StoryLiner: Creative narration in Blender

Manage the cameras of your scenes inside Blender. and edit your sequence in real time and with great simplicity.

Current version is 1.0.12 ALPHA. The first public release is planed to be in May 2023

The currently supported Blender versions are 3.3 LTS and 3.4

About StoryLiner

When I was asked to set up a workflow for the Rabbids Invasion TV Series that would provide an unprecedented level of flexibility for the director at early stages of the production, I recycled a idea I implemented 15 years ago in 3dsMax: being able to do non-linear editing of the shots of a sequence directly into the 3D viewport.

Ubisoft Shot Manager was born. Last year, and thanks to the versatility of the Grease Pencil, I extended it with a whole storyboard mode.

I now want to go futher in the exploration of the graphic process offered by that tool. StoryLiner, as a fork of Ubisoft Shot Manager, it the result of those experimentations. This one too is designed to be production proof and is free.

If you were a user of Ubisoft Shot Manager:

• New features and changes since Ubisoft Shot Manager

• Transitioning from Ubisoft Shot Manager to StoryLiner

Alternatively see all the features here:

• Features

Disclaimer

In spite of all the efforts to make StoryLiner reliable some troubles may occur in some specific use cases.

Please report requests and issues you may face to the [Issues page](https://github.com/werwack/storyliner/issues). Sharing the troubles and asking questions help a lot in making the tool more robust.

Getting started

It is highly recommended to start by reading the StoryLiner General Philosophy to clearly understand the purpose of this tool !

Then:

• Download the StoryLiner zip file,

• Install StoryLiner as a Blender addon,

• Mind the features and the vocabulary,

• …And at last try out your installation !

History

StoryLiner is a pre-production tool that was initialy developed to support the previz of an animated TV series we did at Ubisoft between January 2020 and February 2021. From the very beginning we knew we wanted to share it with the Blender community so we released it as part of an open source project on GitHub during summer 2021. Since that time it is used internaly at Ubisoft as well as by several animation production companies and individuals, and we keep supporting it.

Read this article to see how we used this tool on the TV production of Rabbids Invasion: Mission to Mars: User Stories - Blender and the Rabbids.