2025-02-17 Grease Pencil Module Meeting

Meetings
1

Date/Time: 2025-02-17T15:00:00Z
Link: https://meet.google.com/xxo-tyin-rem

Attendees:

  • Antonio Vazquez (Developer)
  • Casey Bianco-Davis (Developer)
  • Daniel Martinez Lara (Grease Pencil team)
  • Falk David (Blender)
  • Friedrich Schäper (Grease Pencil User, Studio Huckepack)
  • Samuel Bernou (Python Dev, ADV studio)

Topics

  • General updates
  • Discussions

Meeting Notes

  • General updates:
    • Blender 4.4 is in Beta. Please test it out, and if you find issues, please report them. Thank you!
    • Falk: Will be focusing on the “VSE Story project” (design task) the next week or two. Will still be available for review/questions etc.
  • Development updates:
    • Most of the work was going into fixing high severity issues for 4.4.
    • 24 bug fixes committed since last meeting.
    • Hidden layers are no longer part of evaluated data.
    • New features for 4.5 LTS:
      • Options in the layers “Extras” menu to mask layer above or below the active layer (see release notes for more details)
      • Python API: Layers and layer groups are now part of the same base class GreasePencilTreeNode and share common properties. The tree node has two new properties next_node and prev_node to access nodes above and below (at the same level).
Show all commits
  • Discussion: Pinned materials in brush assets are currently broken (see #131186 and #134268)
    • Two proposed solutions:
      1. Lookup for local material with same name, add local copy of brush material if none found. Problem: If there is an existing material with the same name as the pinned material in the brush asset, the wrong material will get used.
      2. “Append & reuse” approach. Problem: Will likely result in duplicate materials.
    • Casey: Can see that users often use pinned materials with generic names like “Material”, so it seems better to end up with duplicate materials.
    • Antonio: If embedded assets are expected to come this year, it seems better to have duplicate materials rather than the wrong material for a brush asset.
  • Falk: Worked on a proposal on how to get the “Bake Mesh Animation” functionality back.
  • Daniel: Hidden layers are no longer part of evaluated data, but what about hidden materials?
    • Falk: We could potentially remove strokes with a hidden material in the evaluation step. Seems reasonable.
  • Daniel: What’s the process for getting new default brushes into Blender?
  • Friedrich: Is there a chance we can get materials with image sequence to pull the textures from?
    • Daniel: Thinks that a lot of effects can be done with Geometry Nodes in the future.
    • Falk: Technically this could be implemented into Grease Pencil materials, but it’s unclear whether or not these will stay. There are some ideas to revamp the rendering side of Grease Pencil and integrate it more into EEVEE.
  • Casey: There’s an issue with the way the current hole design works. Because a hole in a shape will cut away into anything else in that shape, you can’t have islands inside a hole as part of the same shape.
    • Casey: One idea could be to make it so that holes only cut into strokes that come after it.
    • Falk: Will have to think more about this. Maybe this is just a limitation we have to accept. Will get back to Casey.
  • Friedrich: The lasso erase seems to do what the trim tool does, but not erase individual points.
    • Falk: Will check if the lasso erase is doing what it is supposed to do.
    • EDIT: Seems like there is a Ctrl+LMB shortcut that doesn’t do the same as CTRL+Alt+LMB (which is the lasso eraser). Might be a bug in the keymap.
  • Friedrich: Missing the boundary strokes to easily create closed areas.
    • Falk: Was removed in 4.3 because it was too tricky to port this. Will look into finding a solution to implement this in GPv3.

Next Meeting

  • Time/Date: 2025-03-03T15:00:00Z
4 Likes