
Yes, I saw that one as well, I think Maisam Hosaini has some cool tutorials that go over that twitter.com/maisam_hosaini I'll try to combine this now with some of the other things you outlined. Agreed, some kind of visual pose sheet would help elevate this mouth set up.
MLP Friendship is Magic style. Say what you want about the show, but it's one of the more impressive, smooth and _consistent_ looking shows made in Flash, which means rigging vector graphic puppets. I would like to know if Blender's new 2D suite can somehow replicate it.
Ok I figured out your lego head fill problem. Use the polyline tool under "drawing". You will have to use it like a vector drawing tool instead of freehand, but it will fill to shapes properly and is easier than creating a mesh. In the view settings at the top, choose surface on the left with a small offset, and then view on the right. This will allow you to draw directly on a surface according to your view angle while drawing. Hope that is a little better for you cheers!
You just achieved the frame picker feature of adobe animate by using the timeoffset and driver thing and thats what i am looking for, now i just need the graphic symbol feature i hope you can experiment with this, it is just like a gif that has its own timeline that you can set if its playable once or looping good thing about this is it is reusable, and mostly i use this to draw something like running in place then use tweening motion to the graphic symbol itself to make it look like its running there are adobe animate features that makes me my animation easy and makes me stay there even tho i really want to jump to blender, hope you can help. Thank you
it would be super cool , if it would be possible to point a camera on a flat face ( Grease pencil RIG ) and then use that camera output as a texture on a mesh. maybe as face RIG camera render output in png and than reload the texture frame by frame . think it would by slow for animation but i don't know a other way do do it .
did you ever figure out the projecting onto 3d thing? I guess weird things happen when you start bending grease pencil hoops, you can sort of see the fill leaping straight across the back if you contort it in the right way.
I have not returned to this yet. I might wait for 2.83 before I explore this again as there are a ton of new Grease Pencil features in that build. For something like this I might also look into a texture or curve base solution.
That Time Offset with the property driver is actually a practical way to do lip assignment! In professional 2D software, when you're on the mouth layer, you can press Left/Right (or the equivalent of Left/Right) keys to cycle through the different mouth shapes before assigning it as a keyframe, I don't suppose there's any roundabout way of doing that in Blender is there? like assigning the left/right Bracket Keys to cycle through the 1-10 mouths!?
Yeah, something like this is possible, although I think you'd have to write a custom tool. This could be an addon that looks for a property by name and then adds hotkeys to the functions that cycle through. I like this idea!
Level Pixel Level when it comes to Lip Assignment, being able to get to a new mouth shape in 0.5 seconds instead of 2 seconds is a huuuge deal over a 20 minute cartoon, as I imagine you probably noticed doing the Lip assignment for Dipper! Haha!
@@infinitehush Yeah, I know that side of it. A million clicks can slow down a production. Also, I was playing around with this in 2.79: www.blendernation.com/2015/10/06/add-on-pose-lib-preview-makes-pose-switching-easy-and-fast/ I wonder if this would speed up an animator, to just click on a thumbnail of the face shape.
Great tutorial, regarding the curved surface problem. Couldnt you draw all grease sketches on an plane and add a deformation modifier afterwards? I didnt tried this out, but deformation cages could work this way
Can you maybe somehow get the Grease Pencil fil to define a texture change in the underlying material? I'm not sure that's possible, but if it were, you'd basically have the 3D object's material be transparent within the filled area.
I was thinking about that as well, that is something I'm going to investigate. It would be nice if the grease pencil object can project onto a 3D surface, similar to a curve projection in Maya. This would open many options. Good idea!
@@LevelPixelLevel I think the problem why it's not so straight forward is that, at least currently, the way the fill works is some sort of triangulation of the polygon that makes up the fill. If that underlying triangulation doesn't happen to conform to the mesh flow of the thing you want to project onto, it's impossible to avoid the issues you're currently seeing. The only way I could see that might make this work would be some sort of dynamic triangulation. This might be tricky to do fast, efficiently, and in a way that works well with almost arbitrary underlying projection mesh. Otherwise, you'd almost by necessity have to go through modifying the texture of the 3D object instead.
@@LevelPixelLevel One thing you could try (but I suspect it'd become tedious *very* quickly) is basically to "build a scaffolding" of lines in the same color as the fill. Basically a square grid. And then fill out every square individually. That way the fill would have more detail to work with in order to properly project onto the mesh. The grid should adhere to the flow of the mesh as well as possible, which is kinda reasonable to do on a cylindrical object, but it's gonna be a lot tougher on something spherical or what not. It's probably not actually worth the effort, but it might work in principle.
@@Kram1032 Ah I see, almost build a pixel grid texture with the grease pencil across a 3D object. That sounds interesting. I'll give it a try at least with some smaller pieces to see how it goes. Great idea!
Eventually ... One day... I hope you are able to make an, "Action" rig. For instance a fighting capable Goku from Dragon Ball. If you get really skilled than an action rig from Avatar the Last Airbender.
Hey, I'm working my way up to something more advanced like this. I think a good action fight scene is a great test to push Grease Pencil to the limit. Good suggestions!
