Question on texture brushes behavior

[Nathi Tappan]

I just love the bubble texture! So much fun! Particularly because I feel like no matter from where I turn, it feels like they really are little 3D bubbles, it’s almost like they are always looking at the camera, like a creepy portrait that freaks you out as you pass by, is that normal for all stroke textures?

That is the only thing I can think of that is different to the pattern texture behind it… that texture is applied to the fill. And it does not have the same behavior or looking 3 dimensional or of “looking at you” as you orbit around. 

So that was the first question. The second question is, why is there at certain angles the bubbles will behave weird with the transparency and show the background, instead of the dog, but if I keep rotating they go back to normal? They do not intersect with the any other GP objects. 🤔

ps. I know, I know.. why are you using 4.4 after all that? Well, I’m not used to having multiple versions of Blender installed at once, and didn’t notice it became the default. I worked on a little scene organization, saved and went to bed. Now when I try and open it on LTS it is broken (I can’t access the GP object data/materials). So here we are, too far down. I’m finishing it on 4.4 lol.

But I was able to open the whole scene and orbit around… didn’t seem to behave different on the LTS. 🤔

[Dwayne Savage]

First, Great artwork. 

I have no idea on the questions you asked, but for using the LTS version you just open it Blender 4.2 and then F4->append->double click the 4.4 blend file->Grease Pencil-> Then select the GP you want and click append. Opening directly does have a lot of issue. The only thing that I know of that doesn’t append is GP Geonodes. You will need to apply any GP geonode modifiers for it to append properly. 

[Nathi Tappan]

Hey @dillenbata3 thank you! I feel like if my dog had a say on it she would have chosen a better artist lol, but here we are… I feed her, and in exchange she has to put up with my drawing skills. 😅

You are absolutely right about things going crazy when we just open different versions directly. I tried that appending method before and it was not working for some reason. I tried again now just in case I was missing something, and still doesn’t quite work. It will import everything, and it will look the same, but I can’t edit anything. Something on the data tab is broken, and even the grease pencil data icon is missing. There is just a white dot instead. All good, I mainly went back to the LTS because I needed to make a proper mask using the boundary strokes. That’s saved in 4.4, so I can keep tweaking now!

[Paul Caggegi]

When you see that dot instead of a grease pencil icon, it means you opened a file that was saved in a later version.

[Paul Caggegi]

The bubbles appear to face you because their texture is set to the stroke, so it is mapped on each point (dot/square texture) along the stroke. The texture applied to a shape is a fill, so it is mapped over the area.

I used the bubble as a fill texture on the background object here, instead of on the stroke component of the Material, to demonstrate how they look different.

[Paul Caggegi]

The reason the alpha is clipping the dog and not the background is likely because the Maia object shares the same origin location as the bubble object. It’s a quirk of Grease Pencil, that some aspects of the object will be calculated from the point of origin – even if the bubbles are spread out over 3D space. The way to fix this is REALLY simple – move the bubbles forward along the Y axis – even just a little bit – and the bubbles should behave.

Note however, that if you wish bubbles that are positioned behind the monkey (in my case) it is recommended that you create a “background bubbles” object and position that behind the monkey.

[Dwayne Savage]

Nathi, it seem every time you ask a question I learn something new. Thanks Paul for the explanation. 

[Nathi Tappan]

Yes! Thanks for the detailed explanations Paul! Moving the origins worked like a charm!

And I’m glad it helps someone else Dwayne! ☺️

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