Beginner grease pencil tutorial: 3D bonsai painting (Blender 2.9)
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TIMESTAMPS
0:00 intro
2:08 help with LAG
3:10 make your first stroke!
3:27 Section 0. Blender’s interface
7:21 Section 1. Convert grease pencil to mesh
12:38 Section 2. Convert mesh to grease pencil
15:04 Section 3. Stroke placement: Stroke
24:27 Section 4. Stroke placement: Origin
29:49 Section 5. Stroke placement: 3D cursor
37:06 Section 6. Stroke placement: Surface
45:00 Section 7. Finalizing
49:13 Section 8. Exporting
55:31 final touches
Detailed breakdown of the tutorial:
Section 0. Blender’s interface
TOPICS COVERED
3D viewport
Timeline (auto-keying)
Scene collection
Properties (active tool)
How to move around in 3D space
Section 1. Convert grease pencil to mesh
TOPICS COVERED
Grease pencil layers (rename, remove a layer)
About the different modes (Object, Draw, Edit)
Mesh modifiers (skin modifier)
Solid view mode, X ray mode
Edit Mode (clean up vertices, move and resize vertices, proportional editing)
Section 2. Convert mesh to grease pencil
TOPICS COVERED
Grease pencil materials (the different types, change types, change colours)
Section 3. Stroke placement: Stroke
Drawing plane: View
TOPICS COVERED
Grease pencil materials (change colour using the eyedropper)
Layers (add a new layer, autolock inactive layers)
Stroke depth other (3D location)
Brushes (change brush, toggle pen pressure, change radius)
Sculpt mode (grab/pull tools)
Edit mode (lasso select, move and rotate selection, delete strokes)
Grease pencil modifiers (Tint, influence)
Section 4. Stroke placement: Origin
Drawing plane: Front
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Origin (how to transform and reset it)
3D cursor (make it visible)
World origin
Vertex paint (changing colours, add and remove colours from the palette)
Brush (change opacity)
Section 5. Stroke placement: 3D cursor
Drawing plane: Side, Top, Cursor, View
TOPICS COVERED
3D cursor (how to place it)
Vertex paint (hue randomization)
Section 6. Stroke placement: Surface
Drawing plane: view
TOPICS COVERED
Add a new object (sphere, grease pencil blank)
How to Move, scale and rotate along specific axes
3D cursor (move to world origin)
Layers (reorder, copy to another object, mask)
Stroke depth order (2D layers)
Section 7. Finalizing
TOPICS COVERED
Grease pencil modifiers (thickness, tint: gradient, noise, influence (pass index, reverse), share modifiers between objects)
Section 8. Exporting
TOPICS COVERED
Create a seamless turnaround animation
View Lock (camera to view)
Empty (plain axes)
Parenting (camera to empty, grease pencil layer)
Timeline (grease pencil keyframes, move keyframes, dopesheet)
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Equipment I use…
TO DRAW
Wacom cintiq (I was VERY lucky to buy one second hand!)
Wacom intuos pro medium
Blender
TO MAKE VIDEOS
OBS for screen recording
My webcam to film my face
Zoom H1 Handy recorder for audio
HitFilm Express (free version) to edit
iPad and procreate for the thumbnails