Clay Pencil turns 2D animation into 3D and makes a case for a place in Blender's core

Spanish artist Daniel Martínez Lara has published a new video titled Grandma Z, made with Grease Pencil and the experimental Clay Pencil add-on. The clip shows what the tools can currently do and at the same time serves as material for assessing whether Clay Pencil should be moved from the experimental category into Blender's standard feature set.

Clay Pencil is designed to turn 2D animation into 3D geometry: animated volumetric meshes are created using two-dimensional animation techniques. According to the project description, this simplifies the 3D animation pipeline.

For animators working in 2D, this approach means being able to get a volumetric scene while staying within a drawing-based pipeline.

Who is behind the project

Grandma Z was made by Daniel Martínez Lara, Rafa Cano Méndez and Abel Tebar. The add-on itself is developed by Alfonso Martínez. The video and the related presentation from Blender Conference 2026 have been published on YouTube. In the project list of Blender Lab — a venue for complex, future-oriented development within the Blender project — Clay Pencil is listed with the status "in progress".

The tool's status is an intermediate one: it is a demonstration of capabilities, on the basis of which the question of including the technology in the main Blender will be decided. Blender Lab activities are by definition not part of the package's current roadmap and have no deadlines or target release version.

Why a tool like this has appeared now

Grease Pencil has spent many years developing as a 2D tool inside a 3D editor, and the attempt to use drawing as a source of geometry looks like a continuation of that line. Clay Pencil is moving in that direction — which is probably why it ended up among the projects being considered for the role of core functionality.

There is also a broader process behind this. Stylized animation that imitates handmade techniques — clay, paper, painting — has noticeably pushed back the photorealistic approach in recent years, but it comes at a cost: achieving a handcrafted image with classic 3D means is hard and slow. Tools that deliver such a result directly from a drawing are capable of removing part of that cost.

If the trend holds, short films and commercials with a stylized look will increasingly be made by small teams, and the boundary between 2D and 3D animator will keep blurring: demand will probably shift toward specialists who can draw and at the same time understand how procedural geometry works. What comes under pressure in such a scheme are the pipeline stages it bypasses — routine modeling and rigging for one-off stylized projects.