Monday, October 13, 2014

Grease Pencil Stroke Editing - An Update

Here's another update on what I've been up to with the Grease Pencil tools:


See if you can tell what's different from yesterday's screenshot ;)


So, what exactly have I been busy working on? Here's a short list of the changes:

1) It is now possible to select parts of Grease Pencil strokes (using Select All, Circle/brush select, and direct clicking)

2) You can edit these selected segments in various ways (e.g. Translating, Rotating, Scaling,
Mirroring and Copying them). Notably, Proportional Edit also works!

Before

After

3) I've been cleaning up the UI a bit - Moving some editing settings to go with the rest of the editing settings, rearranging some stuff. I also spent the better part of today porting the layers UI to Python, and making that use the UI List widgets - resulting in a much more space-friendly version

The simplified UI List based layout - Yes those colour swatches are functional!

4) In new files (and on objects without any prior Grease Pencil data on them), new sketches will be added to the scene instead of per object. The old default of adding per object turned out to be a nightmare to use in practice, as you'd almost always forget which object you were drawing on

5) I've made a few tweaks to the DopeSheet view for Grease Pencil to make it nicer for layer management. Namely, it's now possible to rearrange layers, and clicking on a layer in the DopeSheet changes the active layer.

6) I've built a Pie Menu (!) for quickly accessing all the functionality. In addition to the hotkeys I've added, with a little practice, the pie-menu approach can be even faster.



On that note, here's a little keymap to get you started:
* D LMB = Draw Freehand
* D Ctrl RMB = Eraser       <--- WARNING: This has changed from what it is in standard Blender
* D Ctrl LMB = Straight Lines
* D Alt LMB = Draw Poly (i.e. line segments, click by click)

* D RMB = Select (single vert only)
* D Shift RMB = Add vert to selection set

* D A = Select All
* D C = Circle Select (LMB = Select, MMB = Deselect, RMB = Escape/Exit)
* D W = Select the whole curve where one vert lies under the cursor

* D E = Copy selected points to new strokes

* D G = Move
* D R = Rotate
* D S = Scale
* D M = Mirror (followed by axis)

* D D = Pie Menu.        NOTE: If using the drawing ops, start dragging/drawing immediately once you press the mouse. Otherwise, you end up just adding a dot.

4 comments:

  1. Awesome! Could this be added to the trunk, pease and when?Also, exposing it to python is great, does this mean that I can basically copy the GP panel code to my own panel, cause Ive been waiting this for a long time!Thanks!

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    1. My plan is to add this to trunk for the 2.73 release, once people have had a chance to play with it a bit and bash out some of the quirks.

      As for being able to copy the code: Yep, that'll be possible. You may also want to check out some of the new context properties available

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    Replies
    1. This is a great work that you do! Can we hope on bucket tool for Grease Pencil in Blender 2.73?

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