What if Grease Pencil could adopt to deformations of a mesh surface?

This year Oscar ceremony is ended. Oscar for best animated short goes to the Feast. Last year it goes to the Paperman. No suprize there. Same guys from Disney, same technology. It looks like 2d animation in 3d space have nice perspective in the future.
Is there a way to provide similar features in Blender?
Maybe idea is stupid, but what if Grease Pencil could adopt to deformations of a mesh surface?

Not sure how you would get the 3D form to fill the sketch but I could imagine drawing arcs and paths for an IK armature to follow. Like drawing directions on screen. Perhaps you could draw over the face to select the mesh to move, then draw a second layer to indicate movement. Or maybe sketch a bone pose or stick man in key poses.

But I don’t do any character animation so I’m clueless, other than I hate fiddling with armature proxy objects.

Wouldn’t Freestyle be able to do something like that?

Freestyle is automated rendering post-processing. What makes this Disney’s software special is a hand-drawn animation over 3d animated data.

It could, and quite simply, with a meshdeform modifier. That is if it were a first class citizen like curves and mesh data types, and not bolted on and isolated into its own little world. But yea I know its easier (and faster) to develop features like that (in partial or complete isolation from others). Maybe it will grow and integrate more in the future, I would really like that :). Then the Paperman like functions may be possible.

Freestyle doesn’t do that kind of thing.

There’s potentially a few ways to do silhouette-finessing in Blender. Nothing as intuitive yet as the Paperman stuff with drawing lines directly onto the screen but rendering is all ultimately just squashing flat projections of 3D objects against a camera plane (or two) anyway.

What’s currently possible in Blender is using animated shape keys specifically to finesse the silhouette of an appended mesh - like a “silhouette pass” once everything else is animated. It’s not quite as quick or powerful a workflow BUT you can draw the line as a guide, create a new shape key, turn it up to 1.0 then drop into Sculpt Mode and manually tweak the outer contour of the mesh that way. You can then animate the influence of the shape key as you please.

It’s not as polished a workflow but then again Blender is free software, not the in-house R&D project of a multi-billion dollar global corporation. Sometimes you have to go to it instead of expecting it to come to you. :slight_smile:

But if theres a workflow theres a way. A recent tutorial of mine outlined a very click process for making an animated sequence of images. Someone came along and automated my tutorial out of existence with a script.

Can You share a link to Your tutorial for animated sequence of images? I would like to see it.

Its a cg cookie tutorial so it’s behind a paywall. If you’re a subscriber its in the video sequencer category.

Got some torrent link to it? :cool:
I’m just kidding.

I agree with You. Rethinking curves to have Grease Pencil features would be so much better solution…