About the problems you were having with the timeline: Blender actually has many different timelines. The one you were using is just the generic timeline, which is simple, but not very useful for complex tasks. There is also the dope sheet editor, which is basically a more advanced version of the normal timeline. Finally there is the Non-Linear Animation timeline, which allows you to layer multiple "actions" on top of each other. Actions are small segments of animation that are combined together for the final animation. I'm a full 3D animator, so I'm not too sure how they would be used in a 2D pipeline, but This is what I usually do: I create separate actions to control the major components of an animation. For example: one action for the transformation of the character as a whole, one for facial expressions, one for the upper body, one for the lower body, etc. Leaning an action based workflow can be quite complicated, but it is a NECESSITY for anyone working on complex or feature-length animations.
I've been having similar problems and am wondering what a better way to work might be. Is there a good way to control animation frames of multiple objects in the same view? For example I've got 3 hand drawn characters in a scene, should each one be their own grease pencil object? It seems like when I do it this way, I can only control the frames of one of them at a time, and can't even see their frames when looking at the other objects, or the full dope sheet / timeline. Is there a better way to do this or could you suggest some terms / tutorials I could look up? It'd be much appreciated!
@@JacobHalton I think if you select multiple objects at once, you should be able to see all of their key frames on the dope sheet editor. I don't usually animate multiple objects at once, but if you select multiple bones in a rig, they all show up in the dope sheet, so I assume the same thing works with objects. Also, make sure the dope sheet editor isn't in "action editor" mode, as this only edits animation data of one object at a time.
Grease pencil objects can receive light, cast shadows, and interact like other 3D objects. Here’s a good demo to illustrate: ruclips.net/video/4pIH10O17JU/видео.html
They do receive light but they don't cast shadows or reflections. That feature is still not here yet, but the devs are active and I expect it'll be added in the near future.
@@njdotson What's a drop shadow? Also, why not just draw the shadows oneself as a separate 2D animation? It'll be real hard to make good looking shadows unless you put in a 3d model or something
Pepe's school creator Daniel Martínez Lara is the one who create the new grease pencil adapted for animation!!! you could write him to tell them what thing in the setings didin't work for you. or you can be part of the live stream in the blender youtube channel on mondays, you can ask things to Pable Vazquez
11:51 yeah, i was gonna say the same. They ARRRRE the creator grease pencil, and it is very important for them to understand the 2d animation workflow to be able to translate that experience into the grease pencil.
Dude I just commented the same thing hahaha btw, I really loved the idea of him being one of the Pablo's guests, because we would have a better perspective from a professional artist that just arrived in Blender, and to talk about the most important things that the artists need, specially while learning the software.
When I first tried out Blender back in 2.79, the user interface and the tools felt really confusing and discouraging: it gave the feeling that you needed to master every tool to make something decent. I tried really hard to be motivated, but at the end I gave up for almost a year. Then I discovered 2.8 and the grease pencil functionalities, and Blender finally made me feel like home! The UI was so much easier to understand, and animating felt so fun! Plus, since I don't have a pro computer, EEVEE made my life so much easier. Now I use it for almost everything, and even if I had the money to pay for Maya, I would still stick with Blender.
Blender's vanilla state versus its plug-in offers is arguably a casualty of its "do everything" nature. If every potentially useful feature/plug-in was enabled by default, Blender would likely be rendered unusable. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and it feels like a major factor of that decision is "How many users don't actually need this?" Even sticking to 3D, there are multiple plug-ins ranging from "obvious" to "essential" that ship with Blender but are disabled by default. The issue is that different people have different views of what is useful. For example, Node Wrangler is arguably essential to anyone who does anything more than the most basic work in the Node Editor, but it just wastes hot key combinations (or causes needless conflicts) and system resources for anyone who doesn't.
Can you give me an example of when the Node Wrangler addon gives you hotkey conflicts, and why you're not able to mitigate that problem by opening you hotkeys tab? Since Node Wranglers hotkeys separated to Node Editor mode only I have never had any problems with it and I use dozens of addons? Blender has THE MOST robust hotkey customization tools on the market out of ALL major 3d DCCs as of now (and I have tried most of them), you can literally customize anything, it's a real killer software and I'm sorry, but this comment is kinda misleading. Just like this video BTW in some parts.
@BainesMKII You're right, the devs have said they like to try and keep Blender as lite and clutter free as possible by disabling a lot of the bundled addons. I also wanted to add the devs have mentioned there's another deeper reason for why users have to download so many addons for seemingly important features. Every addon bundled with blender has to have a coder that is willing to take responsibility and maintain it long-term. The devs don't want to include bundled addons that are buggy, unstable, and unmaintained. I think Blender should really be thought of more as a creative suite than one program with a lot of tools. Its closer to a tightly integrated Adobe CC. The addons form an optional part of that ecosystem with Blender as a free hub.
To add to this. Set up tab for pie menu so you can switch between modes faster with it and use 1,2,3 to switch between vertex and line selection. I'd also recommend disabling the 1,2,3,4 hotkeys in object mode as they just isolate the corresponding collection which causes more issues if you hit it accidentally than the nieche functionality it offers.
Yes to the pie menu on tab! I use a waycom tablet for grease pencil. My tablet has 4 quick buttons at the top that I have set to Shift, Ctrl, Tab, and Z, respectively. Then on my pen I have middle and right mouse click for its two buttons. This makes navigating blender super easy without taking my hands away from my tablet. I also find it way more convenient to set spacebar to the search function rather than play animation. Makes it a lot easier to access tools if you forget which sub menu they're in.
Just to also add to this, tab switches between object and edit mode. Within edit mode, the keys 1-3 switch between vertices, edges and faces respectively. :) I look forward to the future of blender! Been using it since my first year at uni in 2017, and it's come a reaaalllyyy long way! Thanks for the awesome video and perspective! Really enjoyed it man!
Would you recommand it over Harmony? I have to use toon boon in my school, but behind the walls of my house (and with my own project) I'd like to use something free or something I bought licensing of. And Harmony is way too much expansive (I dont like monthly subscription, I prefer one time purchases) (2d speaking)
It's kind of the past as well. Titan AE, Treasure Planet, Atlantis and many more were great mixes of 3D/2D, if anyone wants some extra inspiration, I would check out some of those older films.
