How to create easy GREASE PENCIL ANIMATION for NON ANIMATORS in [Blender 2.8]

Hi, I'm Luciano and welcome to the Adventures of Logical Man. Today I'm going to show you a super quick video on how to create animation for your explainer videos like this one. Let's get on it! First of all, we're going to start with a new Blender scene, create 2D animation. You're going to pick a brush, like the pencil or like the pen, which I prefer, and you're going to draw a face. While holding Shift, your stroke gets much more smooth. We make a happy face. We're going to go to the Modifiers tab, add a Noise Modifier. The Noise Modifier is going to modify the properties of the drawing that we have. In this case, it's modifying the position a little bit. Also, by default, it modifies it across the entire stroke and not in parts of it. So, we're going to lower the amount of position and we're going to also change the steps to 2. So, that means it will do it every 2 frames. You see, it's much faster. Then, we're going to add a little bit more change on the strength. As you can see now, it's not completely black, it's just black and grey and you'll see a little bit of variance in the gradients of grey. We're going to do thickness as well, which is going to make thicker or thinner my stroke. And now, if we go into the Noise Scale, this is going to apply it to parts of the stroke, not the entire stroke. So, it's going to look a little bit more like this. Right? So, now we can actually lower a little bit the position so it's not so squiggly. A little bit less strength, maybe more actually. Not so much thickness. Maybe more noise. Actually, less noise, I think, is better. There we go. That's much nicer. It reminds me of those old cartoons, like hand-drawn old cartoons. 2 or 3 steps, I think it's the better option than 4. There we go. So, we got our little cartoon alive when he's static. So, let's make it be hand-drawn on screen. To do that, we're going to close this little modifier, which is collapsing it there. And then add another modifier called Build. The Build modifier will draw the object by default. This is what it looks like. Cool. That could be enough. I'm just going to make sure the length is a little bit shorter. So, I want to do 2 seconds, which is 48 frames. Good. There's one thing that bothers me, though. That the eyes, they get drawn really quickly. So, I'm going to go into edit mode by holding on this panel, and then edit mode. And I'm going to change over here to the top to select vertices. So, you can see that now, if I select these guys, they have these little points that are the vertices. Now, I'm going to go to Stroke, Simplify, and Sample them. That made less, but they're more evenly spread out. And I'm just going to make sure that there's a little bit more to play with. Now, I'm going to go back to the animation, and I'm going to play it again. And now it took a little bit more time, and just enough for it to read better. Very cool. So, we want to use this in our video. For this, we're going to think of 2 things. First one, is we probably need to make the rest of it transparent. To make this transparent, we're going to go to the Render Properties, Film, and then click on Transparent. Now, if we toggle Rendered Mode, you see that the rest of it is checkerboard. So, we can render it transparent. So, now that it draws, we're just going to render this out so we can put it in our video. I'm going to make sure that the render settings are to what I need. In my case, I think this is a little bit of overkill. I just want to keep the basic render settings, turn it down to 50%. Then, I'm going to choose an output folder. I'm going to call this Smiley. I'm going to select FFmpeg Video, which is going to make a little video clip. And under Encoding, I'm just going to take QuickTime, and then QuickTime Animation, which supports transparency. Make sure you don't forget to hit this little button, RGBA, so the video actually has the transparency. Now, we're just ready to render. I'm just going to go to Render, Render Animation. I forgot to change the length of the timeline. So, by default, it's going to render 250 frames. But at least that gives me the introduction, which is the drawing. And then, a lot of time of looping animation that I can keep in frame if I need to. And because it doesn't take really too long to render, it should be fine. So, now that it's done, I'm going to go to Render, View Animation. We'll get a player. The purple is supposed to be transparent. So, there we go. I hope you liked this video. If you want to see more videos like this, let me know in the comments below. Check out the description, where you can find a tablet like the one that I'm using, and cool t-shirts like the one I'm wearing today. Remember to like and subscribe, and see you next time.