I cannot overstate how much Blender has been a blessing to the 3D modeling and animation industry. I mean, all the amazing features I'm enjoying for FREE with Blender actually cost hundreds of thousands of $$ when it comes to proprietary software. And the Blender features are top-notch world-class quality, with which any skilled team can create a Disney or Dreamworks level movie.
I like to do this in Davinci Resolve, because now you can just record a voice-over and it'll convert it to text and let you edit out parts of the text without having to cut clips. I think it might be Studio version only, though, unless you use it a lot, it's may not be worth it.
The biggest thing that is missing from this demo is retiming of shots. And believe me. I want to dump Storyboard Pro as soon as I can. The main thing that makes Storyboard pro useful in production is the ability to have all edits be ripple edits. Meaning if I retime a shot, whether internal drawings within that shot, or the length of the shot as a whole, it shifts all the timing after that. The more complex a board gets, the more keys and potentially objects that have to shift with that timing, it gets very cumbersome. I was forced to do my recent short (on my channel) in SBP to get the main thrust of the exploration done. It was just too messy to do in Blender, and I was hoping for a nearly 100% blender pipeline.
That's great ! It would be great to do a VS with toonboom story board pro. the essential functions in production are: - automatic renumbering of scenes and thumbnails. - reorganization of scenes in "contact sheet" mode - print to PDF directly - input of dialogues and action's notes
@@poopiecon1489 Blender by far, it's being developed so fast you cant even keep up with new features ! for storyboard learn VSE, GREASE PENCIL, and there is a Sequencer plugin...Too Start !
Fantastic addon! So we can add the actor's voice over in the scene template, and it will be "new" using the template, propagating it to the correct keyframe timing on the VSE. Great!
My brain is melting through my ears. Last year I made a short film, and the storyboard-animatic part was my most tedious and least favorite proccess. I NEED THIS! Thank you very much!
Many actual features in Blender was born as Add-ons. Add-on allows to quickly develop new features more freely, it acts as a proof of concept before be included in the core code. Hope this happens with Storypencil :)
Amazing, Amazing addon, thank you so much for your work ! As someone who really wanted to blend 2d and 3d for quick storyboarding, this is simply perfect. Quick idea/feedback maybe : I think it would be cool to be able to stretch Scenes length in the VSE by dragging handles at the start/end as a "Time > Duration" alternative :]
The Video Sequencer lets you speed-up or slow-down shots, and of course you can edit them (trim them, move them around). So if you have a very complicated scene with a hundred GP-assests running around, just retime it all in the video sequencer.
Wow this was quite difficult to wrap my head around but I got it even have my own template file with brushes and layers. @MatiasMendiola I have a very technical question for ya as I'm using this exclusively. I made a blend file right before this came out so I made my different scenes manually. I made my template story pencil file then appended the 3 scenes of the NON story pencil file in hopes that I can make 3 scenes and just change the scene in the 2D animation workspace, basically inserting them into my story pencil workspace and continue on from there. But it seems the linking of the Video editing strips and the 2d animation workspace source scenes are linked in a deeper level. Is there somewhere I can go to sever these links and reconnect them to my appended scenes. Hopefully I explained myself correctly.
Hello! It's really incredible! I've been waiting for something like this for a long time! Thank you guys so much! Keep up the good work! Merry Christmas!
This is amazing! It would be great to have it as core to Blender, as this sync'd scene to sequencer functionality would be so good for previz/layout teams working with multiple cameras on a single sequence.
For everyone curious - they have left this feature out of the latest release. Absolutely no idea why, would chalk it up to being a mistake. Best thing to do is either use Blender 3.4 alpha for the meantime or attempt putting that version's Storypencil into the new release's addon folder. The latter I personally haven't tested though, so maybe just stick with the former until they address this.
Thanks, just got 3.4 for this very addon and was kinda confused 😅 Also following Matias' comment - It is indeed in the 3.4.1 alpha release if anyone was wondering and you can copy it from 3.4.1a to 3.4 release :]
Thanks a lot, just started using it on a project. Is there a way to change the background from white to black in the base scene ? Changing it via world shading doesn't seem to work. Thanks
@@ni-wo @dkeys86 It's now on the Storypencil tab, inside the Edit Scenes panel there's a "switch menu" that let's you choose between "Switch" or "New Window" for editing scenes.