I've been learning greasepencil for a few reasons, one reason is price. I'm pretty tired paying monthly packs or paying a massive amount for software. The other is I just love the creative potential of 3d/2d hybrid. The amount of control is incredible! (Also I'm already subbed to Broke My Pencil! Great stuff there)
I'd recommend films like The Iron Giant, Titan AE, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Klaus is a more recent example.
Welcome to Blender! There is someone working on a VR version of blender, by the way. Also Blender is made by the community, it is a patchwork of good ideas and addons and variants are the strong points of blender. Every time you think "I wish blender had this or that" someone probably made it as an addon or forked a build of blender and is working on it.
Highly recommended. I've been using blender for a while and I did all my animating in TVPaint. Now I'm doing it all in Grease Pencil. so damn good. I love being able to weave 2D and 3D together.
One thing that I love, as an experienced 3D model artist, is the ability to just draw concepts in Blender, there and then on the spot. This comes in very handy when I'm creating modular assets and want to quickly sketch out ideas without having to fire up Photoshop! I can literally just draw over my 3D geometry. So I can draw a window over a wall to see roughly what it would look like. Great stuff!
Being a jobless waiter made me consider going into 3D modeling but the licence for any good program costs more than a laptop I use. Glad to have discovered Blender! Still had to sacrifice 100€ for a Wacom tablet though..
Is recommend checking out other, less expensive brands as well (there are lots of "best inexpensive drawing tablets" lists online), but I think that was a good investment, especially for drawing and sculpting. Good luck!
I use Huion tablets which are a lot cheaper than Wacom. I have four graphic tablets at home and a pen tablet at work. At home, two old Wacom Intuos and later two Huions. I was so pleased with my first Huion that I had to order another Huion for a PC in another location. Huion was less than half the price of Wacom Intuos. As graphic tablet (different from pen tablet), Huion is better than Wacom Intuos and it is a lot cheaper. Its sketching surface has a nice paperlike texture under your nib, while Wacom Intuos has a horrible smooth surface. At work, I have a Kamvas Huion which is a lot cheaper tablet than Wacom Cintiq. I am pleased with it.
I would say that what Blender is currently great for, is for concept art, storyboards, animatics and such. But I am excited for it to be developed further, adding shadows and more materials on greasepencil. And a more optimized layout for 2D specific workflow!! Great video!
So glad you went in depth. Thanks for the links and mention. You mention depth of field as per camera . U can get the grease object to do that in its fx blur by checking King the 'use depth of field' setting. It will conform to the camera then. I cover it in partc3 of my sci-fi tutorial. Cheers
21:00 There is the ability to make lighting to affect grease pencil artwork, various fx modifiers like rim lighting, blur, motion blur, and depth of field. Spitfire Storyboards will tell ya all about it. I'm gonna watch that video next. ruclips.net/video/InkFqh0K5Uw/видео.html
About the coloring part: Grease Pencil has reverse selection fill and fill by layer since the 2.91 update. It's the (+/-) button on the top of your workspace
I started by watching a more specialized tutorial for minecraft animation, and then giving up and learning in another program before coming back to blender, i also did not watch the donut tutorial
:D It's great to see your impressions of Blender, Toniko! Allan's work inspired me to check it out, and then this video popped up in my recommended. Good pick, algorithm!!
This video has a lot of comments so im sure youve probably already heard it, but if you havnt. Ctrl+tab (hold tab) will let you switch modes quicky Ctrl+tab (quick press) will switch between your last mode w will select the select tool, keep pressing it to get to the select tool you want. like lasso for example.
One thing I think grease pencil will be great for is for translating 2D animation into 3D animation. It’d be really cool to use a grease pencil drawing as a guide for posing a 3D animation. Seems like it could be a useful tool, especially for 3D noobs like me. Blender may be the most accessible 3D program because of it being open source and having a wide variety of community made tutorials, but it still doesn’t change the fact that learning 3D is really freaking hard.
yeeah this is what I wanted!! I want to use flat 2D characters in a 3D space I didn't even know blender can do this. I still need to learn it. It's so big I never know where to start.
I saw a video that describes working with the 3D space, with tips on like everything on the sculpting side of things. Each section is labeled. It's a lot to take in, but if the hard part is specifically the 3D modelling this tutorial gives a good basis/reference to go back and check. ruclips.net/video/1jHUY3qoBu8/видео.html
Hey, you don't have to wait for that PC to get started! The EEVEE engine is designed to render in real time, and it works perfectly for 2D. If you have at least something useable, don't wait too much or you'll never have the chance to start! The truth is that I got interested in 3D when I had a 11 year old chromium notebook (and it was actually impossible to run Blender there), but now, even with the tiny regular Windows PC I have, I always try to practice every time I can.
to inverse fill 1. select the fill tool as usual (& select a suitable GP fill material) 2. ctrl and click on the area outside your artwork. all areas inside the artwork are filled.
To switch fast between draw-, edit- and sculpt mode use the Pie Menu. Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Keymap -> Preferences and activate the checkboxes "Tab for Pie Menu" and "Pie Menu on Drag". Then click the Burgermenue in the bottom Left corner -> Save Preferences. Now if you hold the tab-key and drag you mouse you get a quick menu. It saves a lot of time. Nice Video.
Middle school 2010s that makes me feel old since the first time I picked up 3D program was in the late 1990s. With Bryce, Ray Dream, Animation Master and Lightwave.
Yes, Grease Pencil has along way to go for it to become perfect. I agree. Also, 14:00 I always tell my friends how helpful it is to give learning the hotkeys a priority when learning blender. It makes the rest easier.
Grease pencil has a funky learning curve, true. But I urge you to revisit it in may, when final 2.93 comes out. Brings many new features: mult coloring, very good interpolation, you can create stylized background with scene lineart, that works in realtime... then for 3.0 we're most likely getting true grease pencil cast shadows (already tested that branch). It is on a sure path to maturity
Excellent video 😄 I have a few tips for you to make it a bit easier in some cases ☺️ at around 16 minutes you were talking about how tedious it is to have to switch to edit mode. Well there's a way you can do it without moving your pen away from the drawing - use the pie menus. You need to enable the add-on on the Preferences, but with it you can access whole menus with each workspace by using hotkeys. For instance if you want to go to edit mode from draw mode, press Ctrl Tab, the pie menu will appear and you can choose your desired mode. Then to get back to draw mode, Ctrl Tab again. Also at about 21 minutes you mention that the grease pencil objects can't be made darker, well there's actually a really cool thing with the lights that can do this for you. You need to make sure that you are using a version of blender were the grease pencil objects can react to light. Then instead of animating the darkness on each frame, you can add a light and set up the way you want the "shadow" to look, then you can actually give the Watt value a negative value, like -100 and instead of casting light, it will darken the area that the light is effecting! The more negative you make the value, the darker it will get and you can keyframe these values to get animated lighting. It's amazing to see.
