5 ways to animate in Grease Pencil

In today's episode we're going to take a look at five different ways that you can approach a grease pencil animation in Blender. I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of Lollipop Matt. This episode is sponsored by me. Use the code below to get 10% discount on any of my products. Welcome back everyone. I'm going to show you five different ways that you can approach a grease pencil animation in Blender so you can see how flexible it can be to work 2D in 3D space. So without further ado, remember to like and subscribe and let's get on it. We just started a new 2D animation template. I'm going to make my frames 13. Zoom into that. I'm going to make sure that in my layers we have our onion skin way up so I can see a bunch of frames. So I'm going to start with the first one and I'm going to do this and put my strength to one. Yeah, got my first frame and so I'm going to go down to the second frame. I'm going to ease out from it. Third frame, ease out a little bit more. Ease in the fourth frame. I'm going to start stretching a little bit then I'm going to stretch it more and separate a bit more, right? Something like so because it gains speed. Frame number six I should probably be squashing against the floor and then seven I'm going to squash a bit more against the floor. Then eight I'm just going to bounce back up and so on and then start easing out. As you can see I've lost the volume. Terrible drawing and then I should be getting close to the one to the beginning so you can see shaky bouncing ball but it bounces at least. So yeah, so you can see when where somebody like me that doesn't have any skills struggles a lot you can obviously always go to sculpt and then fix this a tiny bit like make it a bit a bit bigger radius and lower strength and so now you can with your mouse or tablet however you prefer you can just like sculpt this a little bit so they look a little bit better, right? So this probably is a little bit more stretch and so on and then this one we probably want that line at the bottom to kind of be hitting the floor correctly again then maybe this is not so stretched and then this one probably is more stretched then the next one this should be kind of bigger and then we can press shift to soften it out right it's not the whole point of the video to show you this part but since we're here and I'm gonna make this a tiny bit smaller and I'm just gonna get closer here and so something like so I'm gonna get to that one because that one easing out towards that one frame that next frame that should be this one so now click play okay you know I should be better at this right this is what you get sorry and so now I'm gonna push this a little bit more there right there okay I don't want to take too much time but this is frame by frame right you get certain advantages because you draw every frame so you can draw it the way you want it or the way you can also it depends heavily on your drawing skills which in my case they're not many and so this is one way to approach an animation I'm going to draw I'm gonna make sure that this is the one circle that I draw well I'm gonna put this one at the first frame or frame number zero because it's going to be repeated at the end anyways and now if I go into edit mode I can select this right and I can manipulate it the same way I would manipulate vertices so for instance I'm just going to grab move down I can actually use this the manipulators you can move it down a tiny bit then go to the next frame move it down a tiny bit more move it down a tiny bit more down a tiny bit more or maybe a lot more and then a lot more and then here should be squashing against the ground so just scale it scale that so right maybe I scaled it too much to the side and too much something like so I can go to the next frame scale it more scale it more and then I can actually before I go and do the other frames I'm gonna adjust the ones that I have for instance now as as we did before I get I can use sculpt and then go burp burp so I can do my my more stretched frames right so more like so right I'm just going to play with this a bit soften it up I could potentially just use a scale and then something like that scale x scale z scale x right and so it stretches as it goes and then yeah something like that actually this one seems too big so this one so we can make sure that they are kind of aligned and working the right direction and then I'll just select these keys from here right press shift d which is duplicate put them here and we got one two three four five six right I'm going to press s to scale minus or negative one and it scales it based on the current time and now I can put it back there and you'll see that now I get point point I did one extra frame so I can push it you get a bouncing ball that's much nicer than the one I did before but less organic right the other one has that feeling of handmade so that's another thing I'm going to make this circle now by draw mode so I'm going to make a circle again but this time I get a bit of that a little bit more circular right and so I get this and now I'm going to duplicate this keyframe shift d put it over there and we're going to start over here and press interpolate sequence now what this does basically kind of like baking every frame so every frame has the same circle now the cool thing is here I can go to multi-frame and go to use follow and if I move this now because I have only one keyframe being displayed and selected nothing happens but if I go and select all of these guys for instance and move it down you can see