Grease pencil and Store views on Blender 2.79

I finally got the chance to download Blender 2.79 release candy 2 and I want to show you a couple of nifty features about the grease pencil and store
camera views.

I prepared with a Trex Primitive.In case you´re interested, the geometry was added through CreaPrim addon for blender, and was chosen as one of the iconic generic geometries from Softimage. Just so you know.

I then created many different layers with stroke and fill colors you can see on the lower part of the N panel at the right side of the viewport.
On your left side T Panel you´ll find more settings for grease pencil like thickness and sensitivity.
If you really want quality on your strokes, please set Smoothness and Iterations to 3.

Make sure you hace checked “Continuous drawing” on your T Panel. Press the letter “D” on your keyboard
to start drawing on your viewport.

Wait, I know what you´re all thinking: How am I going to draw “plane” on a 3d space? Does the cursor and
stroke know where the raycast will hit? I mean, I can´t even do this on other “commercial” packages,
so why blender…?!! Did I mention Blender DOES pick up your tablet strokes as smoothly as a regular 2D drawing application? in my case I use a 19″ UGEE tablet. Smooth as the wind.

Fixed Camera views.

Softimage had this feature way back since it was created (around 1998) but Blender finally implemented it, and I thought to put it to use with one of the most emergent things commonly happening during a paint session on the grease pencil. So I was making some strokes and AGHHH! I moved my camera! The drawing just messed up!

Easy breezy. Set your view to orthographic by pressing 5 while you´re aligned to the view you want to draw.
If you mess up, there´s a nifty new feature on Blender 2.79 which will store a camera
or 3d window view to a previous position. Choose POV and SAVE CURRENT. Rename the view and Click on
the BOX icon. Now your view is restored.

Parenting on Grease Pencil.

To parent a grease layer, you have to go to the BONE option under the Grease Layer panel and select the object
you want to parent the layer with. This is how you can animate bones to affect your grease layers. Pretty nifty.

Grease Pencil Pie Menu and Sculpt strokes

Press and hold “D” and then “E” this will open up the pie menu for the grease pencil. We need to get into EDIT mode
inside the grease pencil layers to be able to select “E” for sculpting our layers and refine them.
Once you know how to invoque the menues, it´s all a matter of practicing with your desired tool.

You can read more about the shortcuts and tools from the official blender documentation.

When you work on your Stroke and Color layers, make sure to name them. Left color is Stroke, Right color is Fill, make sure FILL opacity is at 1.

Once you get more practice with the shortcuts, grease pencil really is a very artistic way to work on a 3D environment.
Blender 2.79 has even more awesome features as addons and implemented options like the new Denoiser and Filmic profile colors which will really give your Blender a boost for work. I will talk about more implementations on my next video.

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Thanks.