HERO – Blender Grease Pencil Showcase
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN points to it as an impressive demo of Blender's open-source 2D/3D hybrid animation and as a comparison for other 2D animation tools.
What it is
HERO is a short animated film made entirely in Blender to showcase the Grease Pencil 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. It mixes hand-drawn 2D with a full 3D pipeline.
Recommended by 2 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2018 to 2021.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec microcolonel · 2019-08 · on “Japanese anime studio Khara moving to Blender”
2.8 already has the vastly more useful version of grease pencil, and the demo the foundation commissioned was amazing. I love how seamlessly they mix the 3D in with the direct illustration. It shows what skilled animators can do with a tool like Blender. [this video]
Recommends avhon1 · 2021-07 · on “Blender and the Rabbids”
Blender can do that, too, with the "Grease Pencil". [LINK] Here's a short film produced as a grease pencil showcase. At the end, it shows what working with it looks like. [this video]
Cites greenknight · 2018-05 · on “Real-Time Ray Tracing Demo”
> It represents a typical scene in the upcoming Gooseberry open-source movie project Gooseberry has been released -- [LINK] ... they have done multiple movies since then including agent 327 [LINK] and Hero -- [this video] GPU acceleration really helps cycles (Blender's open source raytracing engine)... however, the gooseberry benchmark uses up too much ram to make this render purely off the GPU.
Cites avhon1 · 2019-07 · on “Epic Games Supports Blender Foundation with $1.2M”
> What is the grease pencil? The grease pencil is Blender's 2D drawing system. Initially, it's purpose was to allow artists to sketch scenes out onscreen, in much the same way that CGI artists a few decades ago used literal grease pencils [1] to draw on their glass computer monitors. Nowadays, the grease pencil is a full 2D art system, allowing for hand-drawn 2D art to coexist with 3D assets or tracked with camera footage. The Blender Foundation made a short film called "Hero" [2] to show it off. [1] [LINK] [2] [this video] > How do I select all (UV) verticies? On the bottom edge of the UV editor window is a menu bar. From the left, the menus are editor type (shown as an icon), "View", "Select",
Cites Mathnerd314 · 2020-08 · on “Synfig Studio – FOSS industrial-strength 2D film-quality animation software”
There are more recent videos: [LINK] Here is "Hero" made with Blender, for comparison: [this video] Blender's pseudo-3D has more freedom with camera moves, but the capabilities look pretty similar otherwise.