v0.11.0

This release does not have new features. The main purpose is to add support for Blender 4.3 and Grease Pencil 3.0 (GPv3).

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• Supported Blender versions:
  • Blender 3.3 ~ 4.3
• Most existing features work in a consistent way for GPv2 (Blender 4.2 and earlier) and GPv3 (Blender 4.3). However, there are also some limitations found:
  • https://chsh2.github.io/nijigp/docs/tips/limitations/#grease-pencil-30
• Regardless the add-on, there are many breaking changes in Blender 4.3. Please refer to the official notes:
  • https://developer.blender.org/docs/release_notes/4.3/grease_pencil/

v0.10.2

New Features:

• Interactive Fill: Add mouse shortcuts and touchscreen buttons to confirm or cancel, so that it is no longer necessary to use the keyboard.
• Boolean Eraser:
  • Improve the thickness calculation for Taper mode.
  • A new masking option to make the tool affect only selected strokes.
• Hatch Fill: Add a new style for generating doodle lines.

Bug Fixing:

• Boolean Eraser: Fix the issue that the eraser does not work when the overlapping area with the other stroke is small.

v0.10.1

Bug Fixing:

• Boolean Eraser tool and Interactive Fill tool
  • Drawing at wrong positions when the active object has a non-zero transform.
  • Depth calculation error when not drawing from a perpendicular view plane.
• Line Fit
  • Output strokes are not selected correctly after the operation.

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Please refer to the v0.10.0 release for the full change log and the offline documentation.

v0.10.0

NijiGPen is compatible with Blender 4.2 as a legacy add-on. I have not determined whether to use the new extension platform. Some concerns are posted at #42.

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Recently, this project received several useful suggestions from the issue/discussion board and Twitter, which may help to utilize the existing algorithms in a more convenient way. Thank you all for the feedback.

New Features:

• Boolean:
  • A workspace tool Boolean Eraser(Manual) that allows users to wipe areas with mouse/stylus. (#35)
  • A new operation Fracture(Manual) to break overlapping shapes into smaller parts. (#41)
• Sketch Cleanup:
  • Line fitting and pinching operators now support the multiframe mode (Manual).
    • A new option of line fitting ensures that the output stroke of multiple frames can be smoothly interpolated.
  • Fitting algorithms are improved for smoothing, resampling and strength/pressure calculation.
• Import:
  • For assets that can be either imported or pasted (SVG and color codes), their import and paste operators now have the same options to reduce confusion.
  • SVG import supports appending multiple files to the current object (Manual), either as different layers or as an animation sequence. (#38)
  • Add a shortcut for image vectorization (Manual) to render and convert the current 3D scene to Grease Pencil color fills. (#36, #40)

Bug Fixing:

• Smart Fill interactive tool: an issue of calculating fill colors in the wrong color space.
• Sketch Cleanup: an issue of failing to clear input strokes when not all points are selected.
• Image Vectorization: wrong results from the option Fit to Camera when the camera moves.
• An issue where add-on crashes when there are empty material slots in the active object.

v0.9.0

This release aims at extending the existing operators for a more flexible usage. It also supports Blender 4.1 which has some issues with previous add-on versions.

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New Features:

• Fill Tool (Manual): An alternative Draw mode tool similar to the native fill tool, but using Smart Fill as the backend.
• Polygon Shading (Manual): Generate shadows and lights as editable strokes given a light in the 3D scene. It has a similar visual effect as the Mesh Generation operator, but the whole process is finished within Grease Pencil.
• A new option of Image Vectorization: To automatically scale the converted image to the active camera region. #36 discusses some potential use cases.

Compatibility:

• Blender 4.1 is supported now. The following compatibility issues have been fixed in this release:
  • Installing triangle package with Apple Silicon. (Python packages may need to be installed again, since Blender 4.1 upgrades Python from 3.10 to 3.11.)
  • Errors during mesh generation.

Bug Fixing:

• Smart Fill
  • An issue of slow response in some cases.
  • An issue of errors when the line art layer contains 0-point strokes.
• An issue that multi-frame operations sometimes generate wrong results in the first frame.

Others:

• The manual now has offline files for downloads. EPUB and PDF formats are available.
• Some algorithm descriptions and references are added to the manual.

v0.8.1

New Features:

• Import/export:
  • Brush Import: .sut brushes exported by Clip Studio Paint are tentatively supported now.
  • PSD Render: Positive layer masks can now be baked into the exported file. (However, negative masks are not supported and will be ignored.)
• Color utilities:
  • All operators with the color blending option now support new modes: Overlay, Screen and Soft Light.
  • Recolor Strokes: a new option to use random colors from the selected palette.
• UI improvements:
  • When using the 2D Offset and 2D Sweep tools in the viewport, the user can now click on a stroke to change the selection. (Only dragging will activate the tool.)

