by pullup·Motion Graphics
Illustrative cover generated by AnyPlugins — no product screenshot available.
Real Pencil is cosmetic-first: it adds a pen that follows your cursor and captures motion, but no actual drawing tools. Note that running the pen control disables Blender's auto-save, so save your work before starting a session.
Real Pencil is a Blender addon that adds a 3D pen following your cursor and reacting to your tablet's tilt inputs. It is aimed at demos, tutorials, or just for fun. The pen is an object inside your Blender scene, so it appears in the viewport only. It does not add any drawing feature: aside from the pen motion capture tool and the whiteboard animation feature, everything about the pen is purely cosmetic.
Pen motion capture records tablet movement during scene playback, creating a pen_rec empty object that holds the animation. The automatic whiteboard animation feature, added in the 1.2.0 update, makes the pen follow a drawing using the build modifier without any prerecorded motion capture. Display settings cover contact and away positions, adjustable away distance, manual angle and roll, and scale.
The pen models are handcrafted, low-poly and built at real-world scale, with materials tuned to look good in any viewport shading mode, and you can customize or add your own. Real Pencil is compatible with Blender 4.3 and later, and comes in three product versions.
Real Pencil is best for blender users making demos, tutorials, or whiteboard-style animations who want a cursor-following 3D pen and tablet motion capture.
Real Pencil is completely free to download and use.
Real Pencil is compatible with Blender 4.3 and later, using addon version 2.0.0 and up. On Blender 4.3 specifically, the whiteboard animation feature's Natural drawing speed mode does not compress the animation time when the next grease pencil key sits too close, so you need to leave enough room for the build animation to finish drawing. This issue is fixed in Blender 4.4. If you plan to rely on whiteboard animation, running Blender 4.4 or newer avoids that limitation entirely.
Real Pencil does not add any drawing feature. It places a 3D pen that follows your cursor and reacts to tablet tilt, but aside from the pen motion capture tool and the whiteboard animation feature, everything is purely cosmetic. The pen is an object that lives in your Blender scene, so it is visible in the viewport only. If you want the pen to produce actual strokes, you would still draw with Blender's own grease pencil tools while Real Pencil handles the pen's motion and appearance.
Real Pencil runs a modal while pen control is active, and running that modal disables Blender's auto-save. This means the blend file will not auto-save for as long as the pen control is running, so it is worth saving your work manually before you start a session. The tool was designed to work with a graphic tablet and grease pencil objects in GPencil draw mode. Other scenarios are supported but may not always behave correctly, such as mouse device click detection outside GPencil draw mode.
Real Pencil's automatic whiteboard animation, added in the 1.2.0 update, makes the pen follow a drawing without any prerecorded motion capture by using the build modifier. You select your drawing and click Add Build And Create Animation, then tweak the modifier settings and click the button again to recreate the animation. It works badly on Blender's default grease pencil Monkey object, so use it on your own drawings. On Blender 4.3 the Natural drawing speed mode has a timing caveat that was later fixed in 4.4.
Real Pencil is listed as free in this catalog. It comes in three product versions: a Full package with the addon, default pen, a model pack of ten, extra customizable pens and a blend setup with paper-like surface materials; a Basic package with the addon and default pen; and a standalone model pack with the pens and paper models only. For current licensing and which version fits your needs, check the developer's page. The pen models are yours to use personally or commercially, except for reselling.
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