Until now, we’ve been combining blender shaders to create cartoon-like expressions, but a game changer is coming soon.
In Japan, we already have a lot of adoption records such as “Evangelion”, “DragonBall”, and “Pretty Cure”. Until now, it was only provided by MAYA, but the day when blender will become the main software for 3D animation is near.
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Domo arigato for this link…
English included… if you just press the English button on the top right 
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thanks for the info. Replaced with English HP link.
I’ve been following this product for a very long time, checking occasionally to see what sort of integration options might be coming along. Quite interested to see it will be available for Blender.
Hoping there will be a demo of some sort available; I’ve no issue paying for great software, but would want to evaluate and compare it to my current workflow to determine potential advantages/disadvantages.
Looking forward to learning more. 
One major potential downside is that they note you’ll need to buy a license to actually render any of the things you make with Blender/Pencil+… and licenses for Pencil+ for existing software integrations are currently 508 USD. As nice as it would be to have really good lines and cel shading in Blender, you can already do both with a little more work for free. Getting people to pay 508 dollars for a (admittedly better) toon shader and some line effects is going to be a really tough sell with the Blender crowd
i think you are right. This product is for professionals who need to deliver consistently high quality products in a short period of time.
I don’t think it’s necessary for users who have no problem with the existing blender shader to buy it.
I’d probably pay 100 USD for this software, personally. It would be useful for my workflow. However, I don’t do anything commercial with Blender, nor am I planning on it anytime soon, so I just can’t stomach 500 USD. But you make a good point, this is almost definitely intended for studio professionals working on commercial products.
There’s also a chance that the Blender pricing won’t reflect the Maya/3DS Max pricing. I mean, Blender’s pricing already doesn’t reflect Maya/3DS Max (free is infinitely cheaper than either), so here’s hoping!
Agreed on all points. GP v3 is also on the horizon, and dev notes are pretty impressive on that front. Hopefully one or the other will have much better anti-aliasing on the ink lines, and more flexibility on assigning it to different objects. Render pass integration also quite key.
Somebody explain to me what this does exactly and what are the advantages of using this instead of cell-shading and freestyle or line art modifiers, don’t quite understand what I’m looking at
Freestyle has no preview in viewport.
That is why GP Line Art modifier was created.
So, Lineart is visible in viewport. But expected result is only seen from Camera VIew.
It is possible to lock Camera to View and turn around character like in video, with Line Art.
But it is not possible to display a Quad View that looks good.
It looks like you can disable line rendering while navigating in viewport, in a scene with many lines to avoid lagging.
It looks like Line Style are easier to define.
Line Art modifier is just generating the lines. That are other GP modifiers that will define the style.
So, settings for a style are scattered between different modifiers.
So, the UI seems simpler. But it is planed to replace GP modifiers by GP nodes.
It just seems to be more comfortable.
I saw people complaining about flickering in renders of Line Art animation.
Maybe this renderer is delivering more consistent animation renders.
But from demo, it does not do a lot more.
The speed difference between Pencil and GP is insane… Pencil rendered an animation in 5 mins, that took GP 90 minutes. And the anti-aliasing…no comparison, Pencil has the advantage there as well.
That is pretty cool. That could make it worth the price, if you are on strict deadlines
(Do you think it’s worth the price?)
I do, actually… and after an afternoon with the demo, I bought it.
I realize the price is much higher than what the average blender user is used to, but it’s actually cheaper than what I paid for a license of Illustrate back when I used Max years ago.
So, definitely has a price point. But in terms of speed and features, it’s quite nice. So easy to style lines artistically, and they render SO freaking cleanly.
Are all these works in the Gallery made with Blender? If this is the case, it means that Blender is a big deal in Japan when it comes to anime and NPR. This must become a well known fact all over the community.
Since it’s new for blender and a bit longer availabe for Maya and 3ds Max… i guess not…
Not all in Blender, i only know that Eva 3.0+1.1 is surely to use it.
Btw, you can check which software is used in gallery details.
I’m surprised no one here has mentioned the inverted hull method of inking. I’ve always gotten the best results that way.
The inverted hull method works great, it gets the job done and that’s about it. It’s like making a chair with only a table saw and a hammer- you can make a darn good functional chair that way. PSOFT is like a lathe and a jigsaw and a planer and an upholstery machine - it lets you make a chair that’s beautiful in ways you could never approach with the saw and the hammer. Both are functional chairs, but one of those you can sell for 50 bucks and one you can sell for 2000
Because terrible method compared to any other method. 
(I’m joking. Sort of. Am I? Sort of.)
The inverted hull method lets me control line color with a shader, though, which lets me use textures, animate color changes, and change lineart color or alpha with an empty (important for the way I do eyelids). I can also control line thickness with vertex weights, as well as assign thinner lines to finely detailed parts. I like being able to control the lineart as an actual part of the model, not as post-processing. The only significant downsides I’ve noticed are that I can’t make the inks hug as tightly as I need, and I can’t use a brush. (Let me know if these are things PSoft can cover, and I just missed that though–I’m very good at missing obvious things!)
