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What I'm trying to figure out how to "correctly" manage multiple-scene grease pencil animations. By multiple scene, I mean, maybe I drew an animated intro title, then I want cut to a street scene, then I want to cut to an indoor scene. Ideally I would like to be able to quickly preview and shift the cuts while animating, so I can fine-tune the cuts with the pacing of the animation.

The options I've considered so far:

  • Animate the visibility of all the grease pencil objects in the title to "hidden"
    • Awkward if there are lots of objects, clutters up timeline and makes it easy to accidentally miss an object when moving the keyframes later
  • Erase the strokes at the right time
    • Involves manually erasing every greasepencil object; also hard to edit after the fact?
  • Jump to a new camera somewhere else in 3D space
    • Seems like maybe the best option to me right now, but still feels "hackish", and could be awkward if working with large and 3D greasepencil scenes.

None of these really seem like the "right way" right? What am I missing?

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    $\begingroup$ In the Blender Hero animation, they split the different shots into separate blend files. Then rendered each separately before editing the shots together. $\endgroup$
    – Nascent Space
    Feb 27, 2021 at 3:27

2 Answers 2

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I generally create an empty grease pencil keyframe (something like a single dot out of camera) and i move it at the end of the scene, so it acts like an "off" button for the active object. Hackish, but it works.

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Personally, I only use one file with different Blender Scenes for my different sets and an "edit" Scene that pulls all the others to do the editing. The main inconvenient is that the "edit" scene preview has a crazy slow playback speed, something like 4fps. Also working with audio and timing can be more complicated. The advantages are that it's easy to cut back and forth between sets and switching scenes is instant. Here's a screenshot of the "edit" scene of a one minute animation I did:

edit scene

Sidenotes:

  • I still use the second method you mention to do a rough animatic, which I then render and use as a guide in the edit scene.
  • A gotcha is to set the view in the edit scene preview to Material Preview or Render, otherwise vertex paint doesn't show.
  • I sometime put a whole character in it's own scene, with its mouthshapes, etc, then import it to the different scenes and make it local.
  • For the audio, I set it up in the VSE of the first Scene I use, then start the other Scenes as copies of that one. Keeping in mind that the final audio will only come from the edit Scene.
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