Great Work Master!. I did an exercise on my own by following the steps in part 6 (Advanced Time Offset Rig). And everything works perfectly. In fact, I made an animation moving the bones to go choosing different parts of the original drawing(mouth positions in this video). And everything works great (excellent tutorial). However, when I render the image is stuck in a single position, that is, the positions controlled by the bones in the rendering do not work, even though everything works fine in the project. Pls Help =(. Ty in advance.
I know this is from a while ago, but have you ever found out a way to get grease pencil to follow the curve of an object like the lego head? I have a grease pencil rig and I was trying to use the shrink wrap modifier, but I could not get it to work well. I'm wondering if there is a better way than shrink wrap.
This can work by switching the time offset to value, and this can be driven. Here is a great version of this tool: ruclips.net/video/GX-3F0BG3t4/видео.html
My dude, that's wild af. Great tut! For your lego rig question, is it possible to take the shrinkwrapped mouth thing and offset it by 0.01 local y based off the normal? That's what I'd do in engine, but idk how to do so in Blender
Thanks! Glad you liked it! For the lego head I did try something like that, even with the offset I was still getting a drawing issue with the grease pencil fill, it always tries to find the shortest route to complete the fill. But I have a couple ideas for fixing this and I've heard some good suggestions already in the comment section here, including a mesh-based system.
First off, love your work! Secondly, correct me if you're wrong but it sounds like you have quite a bit of 2D animation and rigging experience. Do you have any thoughts on how your work flow here compares to working in Cell Action or toonboom harmony?
Thank you! And actually, that is what I am trying to replicate. Toonboom harmony has some amazing features, but I do think that Blender can match this (one day). I've been playing around with toon boom, and adobe animate, to see how they deal with certain limitations. Blender has some work to catch up, but I think in 2.83 it will be extremely close. The biggering thing with Blender is the rigging tools. Once you can add a rig to something you also add a pose manager, which is extremely helpful in cutout animation!
hi can you make a video on getting character proportions right? i struggle with that aloti started to make a certain character but it was turning uncanny :(
At 7:10, I'm having trouble finding that menu where you were able to toggle between the frames in Properties. I've looked everywhere, but cannot find it. Does anyone know where that might be?
Hi. I have troubles by following your tutorial on 7 minute you are using time offset modifier with bone using data path and getting this nice control in the item panel. I really like the way it works but trouble is I made it for Other objects and that control shows up on the Pose mode while other shows up on the Object mode. I hope you get my point.. question is how can you switch it so it shows up on pose mode or otherwise on the object mode? may be I'm doing something wrong...
Is it possible to do a frame offset modifier and rig a linked GP object? Because from experience, having a lot of GP keyframes in a scene is heavy on playback. But if they are linked they play with no lag at all.
So I started animating with the mouth rig you made, but if I want to go from, let's say pose 12 to pose 6, then all the poses in between will play, right? Is there a way to stop those poses from animating? and just interpolate the line movement of pose 12 to pose 6?
Right, for something like this you'll need to add a frame hold. So say you want to hold pose 3 for 10 frames, you'll have to key pose 3 at frame one, and 10, then at frame 11 set it to say pose 8, and add another key at frame 35 for pose 8 to hold this for the duration.
What a nice stuff!! Btw I’m trying ‘time offset’ modifier according your video, and I did ‘fixed frame’ setting with different frames ,but I don’t understand how to make animation using ‘time offset’ on dope sheet. Pease help me!
Hi! Once you have the fixed frame option there is a number under this (I think zero is the default) You have to key this at different values in time to have this animate. Check out my example files as well, they will show you this function.
Hi there, this rig is great! I'm only having an issue with the mouth at render time. It doesn't respect the frame offset modifier. It's probably a quirk of Blender, but do you perhaps know why it does this?
Sorry if this is a dumb question -- I have the file open and I'm struggling to figure out how you animated his arm and hand. How were you able to achieve the change? I see that you have different layers for the change in hand shape but I'm not seeing where the value of the keyframe is coming from.
Hello! The arm is animated just using keyframes on the GP object. So select the arm, open up a dope sheet and change the dope sheet option to Grease Pencil and you should see the frames. docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/dope_sheet/grease_pencil.html
when i insert a mouth shape in 1st keyframe and another mouth shape in 5th keyframe , there are inbetween keyframe coming automatically, can you help me with this
hmm that's a good questions. I guess the easy answer is because it is free, but this doesn't mean it is a better software. I think for me I am most comfortable in Blender, so I can do things quick within the software. For now After Effects is probably better at 2D animation. What will make Blender better in the future is being able to leverage all of the 3D character animator tools on a 2D character rig, something like toon boom harmony. But this will take time to learn and perfect in Blender (sorry for the long response!)
Sort of, it's more how the circle draws itself. It will always try to find a linear route to for the fill. So even if the edge is conforming to the 3D object the fill of the 2D object will always be flat (intersecting the 3D geo)
Hello!! this is amazing. I love can make some like that I do with After Effect, it is the best. I'm teaching 2D animation the traditional way, digital too using diferente softwares. I have some question for you: Can I do the some like that but using a secuence frame texture of mouths or eyes, and conect it with a driver or time offset modifier and changes the mouth as I want? sorry for my english, I'm not so good writing in english
Hi, yeah sort of, you can use something called an image sequence texture, and then add this to a 3D object. This method works okay for smaller texture-based animations. I have not tried this on a full face rig.
