Any good tools or tricks for storyboarding INSIDE Blender?

I’m doing a lot of storyboarding at the moment, and I keep jumping from software to software. Is there some trick or clever tool out there to do storyboarding inside Blender, without ever opening another piece of software? I can do quick images and assemble them, of course, but I feel like I’m missing something, like there’s something out there that makes it easier…? I know about the grease pencil, but I’m not clear on whether it lets me do multiple pictures and arrange them flexibly, it mainly seems to be a drawing tool, not organizational?

EDIT: (Warning, this is turning into late night ramble session, if it gets too weird I’ll edit out the crazy later :smiley: )
So, what I’m basically thinking is something that lets me create and organize scenes and simplified assets easily, preferably on the fly. A list of scenes (presumably each in a distinct .blend) that I can switch around in easily, rearranging scenes and exporting assets inside them as new .blends for later improvement (likely linked into the scenes that use them). A one-stop visual thinking board that allows file organization for later work. Does that make sense? I should go to sleep now…

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I recommend that you check out some tuts on Grease pencil, you can get away with GP a lot by using layers, scenes, comps, image editor/painter, texture painting, Freestyle and the video editor.

Naturally I assume the boards are not full on paintings but mostly drawings.c

One workflow to look into is creating many scenes in the same .blend file and using the Video Sequence Editor to edit them. When creating new scenes within the same .blend file, you can have objects/data be shared, which is pretty useful to have the same objects be updated across multiple scenes just by editing it in one scene.

With this setup, you’re free to use Grease Pencil, imported images, and/or any other Blender tools to help visualize your storyboards. Though I do seem to recall there being some sort of a problem when linking rigs and propogating that through multiple scenes.

Anyhow, that’s the workflow I used on an animatic project. After looking into several different storyboarding programs paid and free, this was what I ended up doing. It wasn’t perfect, but I was looking for the most efficient workflow to work in rough 2D/3D elements ideally without having to deal with exporting/importing out of multiple programs.

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Another tip is that one scene can be a (read-only) “background” for another scene; that is, all the objects in the former appear in the latter, but cannot be selected or edited there (only in the original scene).

Oh, that’s interesting. How is that done?

In the Scene settings, there is a “Background” field. Just choose the other scene to be the background from there.

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And, I just tried it–you can have backgrounds to backgrounds, too!

So if scene 1 is the background to scene 2, and you make scene 2 the background to scene 3, you will see both scenes 1 and 2 in scene 3.

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IMO a good storyboarder needs to be FAST, you should use Storyboarder or Krita.

Whoa, didn’t know that was a thing. I could see that being useful!

This is fascinating! Haven’t tried it yet, but I did dabble with the whole scenes in VE thing. You can also import scenes from other .blends, after all, and linking may be interesting. A bit of a juryrig, but smells like potential. Anyone experimenting with this or something like it, please post your findings, good and bad!!

This all depends on what look you want to go for. My colleagues put together a storyboard by print-screening a load of cubes and similarly low-poly models.