Some of you might be familliar with this little script from jason sheifler :

http://www.jonhandhisdog.com/shh-life-er/?page_id=169

There is also a video tut showing it in action:

http://jonhandhisdog.com/movies/js_greasePencil_movie.zip

It as aslo been transfered to max in no time :

http://forums.cgsociety.org/show...7&highlight=grease+pencil

And if you search a little you can see it as been asked a few times for XSI but nobody with the required scripting skills seems to be interessed.... :frown:

So… would it be dificult to implement ? Were to start ? And will it work in modtool ?:whistling:

Grease pencil is great but I personally hated how it draws in curves and you can only draw in viewports.

I would much recommend annotate pro:

http://www.annotatepro.com

There is a 30 day trial there and the app costs like $19. It is one of the best purchases I made.

Hope this helps.
-A

Thank’s i’ll try that at home, but it doesn’t seem to play an animation and help you with timming as with posing, does-it ?

I wrote a grease pencil a while ago but i was never happy with it (it used curves like Jason’s).

A proper version has been on the cards for a while.

To answer your questions : i can guarantee it won’t work on mod tool.
(where to start)
I’m starting with c#/gdi but real coders will be starting with the cdh/graphicsSequencer.
(is it difficult)
it is technically known as a ‘bit of a bugger’

:ninja:

I had a stab at one too, quite a while back. What I wanted to do was to use the sketch curve tool to draw curves, make each one drawn animated visible only on the current frame. There was no command to sketch curves in the SDK so it died a death. It would be nice if a sketch curve command could be exposed.

[quote=Squid;382]

A proper version has been on the cards for a while.

Haha, I’ll say.  :wink:

It’d also be nice for this sort of drawing functionality to be built into Flipbook (like you can in FCheck), although this obviously just can’t be scripted in.

[QUOTE=Nightwalker;369]Thank’s i’ll try that at home, but it doesn’t seem to play an animation and help you with timming as with posing, does-it ?

Yes it can be used to check your spacing and do quick scribbles on top of your viewport to help you with your posing. the timing you can always check in the viewport anyway.

[quote=kim aldis;400]I had a stab at one too, quite a while back. What I wanted to do was to use the sketch curve tool to draw curves, make each one drawn animated visible only on the current frame. There was no command to sketch curves in the SDK so it died a death. It would be nice if a sketch curve command could be exposed.

That was my problem too. i ended up hooking the mouse, projecting to the cam plane then building a curve from that data. messy, unintuitive and my anti virus software really hated a global mouse hook for some strange reason.

[QUOTE=Tina]Haha, I’ll say.  :wink:

:innocent:

As a potential workaround, you can have a plane with an imageclip to which you feed a Paint clip. These can be painted on a per-frame basis and are saved as-you-go. (Paintclips support tablet pens, too.)

I suppose you could even go ahead and draw 1 particle and have it on a big sprite that always faces you.

The only major problem, which I never figured out, is how to insert an in-between frame between existing ones.

—Alan

Jason explains at cgtalk [B]"the script for maya that I wrote is a pretty nasty hack.. basically I’m creating nurbs planes which are parented to the camera that are made “live” which can be drawn on with a curve tool.

So when you add a “draw frame”, it creates a nurbs plane, parents it to the camera, sets it live, and then puts you in the pencil tool.

The nifty bit, though, is making it so onion skinning works (just templating the previous and next frames) and allowing you to modify the timing of your animation quickly by moving keys around in the text scroll list."[/B]

Sorry for the noob question but why can’t we hack something similar using planes and the sketch tool ?

SheepFactory: thank’s, it’s not what I was looking for exactly but it does come in handy for several things :smile:.

[quote=kim aldis;400]I had a stab at one too, quite a while back. What I wanted to do was to use the sketch curve tool to draw curves, make each one drawn animated visible only on the current frame. There was no command to sketch curves in the SDK so it died a death. It would be nice if a sketch curve command could be exposed.

hey Kim, you mean the sketch command or you want something else to manipulate points?

The sketch command is available trough commands like this:

oCurve = Application.Commands("Sketch Curve Tool").Execute();

I’m not sure if this thing return something because those Commands() are not as documented as it should… but you can do the basic which is activate it at least :P