I have tried to get into Grease Pencil for a couple of years now. Coming from 2D animation on Krita and Adobe Flash before that and pencil on paper before that. And yeah. While I do see a lot of potential. I mean, I just can't get the thoughts out of my head, so there should be something to the hybrid approach. But I have always thought it felt very... tacked on and not exactly thought out for people outside the in-group of blender modelers. If I understand it correctly it was at first just an annotation tool (the name coming from the grease pencils used to draw on glass surfaces like displays and viewfinders) that someone decided to hack to make animation. And that still feels like it. I have seen some fantastic stuff dine with the tool. But whenever I look into tutorials I always am struck with how many steps are needed for the simplest of actions. So I revert back to the simplicity of Krita. But this is a long winded way to say this. I welcome all tutorials I find for Grease Pencil. So I'll check out the suggested channels. One of these days I will decipher the workflow. One of these Days I will learn how to draw in 3D planes.
there is a feature called "convert to" which allows you to convert an object into either a mesh, line, or grease pencil stroke. turning a grease pencil into a mesh would allow you to do some of the stuff you talked about with the material nodes.
Pro tip, turn on pie menu and switching between modes would be a breeze, i don't even notice i am switching to a tab now the muscle memory with pie menu is so strong.
I have a solution for grease pencil's interaction to light/shadows/etc! Just render only the animation as a video with a transparent BG. Then, import that video using images as planes addon to a new blend file, where you build a background scene and animate the camera. Then voila, Grease pencil interacts with light & shadows just like any other object! But I think that they should've done interactions with shadows as a default thing
A fair overview I think. Grease pencil is my weapon of choice not because I think it's better than other programs, more so as I feel I need to stick to one thing while I develop as an artist. It may not do certain things as well as other programs but it does have it's own ways of dealing with issues and I can produce complete projects under one roof. I'm having a lot of fun learning it as well as animation in general.
8:00 - yeah, nice idea! If the same stuff you use on you everyday can aquire the VR capability, it kinda put all the pieces together. You'd be able to literally just put up your vrset create something you're imagining then imediatly go work on it on the sofyware, even if you want to put up just a shape. And also you can have a table and work on stuff as a small sculpture. I bet the blender team is capable of doing it, with an easy enought settup. And with the amount of 3d math they already do. I bet as soon as someone gets excited with the idea we'll can see it for real.
Even after everything you said at the beggining I would still like to see you try out clip studio paint and see how it compares to other softwares used in western. I know clip studio paint is used a lot in anime and you can do everything up to composite there, but i dont know so much about western and it would be nice seeing the perspective of someone in that industry. THough there do are quite a lot of featurs in clip studio paint nad quite a lot of them arent that well documented/known about so it might be hard finding info on everythign and how to work around in stuff like keyframes auto actions etc
you can use quick favourites for switching between draw, edit and sculpt mode , rightclick add to quick favourites , but it has to be done in every mode since the quick favourites switch context but then you can swiftly switch between them and the last selected tool will always be available(we need pen , grab and lasso select in general) ... to copy a key frame its easier to just shift+d duplicate the keyframe on the time line or quickly jump into sculpt mode and click slightly on a blank frame
It is a good to do these videos because one of the strongest parts of Blender is that it can be responsive to peoples feedback, because Grease Pencil still being built you can actually be bricklayer for its future. In the experimental 2.93 they added a new feature which allows you to fill multiple frames.
YES YES YES YES YES Tony finally tries Blender! \o/ Welcome to the club! :D Great indepth overview on your thoughts of Blender's Grease Pencil. I could only see that GP will incorporate the expected features in the future such as cast shadow, lights affecting the drawing, etc.
Great video!!! Glad to see you playing around with it! :) I have yet to play with the grease pencil myself, despite using 3D Blender a lot. I should give it a shot. I would love to see the shift and trace Add-On implemented fully though, I agree
13:39 that is changed in blender 2.93 alpha now. It doesn't create a new frame but draw to the last one (unless you have auto-keyframing on). That "an option for everyone's taste" thing in blender is amazing 😁 Btw, Grease pencil is still heavily developing and improves really fast. So using the latest alpha or the experimental branch for Grease pencil may be useful in terms of features & fixes (but less stability ofc 😛)
As you said, "I'm sure there's a way" - and there is. I understand the frustration, because you have to learn a lot of non-grease pencil parts to get some of the effects you desired. Things like learning what each render engine can and cannot do (Eevee's speed, versus cycle's handling of refraction, for example). Things like digging deeper into your materials - Adding emission to a material so you can see the colors (as opposed to lighting the object) will also cause that material to ignore shadows, because the object itself is now a light source, rather than reflecting light. And there are engine-specific things, like turning on screen space reflections in Eevee to get reflections from a glossy surface. Don't lose hope though - answers are usually just a RUclips search away - and you can always ask questions on the forums. Hold onto those feeling of hope, because you CAN make things happen. The way you are just trudging away and finding new work flows rather than concentrating on obstacles is how you learn - asking for feedback is also great!
I saw the youtube channel Worthikids is having great luck with combining 2D & 3D in blender, with his Bigtop shorts. I got into the software at the start of the pandemic, saying that it's the 2D animation killer, in the sense that it can allow indie creators to make frequent content. I still love the 2D art style & it pained me to admit defeat to CGI, but with the way Tech is developing I can see everything coming full circle. I think there'll soon be ways to simulate 2D with 3D, I've only recently got comfortable with 3D systems to look at combining both & it may already be possible, it's just a matter of experimenting. (Just looking at the Studio Arc System Work, shows great promise)
About the grease pencils objects not reacting to light and not casting shadows, the developers said it was on their to-do list. And in fact I remember seeing a demo once in which they were moving lights around and it was actively lighting up the grease pencil object.
3 года назад+3
hm... for the lasso painting brush you say something like "This is the tool I wish TVP and Harmony had..." only, TVP does have it and it is called filled stroke, it is in main panel under the stroke. And due to the bitmap nature of the tvp, it is more flexible since it can also delete shapes, which is messy in Blender at the moment. Other than that, kudos for your video!
