UX designer Jacopo Colò has released Penzil, a threejs-powered online app that lets you sketch in 3D, then export the sketches to Blender.

Inspired by Blender's Grease Pencil toolset, as Colò said, the app was designed to "sketch in 3D on my iPad, on my sofa, without a laptop and graphics tablet".

Personal project by Bart Biernacki

How does Penzil works

Penzil is much like a paint app and really easy to use. You just need to draw your concept with the pencil tool inside in a 3D space.

The main tool will be the pen and erase on top of the screen and the "3d canvas" where you can sketch. You can paint by adjusting the color of the brush, the width of the stroke, and the fill color, and mouse click, finger or stylus could all become your pen to sketch.

You may switch to the erase tool lets erase the entire strokes or undo to the previous step by click the undo button. However, the easer seems to only erase complete strokes rather than partial one.

Once a sketch is complete, you can save it or export it to Blender as a .json file.

Sketch with Penzil

Penzil doesn't have a built-in importer for Grease Pencil sketches yet, though you can get them into Penzil via a script available from Colò's Discord server. As we can see from the twitter, Colò is still developing new features for the app, and has been working on USDZ export and open the file in an AR mode.

Although Penzil was primarily designed for touch screens, it is browser-based, so you can use it almost in any desktop or mobile device. What's more, it is free to use. Try use Penzil to express your 3d concept now: Penzil.app.

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