Anime Scene Blender

[Yi Pressimone]

Ihave made a container class that basicly contains all the information I need for rendering an animation. I'm using the Assimp library to load the animation. Then assigning the data from the scene->mVertices etc. to my array buffers, what I'm having trouble figuring out is how I'm supposed to get that data for other frames into my buffers!

I have managed to load a series of obj-files with it and draw them in order to comfirm that my class works correctly. But obviously I would prefer or actaully need to use something else when I want to expand to the real deal. As loading 250 frames individually takes a couple of minutes. (Loading a simple animation should be done in about 5 seconds tops, right?)

I'm open to using any kind of file format. But I need to know how to set it up in Blender so that the animations will get exported. As I also seem to fail horribly at for now, as I have little experience with Blender.

I've been searching for tutorials on this library and blender exporting for 2 days now, and found almost nothing useful. I did check out the documentation for Assimp as well, which took me so far, but doesn't explain a thing about how aiAnimation affects the vertices. Or how I can get the other frames of data I need.

Well, I did manage to make it work after endless hours! Sort of... I made a model that is transformed in a loop x+5, y+5, x-5, y-5...What I ended up doing, well it was the only thing I could think of anyways. Is reading the data from the scene->mAnimations[] and this basicly consists of an array of the keyframes only. So I had to interpolate all the vertices myself, (which is always a funny task to approach!).

Of course, it doesn't work for everything yet. Actually only translation and the entire model. Apparently it doesn't read name values correctly so I can't which meshes the animation is meant for. But it got me going, maybe someone will find this helpful. =)

Grease pencil has something very special, because you need to keep the feeling of a 2D animation inside a 3D environment, integrating these two worlds smoothly. But this challenge makes more exciting to work in an area that can change how 2D animation will work in the future.

Working in a real production is the best way to fine tune a software and find the real artistic requirements as well as to polish workflows. Therefore the Hero open movie is a perfect way to improve grease pencil.

During these weeks the Hero team has requested a lot of new features and adjustments to adapt grease pencil to the production workflow. Sometimes the changes were simple modifications of default values but other times the changes were bigger like the multi frame editing falloff.

The Hero team requested a way to change multiple frames at the same time, so I developed a new multi frame edition mode that allows changing several frames at the same time. You can select the frames affected using the Dopesheet. This multi frame edition saves a lot of time to animators.

After thinking about the problem, Daniel came with the idea of a falloff effect. A few tests later, and I implemented a way to calculate a smooth transition for sculpted frames. Now, if you move the stroke some units in the current frame, the previous and next selected frames will also be affected, based on an interpolation curve.

The first step to implement this for grease pencil was to determine how to reuse the current infrastructure, while customizing it to the 2D requirements. I did an initial design and after a lot of trial and error, I got something that worked, but after some review by other developers, the initial design required some changes to keep better aligned with the general Blender modifiers design. Finally, with the help of Joshua (Leung), we got a better design and implementation.

Grease pencil has some special requirements that could be handled with modifiers. In some cases, however, the modifier was not modifying the stroke properties, as all 3D meshes modifiers do, but changing their look only.

Lighting is a complex topic, especially when you are working with 2D elements in a 3D world. In 2D, the concepts of normals, faces and so on changes a little, so you need to find a way to mimic all these things in a 2D environment.

As real lighting was out of scope at this moment (it would require more work on Eevee which has its own priorities at the moment), I decided to implement some way of 2D lighting using a special VFX shader.

VFX can be applied to a single object and get cool effects, but this lighting has no relation with other objects. In the future, a full Eevee integration of grease pencil could be implemented, but for now, something is better than nothing.

The simplify process was something you think is necessary from the first stages of the design, but it was one that shows how important it is to have real talented artists working in the development process.

To solve tasks like this, the offset modifier is a great tool because you can filter by layer, pass index or vertex group, so you can apply any type of transformation to selected areas of the drawing or create cool effects as showed in the following video.

Blender 2.8 beta in August! If you compile Blender yourself, you can already try the new Grease Pencil, as it is currently being developed on separate branches (the main one being greasepencil-object).

I think the best way forward for storyboarding would be to ditch the vse as a tool and have a dedicated timeline that would be able to switch between scenes (or at least cameras) and have the grease dope sheet keys and regular keys accessible in the same window. Also some form of color coding and thumbnails to quickly get an overview would be ace. As a total non coder I have no idea if this will be feasible but if this could be done it would be a game changer and make blender the go-to app for storyboard work.

There are different ways to improve the animation skills as drawing plays a major role in animations all sketch used to make by it and it needs to be improve as much as you can draw cleanly drawing of the animations you will become perfect in it.

Will all the grease pencil updates be active in the beta or will we have to wait for October to try these out? also will there be any demos from the team working on the hero project or other similar projects to detail all the changes made to the tool? Very interested in combining 2d animations with these 3d environments. I have been trying to animate a project but all my test footage looks very flat. The hero video inspired me to add my 3d models into my animations but it is very slow would appreciate seeing a professional workflow with the new tools.

-Can the new grease pencil be rendered with along with a 3D environment to combine 2D cell animation and 3D animation into one? As of 2.79 it can only be rendered through openGL, so will there be an option to make it render along with the 3D ray tracing render?

I was happy to see vertex group menu in grease pencil, it would be amazing if you make shape keys for making more than one shape into the same layer and call it when need it. this can be useful for things like lip syncing and more.

*stroke grouping would be a life saver, and my approach for it would be almost exactly the same way around blender except for when you right click on a group all of it would be selected and handled as an object, and if you want to edit a group you can simply press D+G to get into it and all other objects would be faded.

* this feature would be smart for an animator to keep his timeline\dope sheet organized. the ability to highlight a bunch of keyframes and change their color, not the color of the keyframes themselves but the background behind them.

* I know this may not be the way grease pencil is meant to be but why not adding a pen tool.

* last but not least, if there is a check box beneath the layers section, if active you can only edit (sculpt) highlighted layer\s, if not, then it will act the same way it is now!

In 2.79 Grease Pencil could easily draw a stroke on a 3D object. You could even parent a gp stroke to a bone. Problem was that when you added gp strokes on a mesh (for example a stroke on hair (polymesh) of a character) and the mesh had to bend. The gp stroke would not follow the mesh. Will this be fixed by gp in 2.8? Gp strokes would be an object, so I could in theory apply a shrinkwrapmodifier.

How about mixing other 2D objects, including images and videos with 3D? This is useful for 2D video creators (which trending on YouTube) like Kurzgesagt and makes making complex transition easier, without using another apps. But, there are problems such as trimming difficulty, audio arrangement complexity and more. I hope you can discuss this with me and implement this feature if fine.

That offset modifier volume effect was just too cool, love all the work but that had me scratching my head for a minute til I figured out what you are doing :D All lovely things to see developing, thank you for all that you are doing!

Of course, you can draw GP strokes on mesh surface. From what I tested, there was absolutely no feature lost between 2.7x and 2.8x. Just features additions.

The UI changed but you can still define Stroke Placement before drawing in GP branch.

3D Artist and Animator known as DanAnim8ed has recently unveiled an action-packed 3D animation sequence, which, thanks to its stylized visuals and the use of the low-framerate approach, looks like a scene from anime.

Set up in Blender, the sequence was made with the help of DillonGoo Studios' Emily, a fully featured cyberpunk girl 3D rig for Blender 3.6+ and Blender 4.0, along with the studio's Goo Engine, a custom build of Blender that includes several key modifications to the source code that allow one to focus on NPR and anime-style rendering. Additionally, the author utilized one of Blender Zone's rigs to depict the robot being dismantled by the main character.

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