Piggy: Blender Grease Pencil Drawing, Rigging & Animation Course for Beginners

Welcome to this Blender Grease Pencil drawing, rigging and animation course for beginners.

By the end of it, you will be able to draw this Piggy character, rig it and know how to do simple animation and use most of the animation tools and features inside Blender.

The rig we will create will have the following features:

• a moving and rotating head
• closing eyes
• irises that can move separately or together
• a mouth that changes shapes and size along with the chin
• a wrinkling nose
• arms with forward kinematics
• hands that change shape
• a body that moves separately or connected to the legs
• the legs using inverse kinematics
• and the shadow that automatically moves and changes size.

We will go at a slow pace, without time-lapses, in a non-linear way, meaning that sometimes I forget some steps or make mistakes and fix them later, this will help you learn from my mistakes and learn ways to correct similar mistakes. Pay attention to the green text that appears during the videos as it contains very important information.

Reference images are included in the download, you can choose to follow using the Peppa pig reference for a bit more challenge, or finish the course normally then do it again with the second reference, the more you do it, the better you’ll be.

Links to free useful resource videos are also included to help you learn some basic concepts and be more comfortable with Blender.

The course is split to 8 videos:

• In the 1st one we prepare the reference file and draw the initial strokes.
• In the 2nd one we edit and sculpt our strokes and add fills.
• in the 3rd one we prepare the character for rigging by organizing strokes in layers, creating masks and new shapes and animations.
• In the 4th video we create the armature, parent and symmetrize bones, and connect the armature to our character.
• In the 5th video we add modifiers and drivers to control everything with bones and learn basic scripted expressions and bone constraints.
• In the 6th video, we prepare the armature for animation, manage key-frames, create our first animation, learn interpolation modes and how to use the graph editor.
• In the 7th video, we make more animations and combine them in the NLA (Non Linear Animation) editor, then learn creating pose assets & how to use them.
• In the 8th part we learn simple lip syncing, some advanced settings in the graph editor and how to add sound to our project.