UPDATE (9/18/18) I included the Active Tool panel, along the Grease Pencil layers and the Outliner. Also, I realized that the Dope Sheet was duplicated at the bottom (See screenshot and download below)
Hello everyone, inspired by the new workspaces, specially the 2D animation workspace, I started making some modifications and came up with interesting results. In the past I’ve worked with many 2D animation softwares, so I was thinking about recreating the basics of their interface, with some personal configurations:
This is the default setting, in there you can see a rectangle I created with grease pencil’s primitives, which size is relative to the camera aspect ratio, drawn on the orthographic front view. My idea was to draw a canvas or drawing space, sort of. And also, it would let me know in every moment what is going to be rendered and whats not. Below is the dopesheet set on Grease Pencil. Then I modified the World Background color, deactivated some of the the overlays, and created a separated grease pencil object to start drawing.
I made the rectangle non renderable, and both the layer and the material I used to create it are locked.
Here you can see the camera, positioned in front of the canvas.
I draw on a small Cintiq 13HD, so I configured the express keys, the rocker ring and the pencil buttons with some of Blender’s default hotkeys. Everything in a way I could access to the essential navigation and drawing tools. I needed to pan the canvas, rotate the canvas, Zoom in and out, reset rotation, to undo, to activate the pencil or eraser and resize the brushes. Here you can see a diagram with the commands. The only hotkey I modified was the one for the middle mouse key, that is set for rotation. I was looking for a way of not rotating the perspective by accident, but at the same time I could do it if its necessary. So I ended up using alt+middle key. The right and middle mouse keys are on the pencil.
Regarding the rotation of the canvas, I’m looking for an alternative for Ctrl+ numpad 4 (left rotation) and Ctrl + numpad 6 (right rotation), similar to the zoom and pan tool. However for the time being these shortcuts works just fine.
Besides that, I created three materials, one black, red and blue for sketching.
Of course, I want to make clear that this is a configuration I made mostly for traditional (tradigital?) frame by frame animation. It still doesn’t cover all the full capabilities of Grease Pencil. I know is very simple and easy to recreate, but I uploaded a blender file with everything set in case you want to modify it, add more things and to make experiments. Is yours, just press ctrl+tab, select “Draw” and start drawing.
What do you think? Opinions are welcome!.
UPDATE (9/18/18) I included the Active Tool panel, along the Grease Pencil layers and the Outliner. Also, I realized that the Dope Sheet was duplicated at the bottom (See screenshot and download below)
Blender file (download): animation_desk_2.blend (773.7 KB)