Blender 4.3: Grease Pencil

Grease Pencil was rewritten to remove deeper limitations and improve overall performance.

New Features

While the focus of the rewrite was compatibility and feature parity with Blender 4.2, there are some new features that come with this release.

Layer Groups

TODO

Draw Tool Changes

The behavior of the draw tool has been updated.

Radius Unit

TODO

Active Smoothing

TODO

Screen Space Simplify

TODO

Eraser Tool Changes

TODO

Geometry Nodes

TODO

Performance Improvements

TODO

Miscellaneous Changes

TODO

Conversion & Compatibility

From 4.3 and onward Grease Pencil objects are automatically converted to the new architecture on file load. There is no backwards compatibility, e.g. Grease Pencil files created or saved in 4.3 or higher will not load correctly in 4.2 or lower.

Deprecated Features

Some features present in 4.2 have been removed. This is mostly due to the changes in the architecture and the difficulty in maintainability.

Screen Space Stroke Thickness

Strokes are now always in "World Space" thickness mode.

Note that it is possible to recreate the "Screen Space" thickness effect using a geometry nodes modifier.

Interpolation Tool Selection Order

The selection order (in edit mode), that was used to specify pairs of strokes to interpolate, has been removed. Porting this feature was not trivial, so it was decided to replace it with a better version in the future.

Python API Changes

The Python API for Grease Pencil was rewritten to accommodate for the new data structure. For add-on developers wanting to migrate their add-ons to 4.3, See python migration process for more details.