Hello, is me again. I have another question for you. Can I use the some bone (armature) to become it a container the controllers to the face, I mean for the mouth and eyes. I made the face and the eyes in diferent grease pencil element (I hope that you can understand my english)
@@rodrigodpc2331 Are you referring to a face panel, that is in a different location from the main rig? If so then yes this is totally possible and is a great way to build a 2D rig!
Once you add the time offset you can no longer edit the shapes that exist. In this way, you are a little out of luck. But you can always add more mouth shapes, meaning instead of editing old ones you can just keep adding newer shapes.
@@LevelPixelLevel i'm not sure if you found this solution yet, but you can modify the old strokes/shapes that were already set in place with the time offset modifier. it's true that when you turn on the modifier it automatically locks/grays out the keyframes to prevent you from modifying shapes, but the various drawing layers can be unlocked in the dopesheet to be drawn on/added to/tweaked: temporarily hide/disable your time offset modifier (monitor icon). in the grease pencil dopesheet, scrub to the keyframe you want to adjust. find the stroke(s) you want to modify under the dopesheet summary on the far left (assuming the summary drop-down is expanded), and unlock the strokes by clicking the padlock icon. make your changes with draw or sculpt. they should be applied to the whichever keyframe you were on. reenable modifier and make sure everything is in working order. i might recommend locking the strokes again to make sure you don't accidentally make unwanted changes later thank you for sharing this flexible workflow!
@@mxpepper Thanks for this option, yeah I was playing around with this, the only problem I ran into was that it would change the shape for the whole animation. Meaning if I used the same smile shape a couple of times throughout the animation and I wanted to change one frame it would change it for everywhere I used that shape. I've been using a mix of the method you mentions here and duplicating frames to add to the sub-level animation. Thanks for the tip!
You are very right, I've found a couple of bug reports on this issue. I have not been able to get this to open. I'll keep playing around with it and let you know if I find the answer.
iI am having so much trouble learning how to key the mouth rig it is always showing my the mouth position I want at the key point but also the ones that I do not want in between HELPPPP!!!
Look, I subscribed to your channel, but it won't let me set the notifications for all your videos because it says it cannot be done for "content made for kids". Ive been looking for content like yours for months! Can you fix it so I can get full notifications for your channel, please?
I've learned to rig by being a rigging on film, games, and tv shows. The best way to learn (quickly) is to surround yourself with amazing artists and technicians. This can also be achieved in discord channels these days. The other thing I do with learning is to focus on a project-based workflow. I prefer to pick something I want to make, and then just dive in. Usually, I get lost along the way, but I learn a ton by doing this. I find that 6 hour or 10 hour tutorial series are nice, but at the end, I feel like I just followed along, rather than tripping and pulling my self up as I do on my personal projects.
I thought about this as well, but I really want everything to work in the shot and in-camera with the geometry/grease pencil objects. But 2.83 will have some awesome features that might make this a lot easier!
Help! I tried to make a simple 2D eye rig similar to yours, but having multiple grease pencil objects shows tiny white blips where the two objects intersect, even in the render? How did you set up the eyes?
hmm, are you using a orthographic or a perspective camera? Double check your clipping mask. Download my example files as well and copy the render settings over.
@@LevelPixelLevel ok, so I have to animate the bone some value of which will show a certain frame. So how to connect that value with sequence of frames?
5:20 thats hell lot like the feature from Adobe Flash that Alan Becker showed in his tutorials. _See here: __ruclips.net/video/xdwdO2ZpYI8/видео.html_ 7:38 thanks for showing both versions. Thats a huuuuuge boost to my motivation for blendering :) Ohh, and also, have u tried shape keys???
I was thinking the exact same thing! Symbols is a powerful tool in Adobe Flash and now we know how to use it in Grease Pencil !!! Thanks Level Pixel Level and Blender Foundation!
How are you syncing the mouth to a voice? I am accustom to adobe, your time offset trick is very similar to how adobe uses symbols to sync lips to voices. I am not slick enough with Blender to make the connection to how you are using this to sync to the voice. Can you clue me in on that?
What should I do when I have a character facing to one side (like yours here) but I will also need him to look to the opposite side, do you know any ways, maybe, to mirror it with all the edits?
Yeah, a mirror might work for this - and even place the mirror after the armature modifier so you can still use the rig. There is another way I'm working on where you build the left and the right side of the character and have a node that moves this from side to side to change the face.
@@lesia.mammal Opps no I meant rig controllers, more like a face panel - something like this but for Grease Pencil: cdn.lynda.com/video/98819-67-635185083860782478_338x600_thumb.jpg
Btw in 6:34 you can copy as a New driver, and then just paste driver. I think it's quicker, or am I missing something?
Yes! You are totally right, I have not played around with this feature, but it looks to be the same. I'll have to check this out in my drivers master class series.
