From 2D to 3D, How to Storyboard in Blender.
A guide to help you learn Blender for 2D/3D Storyboarding and more.
By Maurits Valk
Contents
This section covers how to approach learning Blender. Blender can do so many things so it’s easy to get lost in the feature rich dungeons. I provide useful tips to keep you on track and learn Blender efficiency.
01
How to Learn Blender
Links to courses, YouTube channels and other resources that can help you learn Blender.
Where to Learn
I share my setup file and preferences that help me work fast. Whippet GP is covered here.
Setup & Preferences
A large list of artists to follow, add-ons that help you work and other resources to help you produce your stories.
Resources / Add-ons
02
03
04
Useful Links
Blender Links
1 Blender Download�2 Blender Market (now Superhive)
3 Blender YouTube (latest showcase reel)
5 Latest Blender Manual (4.4)
Blender is kind of a double edge sword. It’s so feature rich that it can do amazing things like produce an Oscar winning Animated Feature Film, Flow. On the other hand, with so many features at your fingertips it can be really overwhelming when you open Blender for the first time.
My best advice is to start small and take it slow. The days don’t need to be actual days so go at your own pace:
01
How to Learn Blender
Grease Pencil (GP) is the tool inside Blender that lets you draw in 2D and also in 3D space, making it very versatile.
Before learning how Grease Pencil works in 3D space, try using the 2D Animation workspace to learn all the tools of GP in 2D. Once you have a sound understanding of GP, then you can move on to learning GP in 3D space. There are heaps of YouTube tutorials showing how to use Grease Pencil and all of its features (my favorite).
More to come here…
01.1
Learning Grease Pencil
Storyboarding in Blender has numerous advantages. The ability to draw characters acting in 3D space at true scale is incredibly beneficial for productions. You are providing so much more information to a Layout or Previz artist. This makes 3D Storyboards more valuable in any production but also requires more skills to implement.
There are a few different workflow philosophies that are practiced storyboarding within Blender:
Whatever your workflow maybe, there are several add-ons that help you create new and organize cameras but I advise keeping it simple for your first scene and just using camera markers on the timeline. If you only learn how to use Blender through add-ons I worry you might not be able to understand the rest of Blender or where everything lives natively.
Your first scene should be a very simple environment, one or two Grease Pencil character objects and a few shots. Start with a Wide shot, then have one character approach the other, they say hi and the one of them leaves. Keep it simple!
Another method is to just take screenshots from your camera setups and draw over the backgrounds in your favorite 2D program. This is common practice in the industry.
01.2
Storyboarding in Blender
YouTube is the place to learn anything to do with Blender. Because Blender is free and open source, it allows for a larger community of users to create and share their work. You can find a tutorial for any part of Blender on YouTube so start there.
Spitfire Storyboards Channel is the go-to-channel to learn about storyboarding in Blender. Paul Coulthard is an industry veteran and actively uses Blender for his professional work.
02
Where to Learn Blender
Here are additional artists and channels whom share their processes in Blender.
They vary from concept artists, YouTube creators, animators and viz dev artists.
My personal Storyboard mentors who offer paid courses and personalize feedback. Receiving personalized feedback on sequences from industry pros is the fastest way to learn (IMO). They do not teach Blender.
02.1
Where to Learn Blender
Here are additional artists and channels whom share their processes in Blender.
02.2
Where to Learn Blender
The next few slides show some helpful places to tweak your user settings and how I setup my Blender workspaces.
03
Setup & Preferences
Setup the Pie Menu so you only have to press ‘tab’ to bring it up. You don’t want to have to hit two buttons to bring this menu up because you will be switching between a lot.
03.1
Pie Menu
Increasing the softness will allow you to have a thicker stroke without pressing down as hard. This is recommended but to each their own.
03.2
Pen Pressure
Here is an example of my latest Blender 4.4 default workspace. To save your default space, go to File > Defaults > Save Startup File. It also saves everything you have in your file so keep it lean. Note, you could remove the Outliner and Properties panels depending on you can access in your side panel menu (accessed with ‘N’ on your keyboard)
03.3
Workspace
Viewport
Dope Sheet
Outliner
Properties
Whippet GP
Timeline
You can reassign the Grease Pencil tools by right clicking on them and hitting the ‘Change Shortcut’ button then press the button on your keyboard you want to use. Note, you have to ensure you don’t conflict with other keyboard shortcuts in Blender for it to work properly. Below are my shortcuts for the GP tools.
03.4
GP Shortcuts
Brush / B
Eraser / E
Bucket Fill / G
Whippet GP Shortcuts for both the Grease Pencil Mode and Dopesheet/Timeline:
Go to Edit > Preferences > Keymap > Grease Pencil > Grease Pencil Paint Mode
Scroll down to the relevant spaces where you can adjust shortcuts depending where and what you’re doing (I know it’s a lot).
03.5
Whippet GP Shortcuts
I change the brush size shortcut to R and brush strength to Shift R to not conflict with my Whippet GP shortcuts:
I also add the Whippet Jump keyframe operators in the dope sheet so when my cursor is hovering over the dope sheet it works there too.
Pinning workspaces helps you move faster between scenes. For example, Pin your VideoEditing Scene to a Video Editing workspace tab so everytime you click on the Video Editing workspace tab, it will auto jump you to the VideoEditing scene. Blender is kinda funny because you can’t edit sequence strips from the current scene you’re in so you need a separate scene to edit sequences from other scenes. I do the same for the scene I’m working in on my Storyboarding Workspace
03.6
Pin Scenes
Once you get into the thick of it with Blender you’ll start to hear the word, “add-on” alot…and I mean a lot. There is an add-on for anything. An add-on is a plugin that can help you with a workflow, automate things or provide additional menus and customization options.
Whippet GP is my free add-on to help insert GP drawings like you typically would with Storyboard Pro. Here is my blog post with a download of Whippet GP 3.0 updates and a YouTube tutorial showing the new features
Here is my free GP Brush pack. It was made for 4.2 but you can use it for 4.3+. I will make a video about how to move it over to 4.3 and updates I need to make to it soon…
04
Resources / Add-ons
Shot Management Add-ons
Grease Pencil Add-ons
1 Storytools - gives you quick access to grease pencil features and camera tools�2 Cursor Snapper - quickly move the 3D cursor and draw at 3D cursor location
Below are add-ons I use frequently for helping assemble 3D environments and other tools.
04.1
Useful Add-ons
Below are marketplaces to purchase 3D assets so you don’t have to make them. Credit the artists where applicable!
04.2
3D Marketplaces
Additional YouTube channels I frequently watch:
04.3
YouTube Channels
Additional Storyboard Artists and resources to learn from:
04.4
Storyboard Resources
Thank you for stopping by! I hope this was helpful and feel free to message me with feedback to improve this deck on my Discord.
Best of luck!
Maurits Valk