"W" is the shortcut for the selection toll, and while on edit mode you can press "1" , " 2 " or " 3 " to select if you want to select vertices or strokes
[Tab] key is the mode changer. You can set it up so when you hold [tab] and move your cursor, you get a pie menu. [ctrl RMB] is the lasso select. [shift d] will duplicate
getting into blender lately and been curious about this tool. also, thanks for doing stuff with Megaman Legends, huge fan and miss the series big time.
I've completely swapped to Blender for 3D Animation, however, it does tend to die A LOT if you push it too hard and I should know, I've had times when my Blender would crash in the middle of making a new model and I forget to save. Thankfully, Blender actually does auto-save work incase it happens so thats a neat feature
I know that I am missing the point of the video (which is a great video btw!), but I find it really curious from the comments that "gratis" is used in so many lenguages
Blender is arguably the 2nd best 2d animation toolkit available. I would say it's Number 1 In many ways it is. But It needs to develop a good library system for "frames \ symbols." and a better curve, and envelope deformer for Grease Pencil objects, before it can beat out Toonboom.
At the expense of casting shadows and all sorts of light effects, if I'm not mistaken, you can implement it, where on the in the right of the tools panel there is a section for special effects and modifiers, like there are all sorts of different modifiers that work, it is the Blender grease pencil file that can work at the object levels. But this is not certain, but there is evidence in this.
I've been using blender for over 5 years now, ever since grease pencil was revamped, and introduced, in 2.8 I've just bden using it to draw out concepts of a model, but I am now realizing that I should try it out for 2d Animation!
Have you looked at Mental Canvas on RUclips? Infinite canvases in a 3D environment and each canvas has its own layers and you have 3D spatial control over where each drawing/canvas is placed. Then you have a camera that you can move through your drawings to make a video and or interactive space that the viewer can control.
Blender is really cool. My old friend Danny Araya who I believe works for powerhouse animation, made a quick Robin animation with blender and it looked awesome. I've used blender for designing 3D logos and stuff, but I might just start using it for Grease Pencil
I do a lot of what you said as well - I use other programs to get certain elements of my finished product done - I don't get stuck in Blender alone. Blender is another tool - certainly a powerful tool, but sometimes I already have a faster work flow in another product, so I will import Blender renders into another video editor for example, or use Blender to do a custom transition that the video editor won't do.
Blender isn't a "new player" to animation, hon. Blender was created with animation in mind first. It is (or was) also capable of making 3D games. The *grease pencil* has been around since *2015.* I'm glad you found it and like it! Here, this might interest you, I'm going to reply to this comment with a link to Blender's history, but Blender is by no means new to the industry. It went into development in *1994,* and in *1998* an SGI version was published on the web, IrisGL. It's been around for a looong while. And, it's been upping it's game for well over TWO DECADES holy o . o I was still a child and I'm 36 now. TIL and it blew my mind.
About the problems you were having with the timeline:
Blender actually has many different timelines. The one you were using is just the generic timeline, which is simple, but not very useful for complex tasks. There is also the dope sheet editor, which is basically a more advanced version of the normal timeline. Finally there is the Non-Linear Animation timeline, which allows you to layer multiple "actions" on top of each other. Actions are small segments of animation that are combined together for the final animation. I'm a full 3D animator, so I'm not too sure how they would be used in a 2D pipeline, but This is what I usually do: I create separate actions to control the major components of an animation. For example: one action for the transformation of the character as a whole, one for facial expressions, one for the upper body, one for the lower body, etc. Leaning an action based workflow can be quite complicated, but it is a NECESSITY for anyone working on complex or feature-length animations.
I've been having similar problems and am wondering what a better way to work might be. Is there a good way to control animation frames of multiple objects in the same view?
For example I've got 3 hand drawn characters in a scene, should each one be their own grease pencil object? It seems like when I do it this way, I can only control the frames of one of them at a time, and can't even see their frames when looking at the other objects, or the full dope sheet / timeline.
Is there a better way to do this or could you suggest some terms / tutorials I could look up? It'd be much appreciated!
@@JacobHalton I think if you select multiple objects at once, you should be able to see all of their key frames on the dope sheet editor. I don't usually animate multiple objects at once, but if you select multiple bones in a rig, they all show up in the dope sheet, so I assume the same thing works with objects. Also, make sure the dope sheet editor isn't in "action editor" mode, as this only edits animation data of one object at a time.
Grease pencil objects can receive light, cast shadows, and interact like other 3D objects. Here’s a good demo to illustrate: ruclips.net/video/4pIH10O17JU/видео.html
They do receive light but they don't cast shadows or reflections. That feature is still not here yet, but the devs are active and I expect it'll be added in the near future.
@@red-.-red drop shadows can fake it well in some cases
@@njdotson What's a drop shadow?
Also, why not just draw the shadows oneself as a separate 2D animation?
It'll be real hard to make good looking shadows unless you put in a 3d model or something
@@red-.-red They won't in the near future, it's been 3 years already and it's still being held back....
@@dawnpaoloabes8441 The grease pencil refactor landed last year. I'm not sure where you're getting that 3 years from?
Pepe's school creator Daniel Martínez Lara is the one who create the new grease pencil adapted for animation!!! you could write him to tell them what thing in the setings didin't work for you. or you can be part of the live stream in the blender youtube channel on mondays, you can ask things to Pable Vazquez
11:51 yeah, i was gonna say the same. They ARRRRE the creator grease pencil, and it is very important for them to understand the 2d animation workflow to be able to translate that experience into the grease pencil.
Dude I just commented the same thing hahaha btw, I really loved the idea of him being one of the Pablo's guests, because we would have a better perspective from a professional artist that just arrived in Blender, and to talk about the most important things that the artists need, specially while learning the software.
@Jorge Zombie isnt it out for quite some time now?? and what does ira mean??
When I first tried out Blender back in 2.79, the user interface and the tools felt really confusing and discouraging: it gave the feeling that you needed to master every tool to make something decent. I tried really hard to be motivated, but at the end I gave up for almost a year. Then I discovered 2.8 and the grease pencil functionalities, and Blender finally made me feel like home! The UI was so much easier to understand, and animating felt so fun! Plus, since I don't have a pro computer, EEVEE made my life so much easier. Now I use it for almost everything, and even if I had the money to pay for Maya, I would still stick with Blender.
