Modifiers in Grease Pencil 2.8

Blender is a great tool for 3D artists, but it is also capable of supporting creation of 2d animations with grease pencil tool. Primarily grease pencil was meant as a annotation tool, now it can be used to create hand drawn splines, it also is used by many Blender subsystems and addons, giving more artistic approach in modeling and animation. (for example: grease pencil is used by Archipack add-on for Blender to create walls from strokes). In Blender 2.79, which is just around the corner, we will have interpolation for grease pencil strokes, which means easy keyframing between grease pencil frames.

But the best is yet to come: developer Antonio Vazquez is currently working on grease pencil presets and using modifiers to alter shapes and style of drawings. You will be able to add noise modifier that will affect thickness of a stroke, use lattice to deform shapes, etc.

Grease pencil is obviously useful for animators, but can it be useful for arch-viz artists? Why not! If you make some animated visualization, grease pencil can be used to add 2d "hand-written" annotations and pictures (or simple drawn animations) that are precisely placed in 3d space and match the content and camera moves.

Blender 2.80 is currently in development. New Grease Pencil tools are not available in stable releases yet (or even main daily builds of Blender 2.80). Developer is focusing now on squashing as many bugs as possible before the merge with the main Blender 2.8. This development is currently happening on the ‘greasepencil-object’ branch. Hopefully it will appear in daily builds soon.