@@LevelPixelLevel I use it all the time and it works for me! If you do it a lot it saves you some clicks ^^
@@przemysawwiktorek4673 I agree, I've pinned your comment as well so others can see this! Very helpful!
@@LevelPixelLevel Hey mooooom, I got recognition on the internets
@@przemysawwiktorek4673 haha
I think greasepencil is really heaven for 2d animators
I’d love an indepth tutorial course on it. Edit: I mean there are alot of good YT vids on it, but they usually focus on a few features
Agreed
@@robrobusa I agree, i would pay for a full tutorial that goes over all of the features
Holy crap this channel is underrated.
hehe thank you :)
I think it would be interesting to have a list of mouth and eye positions as already created key frames. 2D animators work a lot with that and not with so many bones.
I love your job.
Ed, Edd, and Eddy~! Highly animated, with walking lines too~!
That Grease pencil feature is so GREAT, lovely work man!!!
This was very very informative. I just came to know that blender is advancing very much in 2d animation. Keep up the good work. Waiting for more cool rig tutorials. May be a full body all perspective rig xp
Thank you! I'm working towards that, I hope to have something ready soon!
This channel is the one that needs to be supported and be successful. Subscribed
Thank you for perfect free tutorials. Id love to see more of Grease pencil, these tutorials never enough.
8:25 If you parent grease pencil to a mesh the grease pencil will always render in front of the mesh
Interesting! Thanks for the tip, I'll try that out!
Does this solve the problem of the grease pencil object following the curve of a 3d object
@@hozy224 sort of, I kind of have issues with it though as I can't put 3D objects in front of the Grease Pencil object.
@@LevelPixelLevel I dont Know if you solve the problem completely, But in blender 2.9 you can convert mesh to grease pencil, where you can replace the greace pencil original primitive to mesh with the proper subdivisions to conform to 3d object,
drive.google.com/file/d/14vY6oxH5VzqMH21XvR2dcZi1Tyl5vLiK/view?usp=sharing
Here is a blend file I made using your tutorials. in blend file the eye is a grease pencil object converted from mesh circle
Thank you very much for all the useful information
@@ameensharan Thanks! Yeah I was thinking about this as well, I will try this out in a future video :)
ahh nice. i saw that timeline/seek bar divided into sections in correspondence to the timestamps in description today. Nice implementation by YT. cool
Thank you for the upload! Time offset modifier for mouth animation was exactly what I needed to be aware of. Stay creating buddy. :)
The lego movies/TV shows had a similar issue with aligning the face rigs to the curve of the head, so the faces are animated with the geo slightly offset away from the head then projected onto the head during rendering
Interesting that they had the same problem, I'll see if I can get that working in Blender!
@@LevelPixelLevel might also help if you have a camera inside the head to handle the projection! It'll be more consistent than projecting from the outside.
@@ramenlook3519 Hmm very true, I'll give it a try!
Wow these tutorials are great! Everything well explained
THIS IS VERY CLEVER! thanks for showing it man
The video was very good, it was super useful. About the rigging of the eye, at the end, I have a character with whom the same thing happened to me. My solution was to set the shrinkwrap offset to 0 and a Displacement modifier with the value you want to offset. With that I solved it. As long as the mesh has enough resolution.
I hope you find it useful.
Thanks I'll give it a shot! I was playing around with this as well, but I found the drawing of the GP Objects with fill to have some issues, I'll keep playing around with what you suggested here!
Thats so useful, I will definitely use that on my greasy :)
This is wonderful
This is so nice! One day ( after i do all my projects that I want to do in my lifetime, which are perfectly doable and not out of scale at all!) I will do 2D animation. It's nice that by learning basic blender I learn so much around it! Who knows, maybe some day I will learn basic geometry and shapes, I struggle with triangles too ;(
These are fun little contained projects, I also like using a premade IP. That was I mostly focus on animation and function, rather than design and concept.
Thanks for this, truely. I'm just getting into grease pencil and idk what I'm doing and this helped alot
You sir, are a genius!
This is awesome!
Thanks for the video, that was amazing, with this the mouth sync will be much easier.👍😊😊😊
This is fascinating! Looks like I'm going to behind because I'm still trying to reach the limits of 2.79b!
2.79b had some great features and I do miss a lot of things about that version, but Grease Pencil is so much fun! You should try it out :)
Gotta learn the mask feature, ive been blending in the overlap with the rest of the face
Please do more Grease pencil content! We need to see how you would approach a full character. At my company, we use Moho for 2D but I experimented with GP for use in an ad and I saw the great potential in creating 2D in a full 3D app. I used your videos for reference but I was filling in blanks as I went and I am a new blender user (Been houdini and c4d all this time). Please consider going through with this character and even if you do a multipart series, it would be epic!
Hehe sounds good, I've been building up to that, here is my face rotation test: ruclips.net/video/AtUbR1kXOQw/видео.html
Now that I have this I might break it up into a full character build in the future.
awesome tutorial, thank you!
Amazing tips! Loved it!
these are really great--thank you for sharing and keep it coming :)
I recall seeing a tutorial (forgive me if it was an older one of yours) where they used a bone to select the different mouth shapes from a chart. By moving the bone it drove the shape key I think. Anyway, the upshot was there was a visual chart where you could select the shape rather than having to remember which number corresponded to which shape.
