Welcome back to my BLOG.

Last month, I wrapped up my music video “Coworker Crush” which I had been working on since about March of last year. I’ve sent it off to a few festivals so fingers crossed it gets into some cool ones. I plan to post it online probably during the summer or something maybe but if you really are dying to watch it, slide on into my DMs.

The best part about ending a project is starting the next one, and I’m really excited about my next film which is about Korean Buddhist nuns and mushrooms. I really want to push the style of this film, so I’ve been experimenting with Blender geometry nodes and grease pencil. In developing the story for this new film, I’ve been sketching out a lot of shots and visual ideas in my handy dandy notebook and I think grease pencil would be the best way to translate my hand-drawn style into a digital medium.

In the first part of the film, the nuns hunt for mushrooms in the mountains and I think my sketchy, almost frantic, drawings reflect the wild randomness of nature. Later on, when they’re in the temple, I’ll use geometry nodes to build and animate the beautifully geometric Buddhist architecture and design. I think the procedural mathiness of the geonodes will contrast really nicely with the wildness of the grease pencil, and I hope to bring the contrasting styles together with the nun characters.

I’m teaming up with fellow Korean-American filmmaker and member of New York Mycological Society Maya Han for this film, but I’ll be handling all the animation by myself. That means I can make the style and production as crazy as I want because I only have to worry about working with myself. However, that also means that I need to set up a manageable workflow for myself so I can finish this film in a reasonable amount of time.

I plan to build the nuns with grease pencil, as they are just as much a part of nature as the plants and mushrooms they forage, but also if I can rig a grease pencil object, I can combine both puppeting animation and frame-by-frame animation for a pretty fast and flexible workflow that will amount to a unique style. I’ve been practicing creating grease pencil rigs and want to share this process because I feel like it’s pretty reasonably simple and has a lot of potential for those looking to combine 2D and 3D techniques and learn more about Blender.

ENOUGH about my personal projects, let’s get into the TUTORIAL:

HOW TO BUILD AN EASY PEASY GREASY PENCIL RIG

What is Grease Pencil ?

Grease pencil is a really versatile tool and possibly one of the best things about Blender in MY OPINION. When I was first starting out in Blender in 2023, grease pencil was my entry point into learning the ins and outs of the software.

You can use it for 2D animation AND 3D animation, and the possibilities are pretty endless. 

1. Draw your Grease Pencil object

Open Blender and create a “2D Animation” file.
This will put you straight into the grease pencil workspace which is pretty nice and you can start drawing but

if this is your first grease pencil rodeo, here’s some things to know .

At the top of the window, you’ll see 3 drop down menus:

Stroke Placement and Drawing Plane: If you’re just 2D animating and not doing much in terms of the 3rd dimension, you can leave these at “Origin” and “Front” for the most part. If you are drawing on top of a 3D mesh or drawing in 3D space, you could make more use of the “3D Cursor” and “Surface” option.

Layers: The 2D animation file will set you up with two layers: lines and fills. You’ll also see later that the grease pencil materials are set up with lines and fills. Layers can come in handy but they can be a bit tricky to keep on top of if you’re just starting out. We don’t really need them in this tutorial so I’ll show you a nifty little shortcut later down the line.

On the top right corner, you’ll see some more drop down menus:

I like to open up the Viewport Overlays menu and turn on the 3D Cursor.

I also like to open up the menu right beside it that says “Draw Grease Pencil” and turn on the “Canvas”, set it to a ridiculous color and turn up the opacity so I can see it better. The canvas is the aforementioned Drawing Plane, and I find it helpful to see where I’m drawing and also because it will only show up when I have the grease pencil object selected.

A couple more things to add and turn on:

Tab menu to quickly switch between modes :

Edit -> Preferences -> Keymap -> Check “Tab for Pie Menu”

*Modes are an important part of Blender workflow. You’re automatically put into “Draw Mode” when you open up a new 2D animation file, but then you’ll need to go into “Object Mode” to select and edit other stuff like the lights, camera, and armature that you’ll be creating soon. I find the “tab for pie menu” the best way to switch between these modes. Hold tab down to open up the menu and see how each mode changes the interface. Some options only become available in certain modes.

Auto-Key Highlight :
good visual reminder that you’re auto-keying. You’ll notice that the default file setting will automatically turn on “Auto-key” which is great if you want to jump right into the 2D frame by frame type animation, but we’re just building a rig for our grease pencil object so just go ahead and turn Auto-Key off for now by hitting the big red circle next to the sideways triangles and diamonds at the bottom of your window

Okay you’re ready to draw your guy.
Here’s the guy that I drew. I like to use the “Ink Pen Rough” brush.

Now, you can either hand draw a color fill (remember to switch between line and fill layers as well) OR you can check the “fill box” in the “Solid Stroke” material and set it to a ridiculous green color (or whatever color you like).
It may or may not be helpful for you to use the layers depending on the project, for this simple tutorial, it’s not super necessary so we’ll just go with this shortcut for now but I do think layers are a useful aspect of the grease pencil tool.

If your guy isn’t looking exactly right, you can edit your drawing in “Edit Mode” and “Sculpt Mode” which is pretty neat. If you switch to “Sculpt Mode” and start trying to sculpt and nothing is apparently happening, it’s probably because your tool is set to “smooth”.

Hit “F” to adjust your brush size.

Hold “Shift” to do extra smoothing (make brush go slower for more precise lineart)

Hold “Ctrl” on the keyboard to erase. Although, the default eraser for that hotkey is the “Eraser Soft” and I actually prefer the “Eraser Hard” so I’ll usually just select it from the brush menu instead of using the hotkey.

