Blender 4.3 lets you use Geometry Nodes with Grease Pencil

A recording of a livestream from Blender Studio showing the creation of the splash screen artwork for Blender 4.3 using the new Grease Pencil 3 toolset.

The Blender Foundation has released the public beta of Blender 4.3, the new version of the open-source 3D software for VFX, animation, game development and visualization.

We’ll be posting our usual round-up of the key features in Blender 4.3 on its final release next month, but one is significant enough that it warranted a story in its own right: Grease Pencil 3.

The long-awaited update is intended to future-proof Blender’s storyboarding and 2D animation toolset, laying the foundation for “the next 10+ years” of use in production.

It improves performance, introduces new tools – and even makes it possible to control Grease Pencil using Blender’s Geometry Nodes system.

Future-proofing Grease Pencil for the next decade
Originally due in Blender 4.0 last year, Grease Pencil 3 is a “complete rewrite” of the toolset, with the aim of removing structural limitations and improving performance on large projects.

The original post on the Blender Developer blog described it as laying “a solid foundation for the next 10+ years”.

If you’re interested in the technical details, the video above – a recording of a session from last year’s Blender Conference – takes a deep dive into the changes under the hood.

New features in Grease Pencil 3: Layer Groups, Fill Gradient, and updated drawing tools
Although the focus of the initial release is simply to get the updated toolset to feature parity with Blender 4.2, there are a number of new features, some of them quite significant.

They include color-codable Layer Groups, making it easier to manage large projects.

A new Fill Gradient tool makes it possible to fill areas with color gradients by dragging from a start to an end point on the gradient, in the same way as in most image-editing apps.

And there are updates to the drawing tools, including active smoothing for freehand strokes.

A quick test from Grease Pencil 3.0 to Claymation on the fly using only Geometry Nodes! Using a reference from the cool "Magical Cat"#Blender #GreasePencil #Claymation #GeometryNodes pic.twitter.com/m3p8BqVndl

— Daniel Martínez Lara 🔶 (@_pepeland_) September 23, 2024

Claymation-style animation created in Blender using the Grease Pencil toolset and Geometry Nodes, based on reference from Threadwood‘s animated series Magical Cat.

Edit Grease Pencil objects with Geometry Nodes
However, perhaps the most significant change for artists is that Grease Pencil is now compatible with Geometry Nodes, Blender’s procedural modeling, scene layout and simulation system.

That makes it possible to modify Grease Pencil objects with Geometry Nodes – “many” of the existing nodes that work with curves have been updated to work with Grease Pencil data.

The conversion of Grease Pencil objects to editable curves isn’t fully lossless, but it supports all of the “general attributes and materials” – and it opens up interesting new workflows.

You can get a sense of the possibilities from the tech test above, created by animator and Grease Pencil team member Daniel Martínez Lara, which shows a 2D animation being converted to editable claymation-style 3D animation, using only Geometry Nodes.

Check out the new features and report bugs ahead of the public release
The changes aren’t backwards-compatible – among other things, Grease Pencil’s Python API has been rewritten – and a few features have been deprecated, including drawing guides.

As a beta release, Blender 4.3 is now feature-locked, but Grease Pencil is one of the key toolsets that the Blender Foundation has specifically asked users to bugtest.

The process should help to identify – and hopefully fix – major issues ahead of the final release.

You can do so by downloading the current beta and submitting feedback in this devtalk thread.

System requirements and release date
Grease Pencil 3 is available in beta builds of Blender 4.3. The stable release is due in November 2024. Blender is compatible with Windows 8.1+, macOS 11.2+ and glibc 2.28+ Linux.

Read more about Grease Pencil 3 in the Blender 4.3 release notes
(Still a work in progress at the time of writing)

Download the current beta build of Blender 4.3

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