The Blender 5.1 beta arrives with a set of updates focused on Grease Pencil. The 2D drawing tool incorporates a requested feature: the ability to create fills that recognize and respect holes in strokes. This change, along with a redesigned material workflow and performance optimizations, aims to make working with the pencil smoother and more logical within the 3D environment.
From Mask to Void: How Real Holes Work 🕳️
Previously, creating an area with a hole involved a manual process with masks or additional layers. The new implementation interprets the topology of closed strokes. When an inner path is completely inside an outer one, the system identifies it as a hole and excludes that area from the fill natively. This eliminates intermediate steps and allows editing the hole edges and the main fill in a unified way.
Goodbye to handmade Swiss cheese 🧀
Finally, we can leave behind the era of fake holes, those that required more layers than an onion and fell apart with a sneeze. Now, if you draw a donut, the central hole is a real hole, not a magician's trick that collapses when you move a vertex. A firm step toward a world where a circle inside another circle is interpreted as what it is, and not as a philosophical riddle for the render engine.