Thursday, February 28th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Sneak peek: Maya’s new grease pencil tool

Autodesk has posted a video showing its work-in-progress grease pencil tool for Maya, in the run-up to its official Maya 2014 launch event on 27 March.

The teaser comes with Autodesk’s standard disclaimer that the functionality isn’t guaranteed to be included in any specific release; but given the timing, it’s hard to imagine it won’t form part of Maya 2014.

A more traditional workflow
The video shows the grease pencil in use to draw over the viewport for a more traditional animation workflow.

Similar functionality currently exists in free plug-ins and commercial tools such as Chris Zurbrigg’s Blue Pencil, althoough at this stage, it’s hard to say how the feature sets compare.

As with the accompanying sneak peek of 3ds Max’s Nitrous viewport, the initial feedback on YouTube has been mixed, but if Autodesk runs true to past form, it will be posting more videos in the run-up to 27 March.