When I draw grease pencil on my rigged mesh, and the mesh is deformed by bones, I wish for the grease pencil to follow the mesh. I’m not just talking about drawing on it’s surface, it’s more complicated than that.
Generally I’m looking for a way to draw 2D facial details on a 3D character, so I can have a simple face rig with detailed expressions.
I’ve tried looking into using UV maps and textures for that, using stuff like dynamic paint and image sequences, but those solutions seem clumsy, needlessly complicated and I figure there must be a better way.
If I could do that with grease pencil, the process would be 100x faster and more intuitive.
sure, but it kind of sucks, that I’d then have to weight paint every single stroke, plus, when I skin a stroke drawn on a mesh that’s already deformed, it would “jump” so to speak.
Maybe i do not understand your goal but you can draw in rest position so all you need is apply pose as rest position. I do not know how but surely it is possible. Now that i think about it what @joseph said makes sense, rig grease pencil and create new vertex groups named as the bones and corresponding to the parts of the mesh you drew on.
An other idea is to just draw GP on the whole mesh and uv project it as an Image on it. Or better yet uv project a 2d raster drawing on the front , onother one on the back and fix details with texture paint.
Well i know this took a while, i did not know how to project an image on the mesh in blender 4.0, all i do is 2d animation for the last years (i think last time i uv projected was 9 years ago).I watched some modern tutorials and there is an example, i drew the face on the sphere with GP, saved a still render and projected it on the sphere (in camera view for simplicity). If the GP is a little off you can adjust it (eg in sculpt mode) and reproject it on the mesh to check the result before rendering and uv projecting. Basically you stick what you drew as a texture on the mesh. uvproject.blend (1004.5 KB)
Obviously i should have selected the front half only before unwrapping but you get the idea, though i suspect it is not as simple as in theory .
I’ve come to realise this, but I was hoping for a slim chance someone came up with the thing and would happen to see this post. I dunno it’s a shot in the dark.
For me this thread was useful.It gave me the idea to project grease pencil on simple geometry so that it is affected by light. I will try that tomorrow and hope it will not end up with other bright ideas i had.
Trying things out is never bad, if it does not go the way you intended you will usually learn something anyway. (even if it is, why it was not such a good idea )
(even if it is, why it was not such a good idea 
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