something's happening it's basically moving this frame and then the next two are easing out from there and then there's a gap and then they're easing into the first one and to the last one so if I deselect now and I can see it's not properly a bouncing ball but it's close so I'm going to undo this and I'm going to modify this fall off if you're a 3d animator you can imagine that this is the graph editor it's going to push this a little bit more push this a little bit more we get that it's being like the shape that you usually want to try to get so now I'm going to push this down and look at how they are behaving if I go to object mode you can see that bouncing ball from here we can just modify the frames now we need maybe even rid of this one with what I want to get rid of this one duplicate this one make sure because this is the only one that I want to modify here this one is going to be the same deal just a little bit more squashed and then maybe this one is too far now so I can select them again turn on this push them down and now squash it there stretch it there as you can see they do this squash and stretch gradually towards the first one so basically this midpoint is the keyframe where you're standing at and then from here on out and from here on in is whatever you have selected gradually up so if I go here and then you do the same squash stretch there and as you can see this one is the most affected one and then the other ones are gradually less affected so we got a very similar result now the next one is the boring otherwise it's still important to know that grease pencil it's still an object and so I'm going to draw a pretty circle well pretty you know what I mean now I'm gonna go to sculpt mode and get a little bit better right boom and so as you can see now that I'm in edit mode there's this little point right there that's the origin of the grease pencil object so I can move it over here it's gonna make my life easier you're gonna see why when I move this keyframe which I did in frame 13 to the frame 0 so throughout the whole time we get this drawing modified overrided that's my drawing so now I can jump back into object mode and switch here from grease pencil to top sheet I'm going to make a keyframe in frame 7 with location rotation scale and then up duplicate that here and then make sure that this one stays one frame I'm gonna scale it down wash it right that this one is going to be scaled down again maybe a little bit less so right then I can just reset the transform that copy that over here as well maybe make it a little bit down this one for a little pop and then over here I'm just gonna reset that scale you can see it's a little bit uneven so I'm gonna push this keyframe over here and that's gonna make it a little nicer and so you just go to my graph editor and very very much like you do with a 3d ball you can get the same effect the problem that we miss here is that because we're using object animation we are losing the onion scale which is a really powerful tool for figuring out what awesome so let's go to the fifth one so I'm gonna put this sphere around here press ctrl a and then apply just rotation and scale and now I'm gonna create a keyframe right here again as I said before and move those keyframes and we're gonna copy them to frame 13 and go down to frame 6 scale that right if we actually wanted to maintain the volume properly with a 3d sphere you can just go to the constraints and add maintain volume constraint right and if I now move the lead scale you can see that it compensates the other axis so cool stuff right I'm just going to scale this down push it more or less where the floor should be or in my imagination at least just gonna push copy a keyframe there and same thing again scale it in the z axis push it down a little bit more so it's still touching the floor yeah make sure we got a material with a color so it makes sense right then here I'm gonna scale it back but now I'm gonna scale it in opposite positive d push it up same deal right here z positive move it a little bit further up then here scale is normal scale is normal then now I can just go to the z plate this move this up so it bounces like a bouncing ball a little bit more like a bouncing ball you'd be asking by now well this is not grey's pencil well yeah it's not grey's pencil but you select this you go object animation big mesh to grey's pencil and we're going to just like make seam edges make sure this is just 13 frames starting zero okay and you can see that now we have a new grey's pencil object I'm going to turn off this my 3d bouncing ball animation is as flat as a grey's pencil animation usually is the only thing is that you can for instance add stroke but it will give you the stroke of the faces and I haven't figured out how to have just the borders which probably Antonio Vasquez could answer and yeah this is really cool you can grab an entire character and do a 3d animation and then have it turned into grey's pencil and then draw more stuff on top of it it's a better way to make it fit into your grey's pencil animation so bear in mind that all of these different little kind of techniques are interchangeable and you can add them to your workflow so you can create animation easier you might find that creating faces frame by frame is much easier but then having a cg body that you can then turn into grey's pencil might be easier for other stuff and so on so let me know in the comments below if you know any other ways of approaching a grey's pencil animation that I might not know and remember to like and subscribe and see me next time