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Waypoint

Introduction

Waypoint is a Blender addon that brings bidirectional cursor sync, world-space onion skinning, editable motion paths, interactive frame labels, and pinned frames to Grease Pencil v3 in Blender 4.3+. It’s designed to empower artists with new tooling that reduce friction when working with Grease Pencil, and to keep you in the viewport as much as possible.

Waypoint offers a new way of working which is opinionated by design. Part of what makes Blender awesome is its flexibility and extensibility, but this can sometimes be a double edged sword. Whether you’re new to Grease Pencil or a seasoned Blender user, the absence of dedicated 2.5D tooling and convention is a real pain point. Waypoint aims to address this by introducing a powerful suite of Grease Pencil tools to supercharge your workflow:

Traditional Grease Pencil workflow

Section titled “Traditional Grease Pencil workflow”
  • For new users, working with Grease Pencil can be intimidating, and not very intuitive. Users have to manage object and GP keys, and it’s not obvious what the best way of working is.
  • Moving the GP object can be clunky.
  • Confusion around drawing planes and stroke placement options.
  • Blender’s native onion skinning operates in screen space at the object level. As you move the object, the onion skins follow - they don’t represent where strokes were actually drawn in 3D space. This means you can’t reliably move your GP objects and use the native onion skin feature.
  • There’s no easy way to move or duplicate your sequence to another location. You have to manually re-key every frame or wrangle with the graph editor.
  • Native motion path can be helpful, but it’s quite barebones, cannot be customized and only describes GP trajectory.

Waypoint workflow

Section titled “Waypoint workflow”
  • Use cursor sync feature to seamlessly create and manage object and GP keys together in one click.
  • Move your GP object with ease using bidirectional cursor sync.
  • Waypoint works best when you draw on front drawing plane, and origin stroke placement. More on that here.
  • Our custom onion skin solution renders your onion skins based on where you drew those strokes in 3D space, instead of relative to the GP object.
  • You can use the edit motion path feature to grab all your keys and move them anywhere.
  • Custom motion path feature
FeatureWhat it does
Onion SkinningWorld-space onion skins with per-stroke/fill opacity, keyframe filtering, layer isolation and more
Cursor SyncBidirectional sync between 3D cursor and GP objects for rapid blocking
Motion PathsVisually represent your GP object’s trajectory as an editable curve directly in the viewport
Frame LabelsClickable visual markers on the motion path to help keep track of key poses and shots, and stay in the viewport
Pinned FramesLock specific frames as persistent overlays for reference, keeping you on model

Quick start

Section titled “Quick start”
  1. Install the addon
  2. Open a scene with a Grease Pencil object
  3. Find Waypoint in the N-panel → Waypoint tab
  4. Enable world-space onion skinning and start animating

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”