MAURITS
VALK
3D Story Artist
Whippet GP
Draw Faster
Whippet GP is an add-on for Blender specifically designed to help speed up your storyboard drawings. Custom operators help add news keyframes, more commonly known as 'panels', to your timeline. Along with the operators, Whippet GP provides three critical Grease Pencil menus that live in three different locations natively in Blender. The Grease pencil layers, brush selection and material list are all displayed while the add-on is open. It's to the point and effective.
Add, Duplicate, Multiple & Clear
Inspired by Storyboard Pro, you can map the operators to keyboard shortcuts to save you time. Add a new drawing by however many frames you want to move it forward in the timeline. Duplicate, add multiple frames at one time and clear all the layers while staying in Draw mode!
Grease Pencil Layers
The same menu from the data properties window but conveniently placed in a side panel layout so you don't have to keep switching between menus. This also gives you the ability to quickly setup your GP objects and lock the layers you want to.
Brush Menu
The traditional Grease Pencil brush menu but slightly modify so you can see more brushes at once so you don't need to scroll down.
Materials
A list of all your Grease Pencil materials. Save frequently used materials to your start up file to see them listed here. To create new ones you will need to go to the native Blender menu. This is just for selecting previously made materials.
Whippet GP Installation & Demo
Documentation
Installation
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Download the latest file from Gumroad.
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Save the whippet_gp.zip in your library of add-ons.
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Open Blender and go to Add-Ons under Edit > Preferences
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Click Install and find the whippet_gp.zip file you saved in step 2
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Once it appears under your add-on list, tick the box to activate it.
Viewport Side Panel
To open Whippet GP, activate the side bar menu on the right side of your 3D viewport window. A shortcut to open this menu is 'N'.
Whippet GP will live at the bottom of the list under all your other add-ons.
Mapping Operators to Keyboard Shortcuts
The custom buttons can be mapped to keyboard bindings under the Keymap menu under Edit > Preferences.
I recommended mapping them under the Grease Pencil Stroke Paint Mode. This will ensure the operators behave as expected while in Draw mode and not in any other mode (such as Object Mode).
Copy/paste the following operator names and apply your own keyboard shortcut. I listed out what I map my operators to below.
whippetgp.add_new_keyframe - shift+F
whippetgp.add_multiple_keyframes - not bound
whippetgp.duplicate_keyframe - shift+D
whippetgp.clear_layers - D
whippetgp.delete_keyframes - ctrl+D
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Whippet GP Buttons & UI
The buttons and UI are explained in the video tutorial below. There are two schools of thoughts when inserting keyframes in between other keyframes so that is explained in the video. To change methodology you can turn on and off the 'Shift Future Frames' button. This will tell Whippet GP to push subsequent keyframes further into the future or it will do it's best to preserve the timing of future keyframes.
The Grease Pencil tool menus are slim downed versions of the native Blender menus. This is so you can stay focused on drawing and not get bogged down by menus.