2024-05-21 Grease Pencil Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Date/Time: 2024-05-21T14:00:00Z
Link: https://meet.google.com/xxo-tyin-rem
Attendees :

  • Andry Rasoahaingo (Dedouze, animator)
  • Antonio Vazquez (Developer)
  • Casey Bianco-Davis (Developer)
  • Christoph Lendenfeld (Blender A&R module)
  • Falk David (Blender)
  • Lukas Tönne (Blender)
  • Matias Mendiola (Grease Pencil team)
  • Samuel Bernou (ADV Studio, Dev)
  • Sietse Brouwer (Developer)

Topics

  • Development updates
  • Discussions

Meeting Notes

  • Development updates
    • New Layer Group functionality (by Pratik)
      • Groups can now be active/selected.
      • Drag & drop works for groups now. Groups can also be dragged into other groups.
      • Groups can be deleted (with or without children).
        • Currently the operators are “Delete Group” and “Delete Group with Children”.
    • Snap operators for edit mode (by Lukas)
    • Grease Pencil layers in dopesheet and timeline (by Pratik)
    • Brush radius unit option (by Falk)
      • During a meeting, a few issues came up:
        • The default radius unit when creating a new object is “View” → should be “Scene”
        • The radial control doesn’t seem to properly work anymore
        • Some update issue with the cursor when switching modes (e.g. from draw mode to sculpt mode)
    • Merge by distance Operator (by Chao Li)
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  • We had a short discussion about the names for the deletion operators for groups. It might be better if “Delete Group” deleted everything. “Delete Group (without Children)” could be named “Ungroup”, which is more common in other softwrare. This would ungroup the layers and delete the (now empty) group.
  • Antonio: On the topic of groups, it would be good to allow them to be used in the modifier filtering options.
    • Falk: Will create a task for this. This could potentially replace the “filter pass” option for layers since it seems like that’s what people currently use it for.
  • We had a discussion about this proposed PR: #121590 - Draw only on selected objects in curve draw mode. - blender - Blender Projects
    • Generally people seem to like the idea. Falk shared the link to the build so people can test it out. Please leave a comment here or below if you tested it and have feedback.
    • Samuel: A bit unrelated but a major issue with the current surface project is that it is view dependent.
    • Falk: Thinks that this should be fixable in GPv3.
  • There was a discussion about the topic of extensions and what will happen to the core Grease Pencil addons that currently ship with Blender (see Changes to Add-on and Themes Bundling (4.2 onwards)).
    • We generally agreed that the grease pencil addons don’t need to be core addons and that it’s fine for them to become extensions. Samuel already talked to Dalai about this and the addons are already in the repository on extensions.blender.org.
    • For users, this means that to enable e.g. the Grease Pencil: Tools addon, they first have to go to the Preferences then Extensions and then search for Grease Pencil: Tools. Click on Install and then enable the addon.
    • Apart from the Install step (which uses the internet to download the addon), everything stays pretty much the same.
    • Sietse: It would be welcome if there was a Grease Pencil category on extensions.blender.org.
      • Others agree.
      • EDIT: The category already existed, but it wasn’t used by any extension. This has been kindly updated by Dalai.
  • We had a discussion about #120558 - Anim: Theme entry for time visualization - blender - Blender Projects.
    • Seems verly logical to have a theme setting for the default onion skinning colors.
    • If the default annotation theme color is not used by anything else other than the onion skinning, it should be replaced.
  • Samuel: Could we turn on “auto-lock” for the layers on by default?
    • Andry: Is using “auto-lock” all the time, mostly for the eraser. It’s often the case that people want to just erase on the active layer.
    • Falk: I think the more general solution to the problem is to have a tool setting for “Active Layer/All Layers” that defaults to “Active Layer”. Especially for tools like the eraser.
  • Major remaining targets before GPv3 goes out of experimental (June):

Next Meeting

  • Time/Date: 2024-06-03T14:00:00Z
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