2.14 veteran here 😄
I like Harmony :(
Blender's vanilla state versus its plug-in offers is arguably a casualty of its "do everything" nature. If every potentially useful feature/plug-in was enabled by default, Blender would likely be rendered unusable. A line has to be drawn somewhere, and it feels like a major factor of that decision is "How many users don't actually need this?" Even sticking to 3D, there are multiple plug-ins ranging from "obvious" to "essential" that ship with Blender but are disabled by default. The issue is that different people have different views of what is useful. For example, Node Wrangler is arguably essential to anyone who does anything more than the most basic work in the Node Editor, but it just wastes hot key combinations (or causes needless conflicts) and system resources for anyone who doesn't.
never thought about this, but you're right
Can you give me an example of when the Node Wrangler addon gives you hotkey conflicts, and why you're not able to mitigate that problem by opening you hotkeys tab? Since Node Wranglers hotkeys separated to Node Editor mode only I have never had any problems with it and I use dozens of addons? Blender has THE MOST robust hotkey customization tools on the market out of ALL major 3d DCCs as of now (and I have tried most of them), you can literally customize anything, it's a real killer software and I'm sorry, but this comment is kinda misleading. Just like this video BTW in some parts.
@BainesMKII You're right, the devs have said they like to try and keep Blender as lite and clutter free as possible by disabling a lot of the bundled addons. I also wanted to add the devs have mentioned there's another deeper reason for why users have to download so many addons for seemingly important features. Every addon bundled with blender has to have a coder that is willing to take responsibility and maintain it long-term. The devs don't want to include bundled addons that are buggy, unstable, and unmaintained.
I think Blender should really be thought of more as a creative suite than one program with a lot of tools. Its closer to a tightly integrated Adobe CC. The addons form an optional part of that ecosystem with Blender as a free hub.
@@zbop220 Thanks for this i realized a critical perspective i have not considered before
Pro tip, you can press tab while selecting an object to go to edit mode (So when drawing you can just press tab and it will go to edit mode)
U can also set tab to pie menu in prefs which gets u all the modes if u hold it
To add to this. Set up tab for pie menu so you can switch between modes faster with it and use 1,2,3 to switch between vertex and line selection. I'd also recommend disabling the 1,2,3,4 hotkeys in object mode as they just isolate the corresponding collection which causes more issues if you hit it accidentally than the nieche functionality it offers.
Yes to the pie menu on tab! I use a waycom tablet for grease pencil. My tablet has 4 quick buttons at the top that I have set to Shift, Ctrl, Tab, and Z, respectively. Then on my pen I have middle and right mouse click for its two buttons. This makes navigating blender super easy without taking my hands away from my tablet. I also find it way more convenient to set spacebar to the search function rather than play animation. Makes it a lot easier to access tools if you forget which sub menu they're in.
Just to also add to this, tab switches between object and edit mode.
Within edit mode, the keys 1-3 switch between vertices, edges and faces respectively.
:) I look forward to the future of blender! Been using it since my first year at uni in 2017, and it's come a reaaalllyyy long way!
Thanks for the awesome video and perspective! Really enjoyed it man!
Nice! I'm glad you tried it out. 2D/3D hybrid is the future!
it is indeed
Absolutely!
Well, the planet of the treasure movie was a 2d/3d hybrid in the early 2000s i think that it was with us for a long time already.
Would you recommand it over Harmony? I have to use toon boon in my school, but behind the walls of my house (and with my own project) I'd like to use something free or something I bought licensing of. And Harmony is way too much expansive (I dont like monthly subscription, I prefer one time purchases) (2d speaking)
It's kind of the past as well. Titan AE, Treasure Planet, Atlantis and many more were great mixes of 3D/2D, if anyone wants some extra inspiration, I would check out some of those older films.
I've been learning greasepencil for a few reasons, one reason is price. I'm pretty tired paying monthly packs or paying a massive amount for software.
The other is I just love the creative potential of 3d/2d hybrid. The amount of control is incredible!
(Also I'm already subbed to Broke My Pencil! Great stuff there)
I'd recommend films like The Iron Giant, Titan AE, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Treasure Planet, Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, and Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas. Klaus is a more recent example.
Welcome to Blender! There is someone working on a VR version of blender, by the way. Also Blender is made by the community, it is a patchwork of good ideas and addons and variants are the strong points of blender. Every time you think "I wish blender had this or that" someone probably made it as an addon or forked a build of blender and is working on it.
Well yes and no, the blender foundation is constantly upgrading blender like they just recentot released the 3.0 and it's amazing
Grease Pencil objects cast shadows and can be affected by scene lights. Make sure you have the settings correct for it.
Can you show / demo the cast shadows? The shadow fx or mod is fairly limited in that it only works on one plane .
You should get back into making videos! You're really talented :)
@@kiwimay6080 oh, do you mean me??
As in, do u know any links? Cos grease pencil doesn’t cast shadows as far as I can tell. Really interested
@@HyperDash yesss
I'm neck-deep in Grease Pencil research for everything I do now. I'd love to get with you and do some mutual brain-picking at some point.
You're actually one of the people I thought of who maybe full deep migrated to the grease pencil!
@@TonikoPantoja Absolutely. It's completely changed my life.
Highly recommended. I've been using blender for a while and I did all my animating in TVPaint. Now I'm doing it all in Grease Pencil. so damn good. I love being able to weave 2D and 3D together.
YOOO I didn't think I'd find you here! Love your series, especially the writing
To more worlds colliding, Excellent. I look forward to the future.
One thing that I love, as an experienced 3D model artist, is the ability to just draw concepts in Blender, there and then on the spot. This comes in very handy when I'm creating modular assets and want to quickly sketch out ideas without having to fire up Photoshop! I can literally just draw over my 3D geometry. So I can draw a window over a wall to see roughly what it would look like. Great stuff!
Fun fact: One of the anime industries used blender for one of their anime movies, which is the Studio Khara known for the anime Evangelion.
Powerhouse animation dose as well
Being a jobless waiter made me consider going into 3D modeling but the licence for any good program costs more than a laptop I use. Glad to have discovered Blender! Still had to sacrifice 100€ for a Wacom tablet though..
Is recommend checking out other, less expensive brands as well (there are lots of "best inexpensive drawing tablets" lists online), but I think that was a good investment, especially for drawing and sculpting. Good luck!
