Rough Sets, Blocking, and an Animatic - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 112

In the previous section, you only placed the characters once per shot. There is no real reason to restrict yourself
like this, though. There may be a number of contiguous storyboards all from the same camera angle in which
your characters move about. If that is the case, feel free to adjust the character positioning on a board-by-board
basis. You can put even more positions in between if you feel that it helps to show the action. Don't put too
much time into it, though, because these are still just placeholders for the real animation that is yet to come.
Creating an Animatic
An animatic is a bridge step between the storyboards and the fi nal animation. The template scene fi le (of fi les)
you just created is the basis of an animatic. If everything proceeded pretty much according to your story-
boards, you don't really have to create one. However, the longer and more complex your animation is, the
better an idea it becomes, just to ensure that all of your assets are in place before moving on.
The shot matching for The Beast was close enough to the storyboards and the action was clear enough that I
did not create an animatic for the project. If you would like to, though, here is a good way to proceed.
Replacing Storyboards in the Story Reel
Your goal is to replace the storyboards in the story reel with more accurate representations of the fi nal proj-
ect. To do this, you will be working within the template scene fi le. For shots in which there is no camera
movement and little character action, it is as simple as advancing the frame counter to the appropriate shot
and creating an image fi le from the appropriate camera's perspective.
Locate the shot in the timeline by using the markers you created, and set the current frame counter to place
yourself at the beginning of the shot. Select the camera in the 3D view and press Ctrl-Numpad-0 to force
the view from that camera. If you have not used it before, there is a quick preview button on all 3D window
headers that sends the OpenGL preview of the camera's view to the Render window, allowing you to save it
like a render. Figure 7.36 shows the button highlighted, with the OpenGL preview in the Render window.
These “renders” are saved by pressing F3 , just like any regular render. You can save them into a subfolder of
your storyreel folder called animatic, or, in the case of The Beast , quickies.
Back in your main story reel fi le, import these new images into the Video Sequence Editor and place them
above the storyboard image strips that they will replace. Leave the storyboards where they are—you may want
them there for reference later, and it costs almost nothing in terms of fi le size and processing time. Figure 7.37
shows two OpenGL shots superseding their storyboards in the story reel fi le.
For sections with camera movement, you can either export several still shots that correspond to the story-
board breakdown, or, if you're feeling fancier, export the whole range of frames in an animation.
Once again, the preview render header button comes into play. First, though, choose an animation codec that
is appropriate to your system (FFmpeg, QuickTime, AVI), and then set a fi lename as you did when creat-
ing the animation fi le for the story reel. If you have a larger hard drive with plenty of space, you can simply
choose AVI JPEG, which is one of Blender's internally supported animation formats. It does not produce the