Blender For Dummies, 4th Edition

Chapter 15

Making 2D and 2.5D Animation with Grease Pencil

IN THIS CHAPTER

Setting up a .blend file for 2D animation

Working with Grease Pencil objects to make 2D images and animations in 3D space

Getting your 2D work to play nice with the rest of a 3D scene in Blender

Being an animator at heart, it’s been exciting over the years to see Blender’s Grease Pencil feature mature from being a simple means of annotating scenes to blossoming as a full-blown hand-drawn animation tool on steroids. That’s right. You can do hand-drawn animation right in Blender! And even if you’re not an animator, you can actually draw in Blender. There are so many talented 3D artists whose drawing skills atrophy over years because most 3D tools don’t provide the facilities for a good drawing workflow. And at the same time, there are heaps of amazing 2D artists who never get into working in 3D because dealing with vertices and edges and polygons doesn’t jive with their sensibilities.

Well, not any more. Blender gives you the best of both worlds with Grease Pencil. You can draw and paint in Blender just like in so many other digital painting programs. But because you’re doing it in Blender, you also have the ...