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Blender Exporter

The OVB Blender add-on lives in the 3D-view sidebar (Octo VB tab). It exports your line art to SVGs that OVB then imports into Harmony. It has two sources — Grease Pencil and Pencil+ — and the difference between them matters.

Grease Pencil vs Pencil+

Grease Pencil mode

Grease Pencil — the accurate one

Pencil+ Line mode

Pencil+ Line — the stylized one

Grease Pencil — most accurate

OVB reads your Grease Pencil strokes directly and writes them as SVG with the real per-point pressure/width. Because it works from the actual stroke data, the variable width is exact — the thin-to-thick you drew is the thin-to-thick that reaches Harmony.

  • What you get: SVG straight from GP strokes → true variable width.
  • Occlusion: by the camera — render visibility (the camera icon) or holdout collections (raycast). Strokes behind a holdout mesh are culled.
  • Support: Grease Pencil v3 and legacy GP.

Pencil+ Line — stylized, hybrid width

Pencil+ (the PSOFT plug-in) generates the line art with its own stylized engine — a Pencil+ Line node + compositor. OVB gets that output as a raster (PNG) + a flattened EPS/AI vector. The EPS flattens pressure to a base width and drops per-line colour, so OVB reconstructs the variable width (and colour) by sampling the raster — the Raster → Variable Width option in Settings.

  • What you get: Pencil+'s stylized look; width reconstructed from the render.
  • Occlusion & line generation: handled by Pencil+ itself.
  • Needs: a Pencil+ Line node + compositor set up in your scene.

Which one?

Use Grease Pencil when you want maximum pressure accuracy and you're drawing in GP. Use Pencil+ when you want its stylized line generation (and you already rig with Pencil+) — accepting that width is reconstructed from the raster rather than read from true pressure.

The panel, top to bottom

  • Camera — which camera to project from.
  • Line Source — the Grease Pencil / Pencil+ Line toggle.
  • The source tree — GP objects (or Inline/Outline for Pencil+), each with a checkbox (check = included) and an art-layer mapping (Line Art / Overlay / …). Per Line (Pencil+) exports one pass per mapped line.
  • Output — a folder + Format: SVG. Point Harmony's importer at this folder.
  • Frame Range — Start / End, or Scene Range.
  • Occlusion — Holdout Collections (mark meshes as holdout), Show in Viewport to preview what's culled.
  • Convert to Vectors / Convert Pencil+ Lines — runs the export.

Art-layer mapping = folders

Mapping a line to Overlay writes it to Output/OL/; Line Art → Output/LA/. That's exactly the art-layer folder structure the Harmony importer classifies — so a whole multi-layer character imports as one drawing.

See Occlusion for the holdout system in detail.