Blender Grease Pencil Brush Pack for Comic Style Animation and Modeling

This pack contains 20 hard brushes I made that are inspired by graphic comic and stylized illustration. I found the Blender default brushes lacking in familiar hard edge brushes in other software so I made my own counterparts that might be cool to use in 2D / 3D animation. I am a fan of the direction that Spiderverse, Arcane and TMNT is taking animation so I wanted to make tools for indie animators/modelers using Blender that I would use myself in stylized effects animations and 3D illustration.

The brushes included:

TRI-RAKE, DIRTY TRI-RAKE, TOOTHY, DRY BRUSH, FIVE-RAKE, CRAYON, HARDER CRAYON, COMIC TONE STROKE, COMIC TONE FILL, CHAIN, GRAINY ROPE, INK PEN BETTER TAPER', SQUARE, SQUARE DASHED, SQUARE DASHED 2, SQUARE JITTER, BALLPOINT PEN, CIRCLE JITTER, STAR JITTER, HIGHLIGHT SHAPE 1

How Blender applies brush textures is still a little limited, but I tried to make image textures that don't look so obvious repeated. If you scale the brush size, make sure to adjust the 'UV factor' under the materials for the stroke to control the density of the texture. A youtube video tutorial will follow and be added to explain the brush making process if you would like to make your own version or other brushes.

Youtube:

The icon thumbnails for the brushes may unlink and give you a grey box under your Browse Brush Tab when you first download the .blend file. Don't worry! Your brush should still operate (.blend files retains info marked with the shield icon on) , you just need to relink the correct image thumbnail under 'Active Tool and Workspace Settings' (screwdriver and wrench) by clicking the custom icon (mountain and sun) and browsing to the thumbnail folder for the brush thumbnails which will be included in the download.

The download will include a .blend file with all the brushes ready to use, if you don't want to use this exact .blend file you can append the brushes into your own file. If you are having any issues regarding the brush not working, feel free to send me a message at musubibiadventures@gmail.com and I will do my best to respond when I can.

Blender is free and open-source: https://www.blender.org/download/

Included: A .blend file in Blender 3.6 (make sure to keep updated in order for the brushes to operate properly), a folder of .png image textures for the brushes, a folder of thumbnail .png images for your icon thumbnails in the brush browser

Edits:

9/13/2023 - I got rid of some duplicate image texture blocks that might have prevented the textures of the brushes from loading on startup, the latest file updated should fix this issue! Take a look at the troubleshooting video!

12/29/2023 - I have checked compatibility with 4.0 and haven't seen any issues with opening the blend files from 3.6 to 4.0. There wasn't any big changes to Grease Pencil by the Blender Foundation as originally anticipated during Winter 2023. The brushes should still work and I will be working on developing more image textures and tools up and until the point they overhaul Grease Pencil more! Until then, happy 2D/3D sketching!

2/1/2024 - I have found an interesting way to have hard shaped color dynamics brushes in 4.0, so I am including new brush sets for existing customers and new customers shall also have the new set included with the existing one! You can watch the tutorial on how I made these brushes below!

3/21/2024 - I found the 4.0 brush pack .blend file compatible with 3.6 so I decided to combine them. I also got rid of duplicate data block for the image textures and packed them into the file. That might help it load better.

4/4/2024 - I've included another package that includes an add-on for my Grease Pencil Brush Saver Panel.

5/13/2024 - Just checking if the brush set changed from 4.0 to 4.1 and if it affected the add-on's compatibility. Looks like it doesn't, so everything should also work for 4.1! I realized I might have accidentally deleted some weight paint brushes so that second part of the panel might not have showed up for the startup .blend files if you have the 'Grease Panel Brush Saver Add-on" as well. I added them back in so the add on populates normally again.

The 'Grease Pencil Brush Saver' add-on consolidates all data-block save options in one panel in the 3D viewport for you to toggle on at one place and serves as a visual aid to toggle where you need to save texture files and brushes together. The add-on is designed to be used and installed in the beginning of a new .blend file on the default factory settings start up for Blender 3.6 and 4.0.

• A button to pack resources including image textures into the .blend placed at the top for convenience.
• The first half of the panel lists all the images textures listed in rows with buttons to individually to save the data blocks.
• The second half of the panel allows you to toggle 'Pin' buttons that attach your materials to your brushes and also a button to 'Save" the materials associated to each individual Brush as you select materials in the material list. It will populate with the default Grease Pencil brushes and duplicated custom ones you create.

Currently, the second half does not work if you have added or removed default Weight Paint, Vertex Paint, Texture Paint or Sculpting brushes on the start up of a new .blend file to the 'Brushes' data block index. The second half might also stop working if you start adding those listed brushes in the middle of the .blend file. This might be the case if you are using a forked version of Blender/add-on, something like 'Heavypoly'. On default, Blender groups all these together as a 'Brushes' collection and the add on filters the non-Grease Pencil brushes out by name from 'Brushes' as it indexes through the collection and it will not work unless its the exact default 'Brushes' collection on startup. Maybe future iterations of Blender will eventually separate these... but for now they are all categorized together. I personally use Heavypoly on Blender 4.0 for my projects so I have a build version of this add-on specifically for a Heavypoly startup included in the download as well.

How I use the add-on:

1. I add a grease pencil object.
2. I delete the default materials associated with the grease pencil object and make a new material that represent the texture of the brush.
3. For each individual material, I import a brush texture and click 'Save' on the first half of the panel as it populates the add-on.
4. I duplicate an existing default brush to copy its brush pressure and opacity properties and rename it. It populates on the second half of the add on under Pin and Save Material to Brush'.
5. I make sure to 'Pin' that material that contains the custom texture to the new brush and 'Save Material'.
6. When finished with all your brushes I click 'Pack Resources' at the top to save the textures into my .blend file.

To download the add on; open Blender and go to the 'Edit' tab in the upper left -> 'Preferences' -> 'Add-ons' -> 'Install button' on the top right and click the Zip file. Do not extract it. Then make sure the checkbox for it is toggled on in the list. If you are having any issues with the add on you can message me at musubibiadventures@gmail.com, send me screenshots of the problem, and I will try my best to troubleshoot when I am available.