In Blender, and in art in general, there are many ways to do the same thing. Oftentimes we may become obsessed with trying to find the “correct” way to make something. However, although there may be more efficient and effective techniques, I’m not very convinced there is a very right or wrong way to go about making art.

2. Create an Armature

We want to make a little skeleton for our guy. Your guy’s skeleton may look different depending on what you draw and also how you want him to move but here’s how I made mine:

Switch into “Object Mode”.

Let’s change the origin point to where this guy’s feet would be touching the floor.
Shift + right click to set the 3D cursor at the desired location
Right click the object -> Set Origin -> Origin to 3D Cursor

Shift + A -> Add Armature
With the new armature selected, switch to “Edit Mode”
Starting with this first bone that was creating, I scaled it down (hit “S” on keyboard to scale, “G” to move) and placed the bottom of the bottom circle at the bottom of his bod and the top at where his neck ought to be (he doesn’t have a gender but I’m going to use he/him pronouns cause I don’t think he’ll mind).
This is the start of his “spine”, we got one bone for his little bod, but I need to make a couple bones for his big ahh head that are connected to his bod bone.

So I clicked on the top circle of his bod bone -> “E” on keyboard to extend bone and “Z” to lock on the Z axis.

It’ll be helpful to name and see the bone names when we get into weight painting so imma go ahead and turn on the bone names by going to the “Data” tab (the dancing green guy) -> Viewport Display -> check “Names”.
You can edit the names by going to the Outliner and double clicking the thing you want to rename.

Okay great, let’s give him some ear bones, arms, and legs.
Because these bones are separate from the bod, I hit “Shift+A” to add a completely new bone (but make sure you’re still in edit mode otherwise it would create a new armature and we don’t want that) “Shift+D” is also a useful hotkey to duplicate an object.

I’ve got one more thing to do which is parent all these separate bones that I just made to the bod.

I want the ears to follow the head so I select both ear bones and then the head_top bone last -> Ctrl+P -> Parent (keep offset)

Similarly, I want the arms and legs to follow the bod so I select all the arms and legs bones and the bod bone last Ctrl+P -> Parent (keep offset)

You should notice a dotted line connecting the child and parent bones. You can also see the parent relationship in the outliner as well: the children bone will be under the parent bone.

Now we are ready to “skin” the grease pencil object to the armature.
In “Object Mode” select the grease pencil guy and then the armature -> Ctrl+P -> Set Parent to Armature Deform with Empty Groups.
Check your outliner to make sure that your grease pencil object (I renamed mine “greasyguy” is parented under the Armature. You’ll also notice a few more symbols pop up next to the name.

4. Weight paint

If you move around your armature, you may notice that your grease pencil object doesn’t move at all with it. That’s because we must weight paint our greasyguy to assign which parts of the greasyguy need to move with which bones.
Remember when we parented greasyguy to the armature with empty groups? The groups in question are “vertex groups” and they’re each associated with a different bone.

In “Object Mode” select your greasyguy, select the “Data” tab in the properties area, and scroll down till you see “Vertex Groups”.
You should see all the bone names.

This process is probably the most tedious part, but I kinda enjoy it because I have a SICK and TWISTED mind.

First select a bone, probably would be easiest to start with the first one.

Switch into “Weight Paint” mode, and paint on which parts of the greasyguy you want to be affected by the selected bone.

It will look like you’re painting a heat map, with red being the most affected and blue/black being the least.

Adjust the brush size by hitting “F” and remove weight by holding down “ctrl”.

There are also more options to adjust the brush at the top of the window

Now that you’ve weight painted your first bone, go ahead and weight paint the others.

During the weight paint process, I find it helpful to test out the armature by going to “Object Mode”-> select armature-> “Pose Mode” and moving around the bones.

In this process of switching in between weight painting and testing out the poses, I realized I actually DON’T want the head to be connected to the bod.

I went back into the Armature -> “Edit Mode” -> selected head_bottom + head_top -> “Y” to separate -> head_bottom + head_top + bod -> “Ctrl+P” Make parent (keep Offset)

I also cleared the parenting between the legs and the bod so I could make the legs stretchy. I did so by going back into the Armature -> “Edit Mode” -> select legs -> Right click -> Parent -> Clear

Maybe I should’ve rewritten the whole tutorial but I 1) don’t really care enough to 2) want to show that you can always go back and change things if you want to … unlike life.

6.Animate

Okay! You’re ready to start animatin’ now.

Turn on Autokey

In “Pose Mode” select the bone and move it to the desired position.

In the dope sheet, change “Grease Pencil” to “Dope Sheet” and move the time marker (thicc blue line) to another frame

Move the bone to the next desired position.

Keep goin till it’s moving around just how you want idk i’m not going to go over the 12 principles of animation here just go crazyyyyy

I split the head_top from head_bottom to make him even STRETCHIER and also adjusted the weight painting so that the face would get a bit stretchy as well. I also turned off the bone names cause they got distracting and I don’t need them anymore !
Always get rid of things you don’t need.

7. Render

In the properties window, make sure “Combined” and “Depth” are checked.

In the Output tab, you can adjust the dimensions and file output.

Hit “Ctrl+F12” to render the animation (hit “F12” if you just want a single frame)

Conclusion

Blender is a really wonderful, expansive, and extensive program that can be used to create so many things and this tutorial really only barely tickles the surface.

In addition to developing this technique to use in my film, I want to teach a workshop based on this technique. This documentation is a good way for me to write out my process and think about how I want to present the material to students who may be using Blender for the first time.

I hope this tutorial helped you, or sorry if it didn’t. Let me know either way.