Now that Grease Pencil 3 is in official development does that mean that there will be no new features in Grease Pencil 2? People have been submitting ideas on RightClickSelect for awhile hoping they will be implemented in the v3 LTS.
The goal of Grease Pencil v3 is to settle a basis able to handle the requests, that Grease Pencil v2 could not handle.
So, there will be in Grease Pencil 3, improvements, impossible in GP v2.
Proposals done on RightClickSelect may be still valid or invalid ( because outdated or automatically satisfied by v3 ).
We will see what we will win, loose or have to wait for, when GP3 will stop to be experimental.
Currently, that is too soon to be disappointed or despaired.
GP2 and GP3 are too different, you cant implement feature that works on both. In that case you need to write same feature twice. Developers are not gonna do that simply because that will delay every feature and we’ll get half of those updates in one year out of what we could’ve gotten if they just worked on GP3. Not to mention technical limitations of GP2 that will either prevent some features or will require triple amount of work.
Realistically, except bug fixes you cant expect any new features in GP2. Everything new will be added in GP3 in 4.x series
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There are numerous features that are can be implemented now such as:
- Create Materials from Strokes’ vertex colors (Color Attributes)(and apply the new materials to the strokes). This is desperately needed for Grease Pencil in VSE and Story Pencil as they don’t display strokes drawn with vertex colors attribute properly.
- Ability to adjust stroke hardness and normalize stroke hardness
- Knife tool to add vertices/points to strokes across line intersections
- Select between two selected points
- Bevel selected points (add n points to each side)
- Edge/point slide selected points (good for getting fills to line up perfectly)
- A Distort tool
- Ability to apply the Thickness Profile to selected strokes
- Automerge gives a visual indicator that the next drawn stroke is within the “join by distance” range and will be merged/joined with another stroke.
- Move tool can snap selected points to other strokes’ points when snapping is enabled
- Set active layer to the layer the selected stroke is on
12 Center and zoom to selected points and/or a magnifying glass tool to define a region to pan/zoom to
Of course we can write our own addons to do this (and I have) but it is best to have them flushed out and implemented into Blender.
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I don’t think it’s an issue of whether or not those features can be implemented in v2. It’s a question of will they be? I believe the answer is probably not. The complete focus is on v3, and after that is integrated into blender completely, future development will continue to evolve v3.
I don’t think they will be much interest at all in going back to V2 code to see what tricks they can add to it.
Can they? Unless you’re a developer on the project and you don’t know the difficulty of implementing and maintaining any given feature.
3.0 is described as being a full rewrite, so spending time extending the existing implementation is time wasted. Especially so when apparently…
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I just hate seeing another Blender release with the Grease Pencil release notes empty. To many people the Grease Pencil 2D Animation tab is not a toy and is a tool they use everyday to make a living. Updates that improve efficiency are welcome.
When casual users trying out Story Pencil run into black and gray drawings because they drew with vertex colors they assume it is broken and give up on it. Some may realize they need to draw with Material colors and are overwhelmed with the thought of having to create a new material for every color they want to use rather than just picking a color to draw with. Others may scratch their heads wondering why there is a Create Palette from Attribute Colors and no Create Materials from Stroke Vertex Colors. And a few may wonder why Vertex Colors was renamed to Attribute Colors.
I’m not saying that is me, but some people may think that.
I love the Grease Pencil and use it every day. I want it to succeed.
Grease Pencil VR will be a fun toy to play with but I will always go back to the desktop for animating/drawing for serious stuff.
@PongBuster : I’ll give you props for lamenting about GreasePencil for a change, rather than about things with more mainstream-appeal (I’m looking at you, Sculpt Mode). That’s refreshing.
greetings, Kologe
and geometry nodes
Blender’s strong points don’t include comprehensive notes nor great documentation. For GP updates, reading the dev meeting notes or the project board usually gives more insight as to at least what’s sort of going on in the background.
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