HERO – Blender Grease Pencil Showcase

Blender · 911.4K views · 2018-04-16 · 3:57

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Overview

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.

On Hacker News

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.

Recommended by 2 HN people across 2 months · HN mentions 2018–2021

Topics

Animation & visual effects

What people said

microcolonel · 2019-08 · Strong recommendation
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. [VIDEO]
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avhon1 · 2021-07 · Recommendation
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. [VIDEO]
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Mathnerd314 · 2020-08 · Reference
There are more recent videos: [LINK] Here is "Hero" made with Blender, for comparison: [VIDEO] Blender's pseudo-3D has more freedom with camera moves, but the capabilities look pretty similar otherwise.
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Sources

Video by Blender, played through YouTube.

HN Library · Source license

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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