Grease Pencil Onion peel

GP Onion peel is an add-on for blender grease pencil that add some features 2D animators usually need for onion skinning.

Important note :
- Works only with Grease pencil object (Other objects are not supported). Intended to use only within camera view.
- For Blender 4.3+:
- Use addon version 2.0.0+
- The peels are not colored in Solid view due to core technical changes. Use Material or Rendered shading view

Another onion for your grease pencil

Individual ghost image of you grease pencil object are referred as “peel”. All the peels form the onion of your object.

The onion of you’re GP object is displayed only when the object is active

Once enabled with the refresh button, the onion will be updated at every frame change.

Display On : Click the refresh button or activate the light button and change frame.
Display Off : Click the delete button or toggle the light off and change frame

• Shift+Click on delete button will delete all the onions.

Move the pile of peels

The most interesting feature is the custom transformation of the peels. It allow to move, rotate, scale a peel with shortcuts you’re used to in Blender : G R S. With added shortcut X to mirror the peel (shift+X to mirror vertically)

Once you’re happy with the position hit Enter, else hit Escape.
Peels can be reset / re-edited with buttons in interface.

An appeal for your eyes

The peels allow some configurations that are not possible with native skinning

For each individual peel you can :

• Show/Hide
  
• Set a precise opacity
  
• Set a custom transformation

You can set up to 16 peels before/after as a soft limit (if you edit the field you can go up to 32)

The center slider defines the general opacity of the whole onion The little arrow at the left of the general slider quickly set a linear opacity fade.

• Shift+Click on it to reset all opacity to 100%

Colors you’ll never cry for

As it can be cumbersome to adapt onion color for every new file, you can enable the option in the add-on preferences to set specific color on file opening.

Onion with options

You can filter frame to show peel by specific keyframe type.

If your object or its peels are cluttered by others objects in the scene, use the X-ray button to make them show in front (toggle it off with side button).

Local Vs World

By default, the peels are “local” to the object (exactly like native blender onion skin) and if your gp object is not animated you should use this mode. But if you also have an animation over your GP object, you can tick the World space checkbox. The peels will then respect object animation and place at expected position.

Additional notes

The add-on shows up in Gpencil > Onion peel

This add-on does not use the native onion skin feature and disable it automatically while active.

The onion is not saved with the file, custom peels transformations aren’t saved either.

The onion is made to be viewed from camera, when you are out of it you’ll see an offset in depth, this is made to avoid bad overlapping transparency. If you have transparency problem, try bumping up Depth offset value slightly in add-on preferences

It should be compatible with all 2.9+ version.

Limitations

• Works only within camera view.

• For the time being you can display only the onion of the currently active object.

• You can’t edit multiple peels transformation at the same time.

• The peel are displayed in GP dopesheet when “show only selected” is disabled (since there are simply other GP object).

More words !

Any money received will help me develop more free addons.

Hope you’ll have a good time cooking your animations with this !

Happy Blending,

Samuel Bernou

Tags : #blender #greasepencil #2danimation #blender-addon #b3d #b2d