Will there be an option to export as a pdf storyboard (multiple storyboard panels on a page)? This is wonderful. Thankyou for your work and explanation of the add on.
Hello Matias, I can't find the storypencil add-on on the official blender 3.4 release, is it available yet ? I can't wait to use storypencil, it seems amazing, thank you so much !
Thank you, this is awesome! One Idea, how about automatic adding several scenes? Writing just scene(or what ever want to), adjust amount of them -> press generate, and it makes and put them automatically in to timeline.
this is excellent! thank you so much for your work, I have a couple of questions, 1 can you modify the base scene so you always start with the same scene and materials (for example ink instead of pencil) 2 can you reuse a scene in the timeline? , for example I have a scene with a background of a room then I cut to a different area, then cut back to the first scene, would this 2 have to be separate scenes? or could I cut 1 single scene on VSE and select different frames on the strip?
1. Yes, you can use any scene as a template for new scene strips 2. yes, you can duplicate any scene strip and then duplicate the source scene within VSE with the Scene data-block selector Basically, you can do anything with scene strips like you can do with other strips in the VSE (cut, duplicate, split, etc.)
It seems easy and intuitive. Can you add sound to synchronize the sequences? If I want to expand the duration of a scene, will it bump all the following ones?
Basically, you can do anything with scene strips like you can do with other strips in the VSE (cut, duplicate, split, etc.) For now, the add-on allow only to sync automatically the timeline cursor, if you make changes in the range of the source scene still you have to manually adjust the strips in the VSE with the usual operators (SHIFT+ALT+R, ALT+O, etc.)
Just downloaded 3.4... the addon is not there! Checked under "Testing" like you suggested, as well as Official... nothing. Anyone else have this missing?!
hi there. I'm using 4.1, and the drop down arrow beside "edit" is not there, so I'm not able to open the current shot in a new window. How can I go about doing this, or at least enabling it? Thank you!
As someone who's always a little apprehensive when it comes to the workflow of grease pencil. It does look intriguing. Though I wonder if the new Blender Apps framework will be able to streamline this all further so we don't have to have all the mess of the 3D modeling distracting and confusing new users.
The coming Blender Apps could certainly help streamline the workflow to do just simple traditional storyboards but when a more complex storyboard-animatics is intended (Hybrid 2D-3D), we need the full power of Blender+Grease Pencil
@@MatiasMendiola Yeah, and as I understand it, that's the beauty of Blender Apps. That when you need the full 3D power you can open the same project files in the main app. Even go back and forth as needs arise and specialist designers and animators can have the app tailored to their vocabulary without being a hinderence to the main pipeline.
@@yash1152 As I understand it, Blender Apps is a way you will be able to pick and choose features from the main Blender software and tailor a version that only has what you need for each task and package it as an app. The examples that the have shown are mainly stuff like an asset viewer and such. And with scripting you can go even further in customization. It's not in the main release yet. But they (the Blender devs) have been putting out videos these last few days since the big Blender Conference.
Hey, first of all, great idea! One issue I found was that when you put a text clip or other elements above teh storyboard element the "Edit" wouldn't bring you to the animation tab.
This sounds fantastic! I absolutely love the idea of this , but i do have a question if this also works with changing,moving cameras and such? I would love to add this into my workflow
I think it could be useful for working with 3D scenes as well. But once I put some 3D object in one scene it just don’t appear in the main video editing.
Nce addon!!! But. I have a question, how can I add more frames to a created scene? I can't edit once it's created, is there a way to do that? thank you guys for this!
Hello, I have a question at the seventh minute and twelfth second of your video🤓，There are thumbnails on the scene strip for preview，How did you do it？
When I render through the VSE my frames look dimmed, but while rendering in the Grease Pencil mode after pressing edit then they look how i drew them, how can i fix this?
Perhaps I understand something. Once the length of a scene is selected, it can't be edited after that. I'm sure that's something that's being worked on. Definitely a drawback.
I've been having a problem with this. For some reason, the video sequencer doesn't correspond to the keyframes in the timeline. The video sequencer only creates fixed length scenes that don't seem to be editable. I could very certainly be missing something but wondering if anyone knows the fix for this. Thanks so much!
