The Grease Pencil 3 project aims at eventually replacing the current Grease Pencil. This thread is meant for people give feedback on the current state, report issues, or help document changes.
How to use Grease Pencil 3
Grease Pencil 3 is accessible in the latest Blender 4.3 alpha builds on builder.blender.org. When opening a file created before Blender 4.3, all the Grease Pencil objects are automatically converted.
Happy testing!
Reporting issues / changes
If you find an issue, please check the bugs on the workboard first, to see if it is already being tracked. If it is not, you can report it here.
If you find that there is a different behavior between Grease Pencil 3, then it might either be a bug or an intentional change. We’re working on listing all the changes between Grease Pencil 3 and Grease Pencil 2 here. If the changes is not on that list yet, report it here, and we’ll add it.
Disclaimer
We’re mostly aiming at feature parity with the current Grease Pencil. Please do not use this thread for feature requests. Thank you!
I just did a quick test on this build (b24610053fbc) and I can only draw in the XZ (Front View) plane, is that by design or drawing in 3D is not yet done?
It looks like changing a bottom layer opacity also affects all the stacked layers. I set the bottom layer to %20 the top layer to %100. I see the stroke has like %20 even when I am painting in the top layer.
Thanks. What is the rough timeline for the sculpt mode integration?
The drawing feels really nice and snappy. That part of the experience definitely feels much nicer compared to the original GP, the current version feels a bit laggy when used on a Cintiq like device.
On Friday, the last modifier was merged. This means we reached data parity!
What do I mean by data parity?
When converting a GPv2 object to a GPv3 object, we’re now covering all the Grease Pencil data (fingers crossed). So layers, keyframes, modifiers, layer adjustments, animation data and more. In theory, files that contain GPv2 objects should open and render the same with GPv3 (*). See the steps below on how you can help us test this.
What is expected to (not) work?
GPv3 is not feature complete. There are many things that are still missing. So while we expect GPv3 to look the same in the viewport (*), we don’t expect it to behave the same as GPv2 (yet).
(*) There are some expected differences like the noise modifier not producing the same visual results. In any case, it doesn’t hurt to report differences when you find one.
How can I help testing?
You can help testing by opening files that use Grease Pencil (v2). Make sure to create backups of the files you’d like to try out. Here’s how to do it:
Open Blender, then go to Edit > Preferences. In the Interface tab, enable Developer Extras. This will make the Experimental tab show up. In the Experimental tab, enable Grease Pencil 3.0 and Grease Pencil 3.0 Automatic Conversion.
Open a file that uses Grease Pencil (v2). This will now automatically convert all the Grease Pencil objects to the new GPv3 object type. Disclaimer: Don’t save and overwrite the file unless you have a backup!
When you encounter an issue like a crash, the render looking different/odd, or some other error when converting, please report them here. Thank you !
Today, the experimental options for GPv3 have been removed and it’s now the default Grease Pencil in Blender 4.3 Alpha.
Conversion & Compatibility
When you load a file that was created prior to 4.3, all the GPv2 objects will be converted to GPv3. There is no backwards compatibility between GPv3 and GPv2, e.g. opening a file in 4.2 that was saved in 4.3 might not work correctly.
Missing Features
While a majority of features are already working, we will finish feature parity during bcon1 of 4.3 (until August 28th). Here is an overview of some of the things that are missing:
Hi,
first thank you for your amazing job on Blender, the (not so) new UI design makes it a super great app to use.
I’m the Product Designer behind Tayasui Sketches, a popular drawing app on iOS, Android, and Mac. It’s known for being super easy to use and for some great brushes, especially the watercolors.
Wanting to make some research on customizing brushes for a project of a vector app, I used Blender as a testbed for my research, you can see the end result here.
Along the way, I nonetheless encountered some oddities in the Dot / Square Material that prevented me from reach my goals. Here is what I found and some changes that I believe could render possible the creation of amazing brushes in Blender. I also encountered a few bugs that I listed on another page.
I hope this helps you. I have plenty more feedback and input to offer, but I wanted to first focus on these brushes and see if you think my expertise interests you.
!