I use Huion tablets which are a lot cheaper than Wacom.
I have four graphic tablets at home and a pen tablet at work. At home, two old Wacom Intuos and later two Huions. I was so pleased with my first Huion that I had to order another Huion for a PC in another location. Huion was less than half the price of Wacom Intuos.
As graphic tablet (different from pen tablet), Huion is better than Wacom Intuos and it is a lot cheaper. Its sketching surface has a nice paperlike texture under your nib, while Wacom Intuos has a horrible smooth surface. At work, I have a Kamvas Huion which is a lot cheaper tablet than Wacom Cintiq. I am pleased with it.
Blender, the legend of open source.
one of the greastest success on the user software end for sure
YESSS! I was hoping you’d try this out!
Agreed! The more love Blender gets the better :)
I’ve recently started using grease pencil and it’s only so nice. I’ve never seen a free software where EVRY possible tool is there. It’s amazing!
I would say that what Blender is currently great for, is for concept art, storyboards, animatics and such. But I am excited for it to be developed further, adding shadows and more materials on greasepencil. And a more optimized layout for 2D specific workflow!! Great video!
So glad you went in depth. Thanks for the links and mention. You mention depth of field as per camera . U can get the grease object to do that in its fx blur by checking King the 'use depth of field' setting. It will conform to the camera then. I cover it in partc3 of my sci-fi tutorial. Cheers
FINALLY I WANTED A REVIEW!!!! THANK YOU 🤩🤩🤩🤩🤩🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏🙏✨✨✨
21:00 There is the ability to make lighting to affect grease pencil artwork, various fx modifiers like rim lighting, blur, motion blur, and depth of field. Spitfire Storyboards will tell ya all about it. I'm gonna watch that video next. ruclips.net/video/InkFqh0K5Uw/видео.html
I'm familiar with the fx modifiers, although I was looking for more specific fx that were automated.
About the coloring part: Grease Pencil has reverse selection fill and fill by layer since the 2.91 update. It's the (+/-) button on the top of your workspace
Welcome to the Blender Club, now you need to make a doughnut. 10th comment btw.
Sorry if I sounded rude.
And set a monkey on fire.
*Delete the default cube*
did anyone really watch/do the blender doughnut I got started and dropped it because I got bored
I ended up watching speed modeling and copying them
I started by watching a more specialized tutorial for minecraft animation, and then giving up and learning in another program before coming back to blender, i also did not watch the donut tutorial
:D It's great to see your impressions of Blender, Toniko! Allan's work inspired me to check it out, and then this video popped up in my recommended. Good pick, algorithm!!
This video has a lot of comments so im sure youve probably already heard it, but if you havnt.
Ctrl+tab (hold tab) will let you switch modes quicky
Ctrl+tab (quick press) will switch between your last mode
w will select the select tool, keep pressing it to get to the select tool you want. like lasso for example.
Animators like Worthikids uses this program. :)
One thing I think grease pencil will be great for is for translating 2D animation into 3D animation. It’d be really cool to use a grease pencil drawing as a guide for posing a 3D animation. Seems like it could be a useful tool, especially for 3D noobs like me. Blender may be the most accessible 3D program because of it being open source and having a wide variety of community made tutorials, but it still doesn’t change the fact that learning 3D is really freaking hard.
Try rumba 3d
I can't wait to get back into blender
yeeah this is what I wanted!! I want to use flat 2D characters in a 3D space I didn't even know blender can do this. I still need to learn it. It's so big I never know where to start.
I saw a video that describes working with the 3D space, with tips on like everything on the sculpting side of things. Each section is labeled. It's a lot to take in, but if the hard part is specifically the 3D modelling this tutorial gives a good basis/reference to go back and check. ruclips.net/video/1jHUY3qoBu8/видео.html
I remember hearing about it through A Fox in Space and being excited for it. I'm waiting until I get a decent PC until then
Hey, you don't have to wait for that PC to get started! The EEVEE engine is designed to render in real time, and it works perfectly for 2D. If you have at least something useable, don't wait too much or you'll never have the chance to start! The truth is that I got interested in 3D when I had a 11 year old chromium notebook (and it was actually impossible to run Blender there), but now, even with the tiny regular Windows PC I have, I always try to practice every time I can.
@@Pa_amb_tomaquet Oh heck yeah that sounds neat. I don't have a computer at all but I'll be sure look into it
Thank you
Eh?
Blender is a cpu based prog unless you enable GPU acceleration sooooo.... you don't need a decent comp to do some learning in the meantime.
to inverse fill
1. select the fill tool as usual (& select a suitable GP fill material)
2. ctrl and click on the area outside your artwork.
all areas inside the artwork are filled.
For the shadows and light interaction u can turn the drawings into a 3d object and it will do all that
To switch fast between draw-, edit- and sculpt mode use the Pie Menu.
Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Keymap -> Preferences and activate the checkboxes "Tab for Pie Menu" and "Pie Menu on Drag". Then click the Burgermenue in the bottom Left corner -> Save Preferences.
Now if you hold the tab-key and drag you mouse you get a quick menu. It saves a lot of time. Nice Video.
Well that's useful! Many thanks, kind artist.
Btw I never heard of someone refering to the three stripes as Burgermenu.
Middle school 2010s that makes me feel old since the first time I picked up 3D program was in the late 1990s. With Bryce, Ray Dream, Animation Master and Lightwave.
Yes, Grease Pencil has along way to go for it to become perfect. I agree.
Also, 14:00 I always tell my friends how helpful it is to give learning the hotkeys a priority when learning blender. It makes the rest easier.
Grease pencil has a funky learning curve, true.
But I urge you to revisit it in may, when final 2.93 comes out. Brings many new features: mult coloring, very good interpolation, you can create stylized background with scene lineart, that works in realtime... then for 3.0 we're most likely getting true grease pencil cast shadows (already tested that branch). It is on a sure path to maturity
Excellent video 😄 I have a few tips for you to make it a bit easier in some cases ☺️ at around 16 minutes you were talking about how tedious it is to have to switch to edit mode. Well there's a way you can do it without moving your pen away from the drawing - use the pie menus. You need to enable the add-on on the Preferences, but with it you can access whole menus with each workspace by using hotkeys. For instance if you want to go to edit mode from draw mode, press Ctrl Tab, the pie menu will appear and you can choose your desired mode. Then to get back to draw mode, Ctrl Tab again.
