Baby Suzanne in Grease Pencil

As studio team members finish their work on the Gold project, some want to experiment with new tools - once again, a 3D animator tried their hand at our 2D tool, but with a cute twist this time!

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At the eve of the new Grease Pencil version, I wanted to create a simple animation experiment to test the basic Grease Pencil workflow and use it as a comparison between the versions.

Here's the final result:

At first I figured a simple bouncing ball would suffice but it felt a bit lackluster. So I drew a simple "baby" version of our famous Suzanne monkey (to make it very blender-thematic of course) and animated her as a bouncing ball. Somewhat predictably that escalated into me wanting to give her more personality and story so it ended up being a short clip about poor baby Suzanne getting a new tooth (inspired by my 1-year-old son).

Even with a seemingly simple example like this, the amount of layers needed to organise it really escalated. I figured there would be a simple "sketch" layer, then "outline" layer, "fill" layer and finally a "shadow" layer. Perhaps even a "highlight" layer as a bit of a cherry on top. Simple.

Well as you go along you realise that it's much more efficient to separate some elements on their own layer. It's much easier to tweak the eye darts if you allow the eyes to have their own layer. To make the tongue vibrate during the yelling it makes sens that it also gets separated. In some instances it made sense to also separate the outline of an element and the fill, so the tongue actually gets two layers. In another case, the flapping uvula got one layer which was used for both an outline and fill. Soon my initial 5 layers had ballooned into 18 layers, even with my best attempt at keeping it minimal.

Once it was ready, I went over it with Falk and we opened it in Grease Pencil 3.0 which should automatically convert it without any issues. Right away we found a bug where my "shadow" layer was flickering for no apparent reason. For us this is actually a great thing, because it means we stumbled upon a bug he could fix!

https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/123328

It turned out to be a bug related to the onion skin which was promptly fixed by Falk within a day.

Using Grease Pencil 3.0 I could utilise the improved layer system which includes a folder structure. This made it easy to organise the layers in a more structured way.

After this experiment, my biggest feature request would be to improve the onion skinning so that it takes into account the object animation. I got very excited about animating the Grease Pencil object as a bouncing ball and then doing my pencil animation within it. Turns out, this meant that I couldn't really use the onion skinning feature because it's only being calculated for the drawings and doesn't take location/rotation/scale of the object into consideration. This complication would go even further for shots that have camera movement that needs to be accounted for.

Luckily, the developers are aware of this limitation and are already working on a feature that not only addresses this, but will be used as a broader ghosting feature in Blender.

https://devtalk.blender.org/t/ghosting-system-for-animation/30116

And finally, just for fun, I added the sound of my son to the animation. This was a fun little experiment that gave me a good overview of the basic Grease Pencil workflow and also the differences in the new version.

You can download the blend files here: