Hole Holdout #

This operator and the following descriptions mostly apply to Blender 5.0 and earlier versions, as holes are not officially supported in Grease Pencil in these versions.

Blender 5.1 introduces the new Join Fills operator, which can be used in many cases where this operator is currently used. This add-on operator is still available for users that prefer the old method.

To display holes inside a shape's fill, Blender has a unique mechanism in Grease Pencil that is different from most vector graphic editing software. Users need to manually enable a Holdout option in the material setting to make a stroke transparent.

To simplify this process, NijiGPen provides with an operator to automatically detect holes among selected strokes. If a stroke's path is completely inside another stroke's fill:

• It will be arranged upward to display in front of the stroke it is in.
• It will be turned transparent by assigning a material with all attributes unchanged except the Holdout option being enabled.
  • If such material does not exist, a new material will be created first.

Interaction with Other Operators #

This operation is also executed automatically as a step in many other operators, including SVG Import, Color Image Vectorization, Smart Fill and Mesh Generation.

Please also refer to the Limitation page for more information about processing holes.