2 HN users recommended this demo2 months2018–2021score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026
HN points to it as an impressive demo of Blender's open-source 2D/3D hybrid animation and as a comparison for other 2D animation tools.
HERO is a short animated film made entirely in Blender to showcase the Grease Pencil 2D animation tools in Blender 2.8. It mixes hand-drawn 2D with a full 3D pipeline.
“the demo the foundation commissioned was amazing. I love how seamlessly they mix the 3D in with the direct illustration.” (HN, 2019)
2.8 already has the vastly more useful version of grease pencil, and the demo the foundation commissioned was amazing. I love how seamlessly they mix the 3D in with the direct illustration. It shows what skilled animators can do with a tool like Blender. [this video]
Demo seamlessly mixing 3D with hand-drawn illustration
Blender can do that, too, with the "Grease Pencil". [link] Here's a short film produced as a grease pencil showcase. At the end, it shows what working with it looks like. [this video]
Grease pencil showcase short film, with workflow shown at end
> It represents a typical scene in the upcoming Gooseberry open-source movie project Gooseberry has been released -- [link] ... they have done multiple movies since then including agent 327 [link] and Hero -- [this video] GPU acceleration really helps cycles (Blender's open source raytracing engine)... however, the gooseberry benchmark uses up too much ram to make this render purely off the GPU.
> What is the grease pencil? The grease pencil is Blender's 2D drawing system. Initially, it's purpose was to allow artists to sketch scenes out onscreen, in much the same way that CGI artists a few decades ago used literal grease pencils [1] to draw on their glass computer monitors. Nowadays, the grease pencil is a full 2D art system, allowing for hand-drawn 2D art to coexist with 3D assets or tracked with camera footage. The Blender Foundation made a short film called "Hero" [2] to show it off. [1] [link] [2] [this video] > How do I select all (UV) verticies? On the bottom edge of the UV editor window is a menu bar. From the left, the menus are editor type (shown as an icon), "View", "Select", "Image", and "UVs". Farther to the right in that bar is the widget that lets you set whether you are selecting verticies, edges, faces, or islands. In the "select" menu is "(De)select All", and a label indicating that the keyboard shortcut is "A". (This shortcut is universal to all of Blender's editors (except the text editor, where it is Ctrl+A). If you have anything at all selected, then "(De)select All" will deselect everything. If you have nothing selected, it will select everything. > How do I select multiple via box? In Blender, this is called "border select". In the same "select" menu I described above, it's the bottom option (the one nearest your cursor when you open the menu). It also has a universal shortcut, indicated in the menu: "B". > How do I do numeric input? There are two
There are more recent videos: [link] Here is "Hero" made with Blender, for comparison: [this video] Blender's pseudo-3D has more freedom with camera moves, but the capabilities look pretty similar otherwise.
Comparison point for Synfig's 2D animation capabilities
Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.
Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed
5 Hacker News comments
From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.
Citations, criticism and jokes
Read more