Exploring the Geometry Nodes support Grease Pencil in Blender 4.3

Blender 4.3 has brought about an exciting development for artists and creators with the introduction of Geometry Nodes support for Grease Pencil. This significant update opens up a wealth of new possibilities for combining 3D modeling with 2D animation, providing users with enhanced flexibility and creative potential. Let’s delve into the details of this exciting integration and explore its implications for the Blender community with iRender in this blog.

Blender 4.3 beta versions include Grease Pencil 3. The stable release is expected by November 2024. Linux glibc 2.28+, macOS 11.2+, and Windows 8.1+ are compatible with Blender.

The latest version of Blender, an open-source 3D program for visual effects, animation, game development, and visualization, version 4.3, has been made available to the public by the Blender Foundation.

A Big Feature – Grease Pencil 3 will be posted as our usual roundup of the major features in Blender 4.3 when it releases for final release next month.

With this much-needed improvement, Blender’s storyboarding and 2D animation capabilities will be future-proofed, laying the foundation for “10+ years” of production application. It adds additional tools, boosts performance, and even allows you to use Blender’s Geometry Nodes system to manipulate Grease Pencil.

Originally slated for Blender 4.0 last year, Grease Pencil 3 is a “complete rewrite” of the toolkit, aimed at removing structural limitations and improving performance on large projects.

The original post on the Blender Developer blog described it as “laying a solid foundation for the next 10+ years.” The video below is a recording of a session from last year’s Blender Conference – goes into the under-the-hood changes and technical details

Layer groups, fill gradients, and upgraded drawing tools are among the new features of Grease Pencil 3. Layer groups, fill gradients, and upgraded drawing tools are among the new features in Grease Pencil 3. While the initial release was just to bring the updated toolset up to feature parity with Blender 4.2, there are several new features, some of which are quite significant. 

Among these are color-coded Layer Groups, which simplify the management of big projects. Like in most image editing programs, you may use a new Gradient Fill tool to fill regions with gradients by dragging from a start point to an endpoint on the gradient. The drawing tools have also been updated with active smoothing for freehand strokes.

Grease Pencil now supports Geometry Nodes, perhaps the most important change for artists, procedural modelers, scene layout, and Blender’s simulation system. It makes it possible to modify Grease Pencil objects using Geometry Nodes – many of the existing nodes that work with curves have been updated to work with Grease Pencil data.

Converting Grease Pencil objects to editable curves isn’t completely lossless, but it supports all the “common properties and materials” – and opens up some exciting new workflows. 2D animations are converted to editable clay-style 3D animations, using only Geometry Nodes. The basis of this update is allowing Geometry Nodes to dynamically convert generated curves to Grease Pencil and opens up many possibilities for managing and crafting unique-looking projects.

The changes are not backward compatible – among other things, Grease Pencil’s Python API has been rewritten. Drawing guides are among the features that have been deleted.

Blender 4.3 is presently feature-locked as a beta release, but one of the main toolkits, Grease Pencil, is one for which the Blender Foundation has particularly requested that people test for flaws.

Before the official release, this procedure will assist find and address any significant problems.

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Source and video:cgchannel.com