Hi again and thanks a lot for this add-on it's very nice. I have a question: My animatic have dialogues, so I added the audio on the editing window but when I open the grease pencil scene I can't hear the sound anymore. Is there a way to fix this? Thank you.
I wonder what the performance of this will be in the VSE. Currently including a scene in the VSE wrecks the performance and the preview does no longer work (with a 2D scene with very basic lighting that EEVEE can do in realtime with ~30 fps). It will be interesting if they improve on that.
Interesting. I cannot get the Greasepencil Dopesheet Cursor to drive the Timeline Cursor : what are the settings ? (moving VSE Cursor correctly drives the Greasepencil Dopesheet Cursor when Timeline Synchronisation is checked)
This is great! But I have an issue with setting up a storyboard session. On my custom 2D start up file it does not appear under the draw tab. I assumed that the option should be there if the addon is enabled and a Grease Pencil object is present? Or does this currently only work with factory setting of the 2D startup file?
It's awesome! Amazing job. How can you do to retime a shot after creation? If I want to change the end oof a shot in the VSE, the end frane is actually on hold from the old end. Is there a workaround? For now I just re import the scene from scratch, its a bit annoying...
did you find an answer to this? having the same issue- working around it by rendering the scene and importing it automatically, but it would be great to know the fix.
@@meerkatblackIt seems that changing the "Hold Offset Start" value updates the Scene strip to its current time length. Don't ask me why, but it works ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This looks like a very interesting tool, but I'm having a couple issues with it. Do you have a Discord where people chat about this and other grease pencil features? Some of my current issues are: When I move an object within the scene, it doesn't show the animation in the VSE view, only grease pencil keyframes. I'm also getting a bit of jittering when looking at it in the VSE view. One issue I'm having that might just be a bug, is when I have 2 windows open, scrubbing the timeline in the 2D animation window doesn't work. I can only jump to a specific frame, but not scrub the timeline. I can scrub within the VSE though. I've tried a couple other methods for storyboarding in Blender, and I actually really like the fact that there are multiple options that all work differently. I hope they can all coexist and it's just a matter of the board artist's preference for how they like to work, which method they use.
Setup storyboard under draw menu is a good way to hide the first task, it would be better if that was MUCH more obvious. Changing the active scene is also an obfuscated and fairly impenetrable feature. That cone and ball icon is so obscure.. what even IS a base scene? So many WT moments trying to dig into the concrete that is blender's interface. Blender is so close to being awesome but loves to make the UX a string of shin kicks and face plants.
This seems very convoluted and complex, like a hack or workaround. I think Blender's workflow and UI is a poor fit for storyboarding. Greasepencil itself works fine inside of Blender because it's still a 3D tool in a 3D program and can make use of those 3d tools for creating multiplane animation, concept art or previz. But storyboards are fundamentally a 2D form. It's great that we can animate them now, but like 3x5 cards to a scriptwriter, they are intended to be put on a wall and rearranged or modified easily to tell a story. Hence the name: Story Board. Story pencil should take advantage of the new Blender Apps paradigm - make it it's own thing rather than shoehorning it into blender. If needed, make an easy path into Blender (a storypencil node?) to use it for creating previz, or an actual shot.
Agree that the coming Blender Apps could help to simplify workflow for just simple things like drawing on a 2D canvas, but storyboarding is an evolving art. Today there's a blurry line between what is an storyboard, animatic or previz. It's common to see productions in witch the actual 3D background models are combined with Grease Pencil to do the storyboards. The same scenes created for the storyboard are used next for the layout and animation stages reducing production times. Limiting the stoyboard workflow in Blender to only drawing 2D frames will only reduce the capabilities of the tool.
Wow, great! I tried it out, briefly. I got a bit stuck on the naming conventions of sequences and shots and all. The pop-up for the scene puzzles me, or is it the sequence? or the shot..? I can't figure out how to use it. Can't see the logic.) I use a seqence number ###, a scene number ### and a shot number ###. Something like this: seqXXX-scXXX-shXXX. But it would be great if the naming convention is customisable for everyone, don't you think? Preferrably without pop-ups.