Bug Fixing:

• An alternative source is added to enable users with Apple Silicon to install the triangle Python package. However, I cannot fully test it myself. If you encounter any problems, please report in related issues #34 #21 or #18.

v0.8.0

Note:
This add-on is compatible with Blender 4.0. Please submit GitHub issues if there are any compatibility problems found.

In addition, it is possible to have more compatibility issues in the future Blender 4.x releases, since the whole Grease Pencil module is being rewritten. I am paying close attention to the refactoring process.

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This version 0.8 focuses on stylized art, released with a new fill operator, new supported brush/palette formats and improvements on existing functions.

New Features:

• Polygon operations:
  • Hatch fill (Manual): a new operator to generate doodle/hatch patterns inside a stroke polygon.
  • Offset/sweep: the color tint option can now specify the color blend mode. It can also be used as a standalone operator now.
• Asset import:
  • Brush import: third-party Procreate brushes are now supported.
  • Swatch import (Manual): a new operator to import swatch/palette data from other software to Blender. Supported formats are .aco and .swatches.
    • Recolor Strokes: a new operator to quickly replace the vertex colors of selected stroke points to new colors in a given palette.
• Image vectorization: some improvements are made regarding the quality of output paths.
• Rearrange panel/option layout for several operators.

Bug Fixing:

• Mesh generation: an issue that an empty frame will terminate the operation and stop all following frames from being processed.
• Line taper: an issue that wrong strength/pressure values are set to the first/last points of each input stroke.
• Brush import: an issue that sometimes a newly generated material is not attached to the brush.
• Button of Arranging Strokes: an issue that hint texts are not displayed in the viewport in Blender 4.0.

v0.7.1

New Features:

• New options for rigging operators:
  • Transfer Weights from Meshes: An option to generate temporary meshes specifically for the rigging purpose, using the Smart Fill and taking bones as the hint strokes.
  • Generate Pins from Hints: The user can draw lassos as hint strokes to precisely mark the points which should be assigned weights. There are also some other new options available, explained in the manual.

Bug Fixes:

• Normal Interpolation: The advanced solver does not work for concave surfaces due to a wrong boundary setting.

Other Changes:

• Add popup confirmation windows for some time-consuming operators to avoid unnecessary calculations.

v0.7.0

I am creating a new documentation site at https://chsh2.github.io/nijigp/. Previous README introductions and wiki pages have been migrated to the new site, and I will be updating it with more information in the future.

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New Features:

• Polygon: A new operator "Sweep" is available both in the Edit mode panel and as a workspace tool.
• Rig: A new panel in the Weight Paint mode, providing the following functions assisting rigging and animations:
  • Transfer bone weights from 3D meshes to Grease Pencil strokes.
  • Convert hand-drawn hint strokes to bones and weights.
  • Bake bone animations to keyframes.
• Preferences Panel: The dependency manager is redesigned with the following new features:
  • Capture and display command line logs during the installation process.
  • Users now can manually assign a directory outside the Blender program to load Python packages. Please see details at the new documentation.

Bug Fixes:

• Line Fit: The issue that vertex colors set to the output strokes can be wrong.
• Depth calculation error of boolean operations and SVG paste.
• Some regression issues of the Boolean operator:
  • Using point radius in the Draw mode no longer works in v0.6.
  • Multi-frame operation may show error messages even if it succeeded.

Other Changes:

• Renaming the operator "Select Similar" to "Cluster Select", because the official Grease Pencil 3.0 plan will introduce operators with similar names.

v0.6.0

New Features:

• The default option of the 2D working plane is changed to "Auto", allowing operators to be performed in any 2D plane without switching the mode manually.
  • Please notice that the operators themselves are still based on 2D algorithms. Therefore, please avoid selecting strokes belonging to different 2D planes as the input of a single operation, which may lead to inaccurate results.
• Normal Interpolation: The operator is largely modified with the following new options added. Please refer to the attached video for a quick demo.
  • Convert Normal to Depth: A new method to generate 3D meshes (the option "advanced solver") by using the SciPy's L-BFGS-B optimizer.
  • Multi-color Mesh: An option to use line colors for generated mesh. Gradient colors can be achieved in this way.
  • Assign Open Areas: An option to use a vertex group to indicate open areas of the input strokes.
  • Stop-motion Animation: A geometry node group to automatically show/hide the generated mesh according to the Grease Pencil keyframes.

Bug Fixes:

• Several issues during the transformation between 3D and 2D spaces.

v06demo.mp4