Also at about 21 minutes you mention that the grease pencil objects can't be made darker, well there's actually a really cool thing with the lights that can do this for you. You need to make sure that you are using a version of blender were the grease pencil objects can react to light. Then instead of animating the darkness on each frame, you can add a light and set up the way you want the "shadow" to look, then you can actually give the Watt value a negative value, like -100 and instead of casting light, it will darken the area that the light is effecting! The more negative you make the value, the darker it will get and you can keyframe these values to get animated lighting. It's amazing to see.
I have tried to get into Grease Pencil for a couple of years now. Coming from 2D animation on Krita and Adobe Flash before that and pencil on paper before that. And yeah. While I do see a lot of potential. I mean, I just can't get the thoughts out of my head, so there should be something to the hybrid approach. But I have always thought it felt very... tacked on and not exactly thought out for people outside the in-group of blender modelers. If I understand it correctly it was at first just an annotation tool (the name coming from the grease pencils used to draw on glass surfaces like displays and viewfinders) that someone decided to hack to make animation. And that still feels like it.
I have seen some fantastic stuff dine with the tool. But whenever I look into tutorials I always am struck with how many steps are needed for the simplest of actions. So I revert back to the simplicity of Krita.
But this is a long winded way to say this. I welcome all tutorials I find for Grease Pencil. So I'll check out the suggested channels. One of these days I will decipher the workflow. One of these Days I will learn how to draw in 3D planes.
g r r r a t i s
Is he indo?
Grátis meu mano
@@lautanbintangempatlima8350 i'm not sure, but he did say he grew up in indonesia
Pretty sure it's spanish.
@@lautanbintangempatlima8350 pinoy ku rasa
I tried blender but the program didnt blend my fruits
Most disappointing feature of blender tbh
It took me 5 minutes to get this joke. I forgot what a blender was
dad joke...where even dads may cringe
-_-
But you can blend monkey heads
I laughed out loud when you said "gratis" cuz we use that word in Norwegian too XD
same in the Netherlands 🇳🇱
And Swedish
and Allemagne
@@suziekeuls7582 so the reason Indonesia also use gratis is this huh... Not complaining
in Romania too
there is a feature called "convert to" which allows you to convert an object into either a mesh, line, or grease pencil stroke. turning a grease pencil into a mesh would allow you to do some of the stuff you talked about with the material nodes.
Pro tip, turn on pie menu and switching between modes would be a breeze, i don't even notice i am switching to a tab now the muscle memory with pie menu is so strong.
Grease Pencil has advanced a lot in the last few months.
I have a solution for grease pencil's interaction to light/shadows/etc! Just render only the animation as a video with a transparent BG. Then, import that video using images as planes addon to a new blend file, where you build a background scene and animate the camera. Then voila, Grease pencil interacts with light & shadows just like any other object! But I think that they should've done interactions with shadows as a default thing
A fair overview I think. Grease pencil is my weapon of choice not because I think it's better than other programs, more so as I feel I need to stick to one thing while I develop as an artist. It may not do certain things as well as other programs but it does have it's own ways of dealing with issues and I can produce complete projects under one roof. I'm having a lot of fun learning it as well as animation in general.
8:00 - yeah, nice idea! If the same stuff you use on you everyday can aquire the VR capability, it kinda put all the pieces together.
You'd be able to literally just put up your vrset create something you're imagining then imediatly go work on it on the sofyware, even if you want to put up just a shape.
And also you can have a table and work on stuff as a small sculpture. I bet the blender team is capable of doing it, with an easy enought settup. And with the amount of 3d math they already do. I bet as soon as someone gets excited with the idea we'll can see it for real.
Even after everything you said at the beggining I would still like to see you try out clip studio paint and see how it compares to other softwares used in western. I know clip studio paint is used a lot in anime and you can do everything up to composite there, but i dont know so much about western and it would be nice seeing the perspective of someone in that industry. THough there do are quite a lot of featurs in clip studio paint nad quite a lot of them arent that well documented/known about so it might be hard finding info on everythign and how to work around in stuff like keyframes auto actions etc
you can use quick favourites for switching between draw, edit and sculpt mode , rightclick add to quick favourites , but it has to be done in every mode since the quick favourites switch context but then you can swiftly switch between them and the last selected tool will always be available(we need pen , grab and lasso select in general) ... to copy a key frame its easier to just shift+d duplicate the keyframe on the time line or quickly jump into sculpt mode and click slightly on a blank frame
I'm glad someone as experienced as you are telling us your opinions
Soooooooo Toniko...have you ever heard about 2d animation on a nintendo 3ds? 👀
Kflipnt
Keke has joined the chat
It is a good to do these videos because one of the strongest parts of Blender is that it can be responsive to peoples feedback, because Grease Pencil still being built you can actually be bricklayer for its future. In the experimental 2.93 they added a new feature which allows you to fill multiple frames.
Im doing my thesis with blender. It is looking nice so far
If you set the paint bucket fill tool to "minus mode" (subtractive) and click outside the drawing, it will fill the whole silhouette in one go.
I just started sculpting in Blender and it has been great
YES YES YES YES YES Tony finally tries Blender! \o/ Welcome to the club! :D
Great indepth overview on your thoughts of Blender's Grease Pencil. I could only see that GP will incorporate the expected features in the future such as cast shadow, lights affecting the drawing, etc.
A lot of info gathered with your video. Thanks! I'm a 3DS Max guy but this is eye-opening.
Shift+tab brings up your number menu for mode selection. Tab in itself is the hotkey for edit mode.
Worthikids also preaches the gospel and has some neat tutorials / livestreams about Blender
Ubisoft's TV division has a team that's working on VR in Blender.
The VR scene inspector has been part of Blender since 2.83.
Great video!!! Glad to see you playing around with it! :) I have yet to play with the grease pencil myself, despite using 3D Blender a lot. I should give it a shot. I would love to see the shift and trace Add-On implemented fully though, I agree
Where can I find that add on?
The short cut for quickly switching back between edit mode and other modes is "CTRL + Tab"
13:39 that is changed in blender 2.93 alpha now. It doesn't create a new frame but draw to the last one (unless you have auto-keyframing on). That "an option for everyone's taste" thing in blender is amazing 😁
Btw, Grease pencil is still heavily developing and improves really fast. So using the latest alpha or the experimental branch for Grease pencil may be useful in terms of features & fixes (but less stability ofc 😛)
Definitely inspired to give Blender a serious try now. Thanks!
