Get the best from your stories in Blender

Draw your ideas, explore various directions and cuts, place the cameras and edit your story in real time and with great simplicity!
StoryLiner, all you need from storyboard to camera management and rendering, for artists, directors and studios.

Currently supported Blender versions are 3.6 LTS, 4.0, 4.1 and 4.2. Available on Blender Market.

Watch the animatic and get the sample project here.

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You will love it !

StoryLiner is far more than a tool, it is a complete environment made for you to get the best from your stories!

At the heart of it is the ability to do non-linear real-time editing of the shots directly into the 3D view. Starting from a scene containing an action, you create shots based on new or exiting cameras, define their time range and sort them in the order you wand them to appear in the edit. Non-linear means that shots do not have to follow the scene chronology: you can swap them, shoot the same part of the action from several points of view and even have ellipses! Then turn on the Edit Play Mode, and watch your edit in the viewport.

An then, there are all the other features needed to take advantage of that in a creative way: global animation retiming, batch rendering, storyboarding and easy-drawing on grease pencil objects in the scene…

This add-on too is designed to be production oriented, production proof and… artist friendly!!

Find out the full extent of what StoryLiner can do for you in the Features List !

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StoryLiner Editions

StoryLine exists in 4 editions to fit your needs.

	StoryLiner Essential This is the free edition.
	StoryLiner Essential Perfect for previz and pure 3D. Easy manage and render the shots in your scenes.
	StoryLiner Storyboard In addition to all the Essential features, this edition provides all the tools and environment for efficient storyboarding as well as hybrid 2D/3D previz.
	StoryLiner Studio All the previz and storyboard features plus a set of tools to exchange the edits with external editing applications and generate documents such as edit boards. This edition is very well suited to handle full projects, whether you are a freelancer or a studio with wide pipelines.

See Differences between editions.

Throughout this documentation and in the video tutorials the features are associated to the logo of the editions supporting them.

Why StoryLiner?

StoryLiner is a fork of an open-source pre-production tool named Ubisoft Shot Manager that I initialy crafted to support the previz of the animated TV series Raving Rabbids - Mission to Mars we did at Ubisoft in 2020 / 2021. I extended it with a whole storyboarding workflow for the needs of another production then its development ceased.

Deeply convinced that there was still a need for it in the Blender community and eager to continue exploring its huge potential, I decided to give it a second life and took this opportunity to push forward - or deeply revisit in some cases - several key concepts.

Here are the result of those experimentations.

If you were a user of Ubisoft Shot Manager:

• New features and changes since Ubisoft Shot Manager

• Transitioning from Ubisoft Shot Manager to StoryLiner

Disclaimer

In spite of all the efforts to make StoryLiner reliable some troubles may occur in some specific use cases.
In case (unlikely) of data loss or corruption of your Blender scenes data, be aware that the author of the add-on cannot be taken as responsible. Use it at your own risks.

This said, I will do my best to help you and integrate your feedback in order to provide a memorable creative experience StoryLiner.

Please report requests and issues you may face to the Issues page.
Sharing the troubles and asking questions contributes 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,

• Learn how to make the first steps, watch tutorials, get inspiration from the resources,

• … and give life to your stories !