There also used to be a plug-in that used voice recognition in conjunction with text to create key frames with the corresponding mouth shapes, based on phonemes. Of course, with the system your showing you can add mouth shapes that aren’t speech related.
Yes, I saw that one as well, I think Maisam Hosaini has some cool tutorials that go over that twitter.com/maisam_hosaini
I'll try to combine this now with some of the other things you outlined. Agreed, some kind of visual pose sheet would help elevate this mouth set up.
Great stuff!!!
MLP Friendship is Magic style.
Say what you want about the show, but it's one of the more impressive, smooth and _consistent_ looking shows made in Flash, which means rigging vector graphic puppets. I would like to know if Blender's new 2D suite can somehow replicate it.
It is close. But it still needs work. It would take a lot of work to build an effective 2D pipeline with Blender. but it's getting there.
next level, thanks
Brilliant, thanks for sharing !
As always great stuff!
Tanku very much kkepem coming
Thanks for your video! New subs here!
This is great, can u make a tutorial of how you make a face rig?
Check out my playlist here: ruclips.net/p/PLbjn7kaP877vcaYQQxY2FrPHAdvt7F2pb
I talk a lot about my process and how I rig these objects.
Ok I figured out your lego head fill problem. Use the polyline tool under "drawing". You will have to use it like a vector drawing tool instead of freehand, but it will fill to shapes properly and is easier than creating a mesh. In the view settings at the top, choose surface on the left with a small offset, and then view on the right. This will allow you to draw directly on a surface according to your view angle while drawing. Hope that is a little better for you cheers!
nice
Hey man, I love these, could you suggest where to go turn learn exactly the type of stuff in this amazing video?
You just achieved the frame picker feature of adobe animate by using the timeoffset and driver thing and thats what i am looking for, now i just need the graphic symbol feature i hope you can experiment with this, it is just like a gif that has its own timeline that you can set if its playable once or looping
good thing about this is it is reusable, and mostly i use this to draw something like running in place then use tweening motion to the graphic symbol itself to make it look like its running
there are adobe animate features that makes me my animation easy and makes me stay there even tho i really want to jump to blender, hope you can help. Thank you
it would be super cool , if it would be possible to point a camera on a flat face ( Grease pencil RIG ) and then use that camera output as a texture on a mesh.
maybe as face RIG camera render output in png and than reload the texture frame by frame . think it would by slow for animation but i don't know a other way do do it .
That would be awesome actually! Camera based projectors/textures. That would also help with a couple of other features!
It was great. Can you fully train this build?
Yeah, I might, but check out the links in the description. A lot of the techniques I've used here I've broken down in the past in detailed tutorials.
can you test this with goo from foster for imaginary friends? that old cartoon is nostalgic :)
did you ever figure out the projecting onto 3d thing? I guess weird things happen when you start bending grease pencil hoops, you can sort of see the fill leaping straight across the back if you contort it in the right way.
I have not returned to this yet. I might wait for 2.83 before I explore this again as there are a ton of new Grease Pencil features in that build.
For something like this I might also look into a texture or curve base solution.
I see they disabled comments on your Hilda video. Hopefully that won't happen to this one.
Yes, it is an odd time on RUclips with kid's content. It makes it tough to post animation/rigging tutorials with interesting content.
yup, kids videos cant be added to playlist also... which is a BIGG down
That Time Offset with the property driver is actually a practical way to do lip assignment! In professional 2D software, when you're on the mouth layer, you can press Left/Right (or the equivalent of Left/Right) keys to cycle through the different mouth shapes before assigning it as a keyframe, I don't suppose there's any roundabout way of doing that in Blender is there? like assigning the left/right Bracket Keys to cycle through the 1-10 mouths!?
Yeah, something like this is possible, although I think you'd have to write a custom tool. This could be an addon that looks for a property by name and then adds hotkeys to the functions that cycle through. I like this idea!
Level Pixel Level when it comes to Lip Assignment, being able to get to a new mouth shape in 0.5 seconds instead of 2 seconds is a huuuge deal over a 20 minute cartoon, as I imagine you probably noticed doing the Lip assignment for Dipper! Haha!
@@infinitehush Yeah, I know that side of it. A million clicks can slow down a production. Also, I was playing around with this in 2.79: www.blendernation.com/2015/10/06/add-on-pose-lib-preview-makes-pose-switching-easy-and-fast/
I wonder if this would speed up an animator, to just click on a thumbnail of the face shape.
Great tutorial, regarding the curved surface problem. Couldnt you draw all grease sketches on an plane and add a deformation modifier afterwards? I didnt tried this out, but deformation cages could work this way
Can you maybe somehow get the Grease Pencil fil to define a texture change in the underlying material? I'm not sure that's possible, but if it were, you'd basically have the 3D object's material be transparent within the filled area.
I was thinking about that as well, that is something I'm going to investigate. It would be nice if the grease pencil object can project onto a 3D surface, similar to a curve projection in Maya. This would open many options. Good idea!
@@LevelPixelLevel I think the problem why it's not so straight forward is that, at least currently, the way the fill works is some sort of triangulation of the polygon that makes up the fill. If that underlying triangulation doesn't happen to conform to the mesh flow of the thing you want to project onto, it's impossible to avoid the issues you're currently seeing. The only way I could see that might make this work would be some sort of dynamic triangulation. This might be tricky to do fast, efficiently, and in a way that works well with almost arbitrary underlying projection mesh.
Otherwise, you'd almost by necessity have to go through modifying the texture of the 3D object instead.
@@Kram1032 Yeah, that is what I'm thinking as well. I might attempt this again but with mesh instead of grease pencil.
@@LevelPixelLevel One thing you could try (but I suspect it'd become tedious *very* quickly) is basically to "build a scaffolding" of lines in the same color as the fill. Basically a square grid. And then fill out every square individually. That way the fill would have more detail to work with in order to properly project onto the mesh.
The grid should adhere to the flow of the mesh as well as possible, which is kinda reasonable to do on a cylindrical object, but it's gonna be a lot tougher on something spherical or what not.
It's probably not actually worth the effort, but it might work in principle.
@@Kram1032 Ah I see, almost build a pixel grid texture with the grease pencil across a 3D object. That sounds interesting. I'll give it a try at least with some smaller pieces to see how it goes. Great idea!
Eventually ... One day... I hope you are able to make an, "Action" rig. For instance a fighting capable Goku from Dragon Ball. If you get really skilled than an action rig from Avatar the Last Airbender.
Hey, I'm working my way up to something more advanced like this. I think a good action fight scene is a great test to push Grease Pencil to the limit. Good suggestions!
Could you do a comparison of the original animation?
Great Work Master!.
I did an exercise on my own by following the steps in part 6 (Advanced Time Offset Rig). And everything works perfectly.
In fact, I made an animation moving the bones to go choosing different parts of the original drawing(mouth positions in this video). And everything works great (excellent tutorial).
However, when I render the image is stuck in a single position, that is, the positions controlled by the bones in the rendering do not work, even though everything works fine in the project.
Pls Help =(.
Ty in advance.
I know this is from a while ago, but have you ever found out a way to get grease pencil to follow the curve of an object like the lego head? I have a grease pencil rig and I was trying to use the shrink wrap modifier, but I could not get it to work well. I'm wondering if there is a better way than shrink wrap.
Great tutorial. But I have a worry. How do we apply a Driver bone to a set of Grease Pencil mouth shapes using the Time Offset technique?
This can work by switching the time offset to value, and this can be driven.
Here is a great version of this tool: ruclips.net/video/GX-3F0BG3t4/видео.html
My dude, that's wild af. Great tut!
For your lego rig question, is it possible to take the shrinkwrapped mouth thing and offset it by 0.01 local y based off the normal? That's what I'd do in engine, but idk how to do so in Blender
Thanks! Glad you liked it! For the lego head I did try something like that, even with the offset I was still getting a drawing issue with the grease pencil fill, it always tries to find the shortest route to complete the fill.
But I have a couple ideas for fixing this and I've heard some good suggestions already in the comment section here, including a mesh-based system.
@@LevelPixelLevel nice! Hope you can figure it out because thatd be like game changing yo
awesome ! rig could you do a venture bros Rig ?
Thank you! Let me see what I can do. Venture Bros looks epic.
@@LevelPixelLevel i cannot wait!!!! lol i would buy every asset you make lol amazing work!
First off, love your work!
Secondly, correct me if you're wrong but it sounds like you have quite a bit of 2D animation and rigging experience. Do you have any thoughts on how your work flow here compares to working in Cell Action or toonboom harmony?
Thank you! And actually, that is what I am trying to replicate. Toonboom harmony has some amazing features, but I do think that Blender can match this (one day). I've been playing around with toon boom, and adobe animate, to see how they deal with certain limitations. Blender has some work to catch up, but I think in 2.83 it will be extremely close.
The biggering thing with Blender is the rigging tools. Once you can add a rig to something you also add a pose manager, which is extremely helpful in cutout animation!
@@LevelPixelLevel Thanks for the reply!
hi can you make a video on getting character proportions right? i struggle with that aloti started to make a certain character but it was turning uncanny :(
This is fine and all but where do you even start?
At 7:10, I'm having trouble finding that menu where you were able to toggle between the frames in Properties. I've looked everywhere, but cannot find it. Does anyone know where that might be?
Hi. I have troubles by following your tutorial on 7 minute you are using time offset modifier with bone using data path and getting this nice control in the item panel. I really like the way it works but trouble is I made it for Other objects and that control shows up on the Pose mode while other shows up on the Object mode. I hope you get my point.. question is how can you switch it so it shows up on pose mode or otherwise on the object mode? may be I'm doing something wrong...
Is it possible to do a frame offset modifier and rig a linked GP object?
Because from experience, having a lot of GP keyframes in a scene is heavy on playback. But if they are linked they play with no lag at all.
