Blender 2.8x is being dubbed “Workflow” by the Blender Foundation, and 2D animators are included in that. The 3D suite has included a tool, called “Grease Pencil”, for quite some time now, and its purpose was mostly to write notes. Since then, people have been using it for modeling (especially curves) and even 2D animation, which led the Blender Foundation to build it up in that direction.
This could potentially bring Blender more competitive with existing 2D animation software, like Animate CC (the Adobe re-brand of Flash Professional) and other tools. Being a 3D-centric application, it has a lot of interesting features to add to the mix, especially in terms of camera movement. (Animate CC just received a virtual camera in the most recent major version.) It will be interesting to see how comfortable they can make it for novices, because this is one of those areas that there’s not a lot of good free software for learners. (Digital Video and Studio Ghibli released OpenToonz, but it seems… more than a little difficult for newcomers from what I’ve seen.)
Blender 2.8 is supposedly aiming for a SIGGRAPH preview, which starts on July 30th.
So is this “Workflow” in the
So is this “Workflow” in the Blender interface going to change(or even easy for the user to customize) according to what type of work is being done for 2D and 3D workflows such as sculpting and mesh modeling as well. Also that Grease Pencil fills feature looks nice with those procedural textures composited in.
The biggest problem with Blender is with some of the documentation, namely the lack of up to date documentation on how to use some features, down to examples at the UI/Interface level. So I hope that they can work on that part before release. There will be the usual YouTube videos but many of the demos move too quickly and the persons doing the demos tend to be using the keyboard shortcut methods rather than the menus when explaining the interface. And some would rather have the menu options utilized when explaining the interface(For whatever Blender functionality) to any Blender Noobs, or even for experienced users(When explaining new features). Also it’s easy to see exactly what the person is doing with the interface in any demo video if the person doing the demo sticks to using the menu UI method as that can be readily seen in the videos, not so for keyboard short cuts.
I’d love to see in the Blender 3d interface an object that mimics an actual simulated projector that acts similar the Blender Camera Object(With camera minipulation options) with a 3d manipulator where I can shine the projector(It’s assigned texture/s to be projected) on the object 2D(Curve objects included), or 3d mesh or mesh plane objects and have that procedural texture projected on the object or whatever part of the object(vertices/polygons) that I have assigned to take on/show the Procedural(Generated)/Image/Animated texture.
It’s not so clear with the current Blender UI/Interface with that numerical texture coordinate system just what direction the procedural generated texture is coming from in relation to the object or if the user can let the object move in relation to the generated texture’s projection or have the projector/projection fixed/locked and following the object/assigned part of the object that takes on whatever procedural/other pojected texture is assigned to it.
The Blender Camera can have its movement changed(and/or Locked to an object) by automated dollying/Flying, path following and such in the 3d interface but textures(procedural or image textures) and other projections can only be changed by changing some coordinate numbers and it’s hard to visualize exactly what direction relative to an object/assigned mesh the projected/procedural texture originates. Blender needs to have a projector object similar to the camera object that can be used to project generated textures, Image textures, or even textures made from animations projected onto other objects in 3d or 2d in Blender’s UI and rendering subsystems.