As you said, "I'm sure there's a way" - and there is. I understand the frustration, because you have to learn a lot of non-grease pencil parts to get some of the effects you desired. Things like learning what each render engine can and cannot do (Eevee's speed, versus cycle's handling of refraction, for example). Things like digging deeper into your materials - Adding emission to a material so you can see the colors (as opposed to lighting the object) will also cause that material to ignore shadows, because the object itself is now a light source, rather than reflecting light. And there are engine-specific things, like turning on screen space reflections in Eevee to get reflections from a glossy surface. Don't lose hope though - answers are usually just a RUclips search away - and you can always ask questions on the forums. Hold onto those feeling of hope, because you CAN make things happen. The way you are just trudging away and finding new work flows rather than concentrating on obstacles is how you learn - asking for feedback is also great!
I saw the youtube channel Worthikids is having great luck with combining 2D & 3D in blender, with his Bigtop shorts.
I got into the software at the start of the pandemic, saying that it's the 2D animation killer, in the sense that it can allow indie creators to make frequent content.
I still love the 2D art style & it pained me to admit defeat to CGI, but with the way Tech is developing I can see everything coming full circle. I think there'll soon be ways to simulate 2D with 3D, I've only recently got comfortable with 3D systems to look at combining both & it may already be possible, it's just a matter of experimenting.
(Just looking at the Studio Arc System Work, shows great promise)
3:42 G R A T I S
Didnt expect that word hahaha
About the grease pencils objects not reacting to light and not casting shadows, the developers said it was on their to-do list. And in fact I remember seeing a demo once in which they were moving lights around and it was actively lighting up the grease pencil object.
hm... for the lasso painting brush you say something like "This is the tool I wish TVP and Harmony had..." only, TVP does have it and it is called filled stroke, it is in main panel under the stroke. And due to the bitmap nature of the tvp, it is more flexible since it can also delete shapes, which is messy in Blender at the moment. Other than that, kudos for your video!
"W" is the shortcut for the selection toll, and while on edit mode you can press "1" , " 2 " or " 3 " to select if you want to select vertices or strokes
[Tab] key is the mode changer. You can set it up so when you hold [tab] and move your cursor, you get a pie menu.
[ctrl RMB] is the lasso select.
[shift d] will duplicate
getting into blender lately and been curious about this tool. also, thanks for doing stuff with Megaman Legends, huge fan and miss the series big time.
I've completely swapped to Blender for 3D Animation, however, it does tend to die A LOT if you push it too hard and I should know, I've had times when my Blender would crash in the middle of making a new model and I forget to save. Thankfully, Blender actually does auto-save work incase it happens so thats a neat feature
11:40 The pepeland(Daniel Martínez Lara) is actually the Grease pencil developer :D
And don't forget Antonio too :D
I know that I am missing the point of the video (which is a great video btw!), but I find it really curious from the comments that "gratis" is used in so many lenguages
Blender is arguably the 2nd best 2d animation toolkit available. I would say it's Number 1 In many ways it is. But It needs to develop a good library system for "frames \ symbols." and a better curve, and envelope deformer for Grease Pencil objects, before it can beat out Toonboom.
okay first time viewer here, that inro with the painting puppy is adorable
You Can Use the TAB key for a wheel menu for the mode, object, draw, edit etc.
The hotkey for edit mode is tab. It's super easy. Pressing tab will toggle edit mode, and holding tab will bring up a really fluid pie menu.
3:42 "Grrrraaaatisss" made me giggle!
Suggestion: Try changing the nib on your pen to the paper one so it feels more like your drawing on paper.
Clicked the video just because I saw Volnutt in the thumbnail LOL!! Great job bro!
Thanks for posting this. Surprised you didn't look at the Freestyle option.
At the expense of casting shadows and all sorts of light effects, if I'm not mistaken, you can implement it, where on the in the right of the tools panel there is a section for special effects and modifiers, like there are all sorts of different modifiers that work, it is the Blender grease pencil file that can work at the object levels. But this is not certain, but there is evidence in this.
Grease pencil actually seems great for 2.5d parallax work
Rim, blur and lighting are done with modifiers
As another note you can do a lot of the effects through the compositor
I've been using blender for over 5 years now, ever since grease pencil was revamped, and introduced, in 2.8 I've just bden using it to draw out concepts of a model, but I am now realizing that I should try it out for 2d Animation!
Just in time, I needed it!!!
~THANK YOUUU~
Have you looked at Mental Canvas on RUclips? Infinite canvases in a 3D environment and each canvas has its own layers and you have 3D spatial control over where each drawing/canvas is placed. Then you have a camera that you can move through your drawings to make a video and or interactive space that the viewer can control.
Blender is really cool. My old friend Danny Araya who I believe works for powerhouse animation, made a quick Robin animation with blender and it looked awesome. I've used blender for designing 3D logos and stuff, but I might just start using it for Grease Pencil
4:34 Woah, you didn't even stutter. It takes guts to say you pirated, even if it was a long time ago.
congratz, sad i missed the wedding though!
I do a lot of what you said as well - I use other programs to get certain elements of my finished product done - I don't get stuck in Blender alone. Blender is another tool - certainly a powerful tool, but sometimes I already have a faster work flow in another product, so I will import Blender renders into another video editor for example, or use Blender to do a custom transition that the video editor won't do.
Now I just need to learn to draw!
You can convert the grease pencil to a object. To allow it to cast reflections.
Blender isn't a "new player" to animation, hon. Blender was created with animation in mind first. It is (or was) also capable of making 3D games. The *grease pencil* has been around since *2015.*
I'm glad you found it and like it!
Here, this might interest you, I'm going to reply to this comment with a link to Blender's history, but Blender is by no means new to the industry. It went into development in *1994,* and in *1998* an SGI version was published on the web, IrisGL. It's been around for a looong while. And, it's been upping it's game for well over TWO DECADES holy o . o
I was still a child and I'm 36 now. TIL and it blew my mind.
Maybe the shortcut you are searching for is Ctrl + Tab (Mode Menu) where you can select the object mode / edit mode / sculpt mode, etc
idk how much this is been said but your intro looks so satisfying X)
3:42 GRATISs
love it! XD
This looks like an incredible amount of work. I thought the software would make this somewhat automated.