I have not tried this, but it sounds interesting! I will look into this for sure!
listen I rigged a full 2d model now how do I animate it with armature because I tried and it doesn't work the same as normal 3d blender
So I started animating with the mouth rig you made, but if I want to go from, let's say pose 12 to pose 6, then all the poses in between will play, right? Is there a way to stop those poses from animating? and just interpolate the line movement of pose 12 to pose 6?
Right, for something like this you'll need to add a frame hold. So say you want to hold pose 3 for 10 frames, you'll have to key pose 3 at frame one, and 10, then at frame 11 set it to say pose 8, and add another key at frame 35 for pose 8 to hold this for the duration.
What a nice stuff!! Btw I’m trying ‘time offset’ modifier according your video, and I did ‘fixed frame’ setting with different frames ,but I don’t understand how to make animation using ‘time offset’ on dope sheet. Pease help me!
Hi! Once you have the fixed frame option there is a number under this (I think zero is the default) You have to key this at different values in time to have this animate. Check out my example files as well, they will show you this function.
@@LevelPixelLevel Finally, I made it according your help! Thank you so much!! (I love you hahahaaa just kiddingXD)
Hi there, this rig is great! I'm only having an issue with the mouth at render time. It doesn't respect the frame offset modifier. It's probably a quirk of Blender, but do you perhaps know why it does this?
Awesome work man! PS your links to your social on gumroad link to wrong page. Your instagram doesnt match
Thanks! I think I fixed this now!
I hope you can make My Little Pony cartoon rig In blender
That sounds like a challenge :) I'll see what I can do!
Sorry if this is a dumb question -- I have the file open and I'm struggling to figure out how you animated his arm and hand. How were you able to achieve the change? I see that you have different layers for the change in hand shape but I'm not seeing where the value of the keyframe is coming from.
Hello! The arm is animated just using keyframes on the GP object. So select the arm, open up a dope sheet and change the dope sheet option to Grease Pencil and you should see the frames. docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/editors/dope_sheet/grease_pencil.html
Level Pixel Level Ohhh, I see! Thank you so much!
If I rig a stroke, Then the ''Time offset'' modifier works or not??
when i insert a mouth shape in 1st keyframe and another mouth shape in 5th keyframe , there are inbetween keyframe coming automatically, can you help me with this
You need to interpolate the sequence to build the in between keys: docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/grease_pencil/animation/interpolation.html
Thanks for the reply
Anyone know where I can find more information like this?
hey there. Have u tried shape keys?? i dont have personally tried them, but i heard they are used often in animation and rigging
Yes, I use them all the time in when I'm rigging mesh, although you cannot add them on Grease Pencil Objects
Any idea on a body turn rig?
Playing around with a character right now, hopefully I'll have an update soon.
i kinda have a crush on you
I was try grease pencil but, its drop fps only 14 fps on playback, I was try many issue, but still not find to fix it.
hmm try the example file, it is a new feature so it might be slow still.
Im new to blender I usually animate 2d characters in After effects. What is the advantage of doing this in Blender?
hmm that's a good questions. I guess the easy answer is because it is free, but this doesn't mean it is a better software.
I think for me I am most comfortable in Blender, so I can do things quick within the software. For now After Effects is probably better at 2D animation. What will make Blender better in the future is being able to leverage all of the 3D character animator tools on a 2D character rig, something like toon boom harmony. But this will take time to learn and perfect in Blender (sorry for the long response!)
Another reason, Blender is good on Linux, Windows and Mac. After effects can't be used for Linux users.
I downloaded the files and they don't open in Blender.
I'm new at this.That issue that it wasn't following the 3d object could it be the offset on the surface?
Sort of, it's more how the circle draws itself. It will always try to find a linear route to for the fill. So even if the edge is conforming to the 3D object the fill of the 2D object will always be flat (intersecting the 3D geo)
Hello!! this is amazing. I love can make some like that I do with After Effect, it is the best. I'm teaching 2D animation the traditional way, digital too using diferente softwares. I have some question for you: Can I do the some like that but using a secuence frame texture of mouths or eyes, and conect it with a driver or time offset modifier and changes the mouth as I want? sorry for my english, I'm not so good writing in english
Hi, yeah sort of, you can use something called an image sequence texture, and then add this to a 3D object. This method works okay for smaller texture-based animations. I have not tried this on a full face rig.
@@LevelPixelLevel It is a very good news jaja!! Thanks You very very much!!
Hello, is me again. I have another question for you. Can I use the some bone (armature) to become it a container the controllers to the face, I mean for the mouth and eyes. I made the face and the eyes in diferent grease pencil element (I hope that you can understand my english)
@@rodrigodpc2331 Are you referring to a face panel, that is in a different location from the main rig? If so then yes this is totally possible and is a great way to build a 2D rig!
@@LevelPixelLevel Thank you very much again!!!
IM not sure i follow the part about the mouth shapes. You say your out of luck, but we can add more shapes. Its a bit confusing?
Once you add the time offset you can no longer edit the shapes that exist. In this way, you are a little out of luck. But you can always add more mouth shapes, meaning instead of editing old ones you can just keep adding newer shapes.
