Fighting (with) Grease Pencil

Introduction

As an exercise and exploration with Grease Pencil, we decided to create a small test, animating in a traditional 2D way with a 3D background.

This is the final result:

Why

The idea of this test was to get the hand of the process of a 2D animation from beginning to end, and have some test file for GPv3.

Process

First, I started creating the main poses of the animation with a rough sketch, in this stage I just wanted to get the right energy and flow.

After that, I took the poses I had and started to add inbetweens. The method I liked the most and I used during most of the process when coming to inbetweens was to use the same pose and edit and sculpt it to be able to "live" in the pose, but have animation on it.

When I was happy with the timing and spacing of the animation, I decide to delay some parts so that not all the parts of the body would move at the same time, to create the sensation of weight. In this case, I just took the arms and the head and I moved them to create delays. Until this stage all was really fast, drawings were really messy and it was really easy to edit them because you didn't need to make them look good.

Next step was to make the main poses, taking care a bit more of the volumes of the character. Now things start to get more difficult, keeping poses of model in 2D is really complex for a 3D animator used to have the volumes for free.

When I was somehow happy with the main poses, I decided to just focus on the torso and the head. In this case I felt it was easier to animate the head and neck in one layer and the torso in another one. It was easier to edit the parts separated and be able to delay them keeping the animation kind of organize.

After that I decided to add the arms in another layer. Here I really regret not doing another pass defining the arm musculature a bit more and leaving it just as volumes, because later I had to do it when I wanted to do the clean up pass.

Then I did a tight up pass on the face, trying to add the main expressions on the main poses.

After being kind of happy with the main poses, I added the inbetweens, again editing and sculpting the strokes of the main poses I had in the step before.

Then I tried to define the arms a bit more, and I found out that the reference volume I had for the gloves was pretty bad. I tried to do it again and I found out it was kinda difficult for me to get them right, so I asked Beau if he could model and rig for me a glove prop I could use as a guide and I used them to animate them in the main poses (I had to scale and tweak them to look like they are coming close to the camera, or away from it).

3D animators are always gonna 3D

Note of the producer, Fiona: this is a great example of how Blender can help you achieve the level of animation you want, by using the strength of each tool. The flexibility of 2D, the consistency of 3D.

Then I proceded to animate the gloves in the rest of the poses that were already there on the body.

Next step I wanted to do was the clean up step, where you make a really clean and nice line on your drawings. I never have to do it in 3D, I just animate and that's it, so I found this to be the hardest part of all the animation process.

Usually, 2D animators just do each drawing again with the clean up line, because they have already the base of the animation, so one drawing-one pose, but this was really hard for me. I tried to do it, but when I tried to animate the first part of the animation I found out it wasn't going to work.

I went back to whatever was working for me, I took the main poses I had and I split them in different layers, head and neck, torso and arms with the gloves. This made the process much easier because again I was able to edit and sculpting the strokes of the poses I already had and animate them more in a "3D" way.

Note of the producer, Fiona: this is actually a technique used by 2D animators working on action shots or with a lot of superposition (especially hands over body, or something that moves way faster than the rest. This is also very convenient when you need to do retakes as you can focus on one area without risking messing with the others. It can also help in compositing, to play with the depth of field.

So after I pass all the headache of cleaning up the line for the torso and the head, I jump into the arms. In this case, the "clean up" version I had before was really complex and not working, so I had to simplify the amount of lines the arm had, and I added some smears in some of the poses to show the speed of the movement. Also did a draw over the animation of the 3D gloves and I hide them, because they already did their job.

At this moment I was happy with the animation (and a bit tired) so I went to the next step of the process, I added a flat color pass.

Next, I added the shadows for the main poses. Again, in my usual work I never have to go through this process: in a 3D project, after the animation is done, the shot goes away from me and I go to animate another shot, so I don't have much idea about lighting and shadows. I had to check a lot of info and something not bad came out of it. I showed it to the people that know about lighting at the studio, they pointed out that some of the shadows of weren't right, thus I adjusted them.

In this version, some of them were already fixed, but they pointed out more weren't looking good so I did more retakes on them.

This version is the final version with all final shadows animated. It was an interesting and hard step in the animation.

With this the animation was pretty much done, but since the beginning I wanted add some impact frame - a succession of frames with different colors and patterns (usually opposite to each other) that shock your brain to create a bigger impact. In this case I added them on the charging up of the last punch to add extra power up on that moment.

Next, I added a small camera movement, trying to have the feeling that somebody was holding the camera.

After showing the animation around, some people gave me some feedback on the impact frames, so I did some changes on them, trying to make them more dynamic. (here some of the final impact frames)

After all was done I gave the animation to Beau to put it on the background he did and start to do the compositing to make it look epic.

Background

For our fighter we needed a matching setting and decided on a boxing ring with a static crowd. We started with blocking out the scene using primitives and Grease Pencil objects. Next we adjusted the ropes and added compositing FX to increase visual interest.

I took what Pablico was working on and implemented a background. Together we discussed various elements to be placed in the final image like the circular lights. These have no logical purpose as working lights but are placed as a suggestive element. The angle of these elements were very specifically placed so that it didn't take too much attention and to be suggestive standing inside of a boxing ring.

Viewport preview

To tie all of the visual elements together we use various render layers for the boxing ring, crowd, flare and gradient, the animated character and final post-processing. The gradient is a simple sphere object with a gradient texture and the flare contains multiple Grease Pencil objects with visual effects like blur.

These are the various layers forming the final composite.

Conclusion

My main conclusion is 2D animation requires some skills you don't need as much when you do 3D animation: for example keeping the volumes on the character or creating the shadow pass. Also some parts, like the clean up, are really tedious and require a lot of practice to make it good

This animation wasn't a walk in the park, but I learnt a lot about the process and also about how to utilize Grease Pencil in my advantage, like using the strokes as 3D objects, being able to transform and sculpt them. This made my life easier when I needed to animate poses that were similar to another ones.

If you would like to have the blend file, please tell us in the comments.

NOTE: I'm adding the animation file I worked on, soon we will upload the final file with the background. ALSO this file only works on GP2 at the moment, so you will have to use blender 4.2, it won't work on the last daily build (we are working on it)