Tablet Troubleshoot

If hovering tablet makes the pen "jumpy"  (switch rapidly between pressed and hover position):

- if you don't need the hover position, just set the away distance to zero.

- Sometimes just restarting Blender fix it

- Default input detection is 'Automatic', try switching to 'Tablet' input (note: this will disable pressure detection support for mouse device)

If the pen tilt in the wrong direction

- Go to the addon preferences and check the mirror in horizontal or vertical axis and restart the Control modal

Tips

Ink spreading animation

To recreate an animated ink drawing effect there are 3 methods

Grease pencil build modifier + Automatic animation (with fixed angle):

1 - Select GP object and the pencil you want to apply in list as well as the fixed angle

2 - Click on the button "Add Build And Create Animation" (if a build modifier already exists, name is "Create Animation")

3 - Animation is created, adjust speed to your liking in modifier settings and click button again to regenerate pen animation.

Grease pencil build modifier + Motion capture:

1 - Ensure there is a big scene frame range to avoid a playback loop

2 - Create an empty Gpencil frame at scene start time.

3 - Disable autokey

4 - Activate mocap mode, launch playback and write or draw

5 - Stop the playback and make sure to disable the pen mocap record mode

6 - Add a Build modifier on the GPencil object and set following settings:
   Timing : "Natural drawing speed" (option available only since 3.5)
   Speed factor : 1.0
   Maximum gap : 10



7 - Offset the Gpencil frame to the moment where pen makes the first stroke. Then adjust to synchronise the pen animation and the line building.

Dynamic paint

You can also create a Dynamic paint setup:
1 - Create a mesh plane at GPencil drawing plane position and set it as Dynamic paint, in properties "Physics" tab,  with type Canvas (default)
2 - Parent a little mesh at the tip of the animated empty object and also set as Dynamic paint with type Brush.
3 - fine tune the dynamic paint properties on both object and bake to vertex color or image sequence

Achieve better look

- On the scene, disable the Eevee "viewport denoising" option to avoid smearing effects, the addon expose it in the quick prefs popup (gear icon).

- It's often best to draw from a camera perspective view (better Eevee shadows)

- The pencils materials are best looking with an hdri lit the scene (plugged in World material):
(for a viewport setup, In material or render shading mode, uncheck "world" and choose your preferred ambiance).

Extra brushes

- To get good looking artistic Grease pencil brushes, that will go nicely with the pens, get the free textured brush pack made by Daniel Martinez Lara:



You can download them on the dedicated blender cloud page or use following method.

Step to automatically download the pack and append in current blend, using build-in "Grease Pencil Tools" addon.
    - Go to your preferences, enable "Grease Pencil Tools" addon.
    - With a grease pencil pencil object active and in Draw mode, go to the "Tool" Tab in sidebar
    - In the brushes dropdown menu select "Download and import texture brush pack"

Pen Mocap

Once the control is active you can use pen motion capture in bottom sub-panel

After ticking the record button, start the scene playback. The movement will be recorded.
Tip: Since record is done during playback, make sure to set a long enough frame range first.

A "pen_rec" empty object will be created with the animation.

Once the animation exists, you can clear or create another take (a new anim datablock)

The append model on mocap button will put the currently selected pen as child of the pen_rec object (respecting current settings).

Setup

Panel is located in Sidebar (N) > View > Real Pencil

Set in addon preferences if you're left or right handed (Only affect pen initial rolls).
If pen tilt in wrong direction, invert tilt horizontally or vertically with dedicated checkbox in addon preferences.

The demo video (different from the short trailer) showcase the addon use

Limitations and known issues

- This tool was designed to work with a graphic tablet and grease pencil objects, specifically GPencil draw mode.
Other scenario are supported but might not always work properly. (eg: Mouse device click detection can sometimes fail in other modes than GPencil Draw mode)

- Running a modal disable the auto-save ! Meanning, while the pen control is active, the blend file will not be able to auto-save.
Therefore, it's not recommended to work on important file while running controls (or doing manual save regularly).

- Viewport swap (changing workspace, maximizing area or getting back from maximized) with control enabled will cause an error. If that happen, you just need to click stop / start button again.

- Works with previous Blender version (2.9+). Before 3.5 some pen shaders are broken.