@@LevelPixelLevel i'm not sure if you found this solution yet, but you can modify the old strokes/shapes that were already set in place with the time offset modifier. it's true that when you turn on the modifier it automatically locks/grays out the keyframes to prevent you from modifying shapes, but the various drawing layers can be unlocked in the dopesheet to be drawn on/added to/tweaked:
temporarily hide/disable your time offset modifier (monitor icon). in the grease pencil dopesheet, scrub to the keyframe you want to adjust. find the stroke(s) you want to modify under the dopesheet summary on the far left (assuming the summary drop-down is expanded), and unlock the strokes by clicking the padlock icon. make your changes with draw or sculpt. they should be applied to the whichever keyframe you were on. reenable modifier and make sure everything is in working order.
i might recommend locking the strokes again to make sure you don't accidentally make unwanted changes later
thank you for sharing this flexible workflow!
@@mxpepper Thanks for this option, yeah I was playing around with this, the only problem I ran into was that it would change the shape for the whole animation. Meaning if I used the same smile shape a couple of times throughout the animation and I wanted to change one frame it would change it for everywhere I used that shape. I've been using a mix of the method you mentions here and duplicating frames to add to the sub-level animation.
Thanks for the tip!
Can't open the project with Blender 2.83...it will crash! :/
You are very right, I've found a couple of bug reports on this issue. I have not been able to get this to open. I'll keep playing around with it and let you know if I find the answer.
iI am having so much trouble learning how to key the mouth rig it is always showing my the mouth position I want at the key point but also the ones that I do not want in between
HELPPPP!!!
Hey, check out the example files here from Gumroad, you can download them for free and see how I built things under the hood.
On dope sheet, select your keyframes, right-click and set Interpolation mode to constant
Look, I subscribed to your channel, but it won't let me set the notifications for all your videos because it says it cannot be done for "content made for kids". Ive been looking for content like yours for months! Can you fix it so I can get full notifications for your channel, please?
Hey, I think I updated this, give it a shot now and let me know how it goes.
how did you learn to rig and stuff, i want to try to animate but dang, i get confused
I've learned to rig by being a rigging on film, games, and tv shows. The best way to learn (quickly) is to surround yourself with amazing artists and technicians. This can also be achieved in discord channels these days.
The other thing I do with learning is to focus on a project-based workflow. I prefer to pick something I want to make, and then just dive in. Usually, I get lost along the way, but I learn a ton by doing this. I find that 6 hour or 10 hour tutorial series are nice, but at the end, I feel like I just followed along, rather than tripping and pulling my self up as I do on my personal projects.
@@LevelPixelLevel ok thanks, I'll try to figure it out lol
re: 8:28 Why not use compositing to achieve the effect?
I thought about this as well, but I really want everything to work in the shot and in-camera with the geometry/grease pencil objects.
But 2.83 will have some awesome features that might make this a lot easier!
Help! I tried to make a simple 2D eye rig similar to yours, but having multiple grease pencil objects shows tiny white blips where the two objects intersect, even in the render? How did you set up the eyes?
hmm, are you using a orthographic or a perspective camera? Double check your clipping mask. Download my example files as well and copy the render settings over.
How do I make a good triangle?
With Grease Pencil? That's actually a good question. Maybe start with a square with no points in between the corners and delete a corner.
@@LevelPixelLevel Perhaps just draw a circle and simplify-sample it until it looks like a good enough triangle?
@@thallmeister That works as well! Good call.
ok, so how to put those frames on actual time line to sync it with let's say audio?
You can you the offset value number under the fixed frame option. This can be keyed at over the timeline to create animation.
@@LevelPixelLevel ok, so I have to animate the bone some value of which will show a certain frame. So how to connect that value with sequence of frames?
@@maximk7816 to do this you can attach a driver, this will allow you to push the animation of the sequence time offset node from a controller.
5:20 thats hell lot like the feature from Adobe Flash that Alan Becker showed in his tutorials.
_See here: __ruclips.net/video/xdwdO2ZpYI8/видео.html_
7:38 thanks for showing both versions. Thats a huuuuuge boost to my motivation for blendering :)
Ohh, and also, have u tried shape keys???
I was thinking the exact same thing! Symbols is a powerful tool in Adobe Flash and now we know how to use it in Grease Pencil !!! Thanks Level Pixel Level and Blender Foundation!
Hey, yes, I use that keys all the time. And yeah, Grease Pencil feels a lot like After Effects. I think it is the closest competition for the program.
How are you syncing the mouth to a voice? I am accustom to adobe, your time offset trick is very similar to how adobe uses symbols to sync lips to voices. I am not slick enough with Blender to make the connection to how you are using this to sync to the voice. Can you clue me in on that?
What should I do when I have a character facing to one side (like yours here) but I will also need him to look to the opposite side, do you know any ways, maybe, to mirror it with all the edits?
Yeah, a mirror might work for this - and even place the mirror after the armature modifier so you can still use the rig.
There is another way I'm working on where you build the left and the right side of the character and have a node that moves this from side to side to change the face.
@@LevelPixelLevel nodes, you mean properties (6:20) but with rigs?
@@lesia.mammal Opps no I meant rig controllers, more like a face panel - something like this but for Grease Pencil: cdn.lynda.com/video/98819-67-635185083860782478_338x600_thumb.jpg