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 acessible in the latest alpha builds on builder.blender.org. Go to the Preferences (make sure Developer Extras is enabled in the Interface), then go to Experimental and tick Grease Pencil 3. Finally, restart Blender.
Here are a some things that are good to know:
Don’t use the “2D Animation” template for new files, as old Grease Pencil objects will not be automatically converted to the new Grease Pencil v3 type.
You can manually convert from the current Grease Pencil to the new Grease Pencil using the Object > Convert menu/operator.
Grease Pencil 3 uses a different render engine, so Grease Pencil 2 objects won’t render if you have the experimental option enabled.
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 !
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