- Thumbnail a set of animation keys before touching a rig.
- Storyboard shots inside a set you built, with correct perspective for free.
- Plan a camera move by drawing what you want in frame.
Build · 30–45 min Three ways to use it
- Thumbnail your keys before you touch the rig
Four rough drawings of contact, down, pass and up take about five minutes and save an hour of posing. You are deciding what the poses are while the cost of changing your mind is a scribble rather than a keyframe.
And because this is Grease Pencil, you can draw them right next to the character, at the correct scale. The thumbnail and the thing it describes are in the same space.
- Storyboard inside the set
Draw shots inside the background you built on Days 2–3, and the perspective is already correct — because you are drawing in the actual space rather than trying to imagine it onto a flat page.
This is the thing that is genuinely hard to do any other way. A paper storyboard of a 3D set is an act of translation; this is not.
- Plan a camera move by drawing it
Sketch what you want in frame at the start, and what you want in frame at the end. That is a more precise instruction to yourself than any sentence you could write about it.
Then build the move and compare. The gap between what you drew and what you got is the useful part.
Professional animators plan on paper. Nearly all of them, nearly always — because thinking with a pencil is faster than thinking with a rig, and mistakes cost nothing.
This is that same habit without leaving the file, and in the same space as the thing you are planning. If you take only one of these four sessions, take this one.
- You thumbnailed four keys before posing anything.
- You drew at least one shot inside your own background.
- You planned a camera move by drawing its start and end frames.