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I would like to 'draw' a basic 2D mesh of any shape using my mouse. I've read advice on using grease pencil, but if I use grease pencil and convert to a mesh it seems to have lots of different properties and the mesh doesn't behave normally at all. I feel like this would be a straightforward feature that a lot of people would want as it would save a lot of time, so maybe i'm missing something?

For example I want to create the outline of a beer bottle (or any shape using a reference photo), and have as simple a mesh as possible? Instead of creating a basic object and manipulating it.

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I would argue that this approach doesn't really save too much time, since handdrawn shapes must be cleaned... manually. But I concede that it's probably suitable if you're just making a sketch!

Anyway: you can definitely do it using grease pencil! What is the problem you're experiencing?

This is a possible workflow. Precondition: use Blender 2.80 or newer.

  • Add > Grease Pencil > Blank
  • Get into an orthographic view (e.g. Front Ortho)

  • Entrer "Draw Mode", draw; then go back to "Object Mode"

  • Right click on your object > Convert to Bezier Curve

  • In the Outliner, hide the grease pencil object and select the newly created Bezier curve.

    In my version, I have a little bug whereas the Bezier is not immediately visible. Hop in and out of Edit Mode (Tab) to make it visible

    enter image description here

  • Your curve has probably too many handles. To reduce them, enter "Edit Mode", select all the handles (A), then do Right Click > Decimate Curve. In the box that appears, select a suitable value.

    enter image description here

  • To avoid your mesh to have still too many handles, go in the Curve settings and change Resolution Preview U to 2 or 3
  • Right Click > Convert to Mesh

  • You've got your mesh! You can use it as any other mesh. For instance, you can use the Screw modifier

    enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ riiiight ok, that's great thanks. Yes if I follow your instruction exactly then it works perfectly. I think i was basically converting the grease pencil directly to a mesh. Which would appear to give me what i wanted, but whenever i would go into edit mode it wouldn't give me all the 'mesh' options, it would just give me the same options as grease pencil. Couln't figure it out! great thanks :) I'm not to worried about clean up right now, planning to use this for some 3D printing reasons, so basically just looking to draw a 2D shape then give it some depth so i can print it. $\endgroup$
    – ANDYSAWRUSS
    Commented Dec 18, 2019 at 18:33
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There is a tool for this in Edit Mode called Poly Build. It is basically a quicker way of creating, connecting, moving, and deleting geometry by "drawing." This seems to fit your use case.

Documentary of the Poly Build tool

The Poly Build tool uses many built operators in an interactive way to add, delete, or move geometry. This is extremely useful for retopology.

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