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Understanding Scenes and How to Use Them

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What is a Scene?

If you’re familiar with Storyboard Pro, then you’re probably aware that every “Shot” is called a “Scene” in that software. The same naming convention can be applied in Blender 5.0 now with the Story Tools update where each Scene Strip is a window into it’s own Scene. Instead of cutting the Scene Strip into panels in Blender, we instead add keyframes on the Dopesheet with Grease Pencil objects. Check out tutorial from the Blender Studio showing you how it works with no add-ons.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTRF_VseX1k

But What Actually is a Scene?

If you think of a Scene as it’s own three dimension space where we can add whatever we want inside then we can start to explore the idea of a Scene more as a Set rather than an individual “Shot”. Therefore, a Scene is a collection of assets, cameras and environments used to tell stories.

Consider the diagram below. The Scene Icon in the middle houses all objects that we might need to tell a story. It’s up to decide how we can best tell our story inside any given Scene or across multiple Scenes.

I like to use the example of telling a story that takes place both outside of a House and inside of the House. To make our lives easier, we don’t have to create all of the Shots (aka Cameras) in just one Scene. We can utilize multiple Scenes to tell the story. So how do we combine multiple scenes? Before Blender 5.0, we had to render playblasts and reimport video files into the a separate Editing Scene (or other editing software) ****to preview an entire Sequence. Now, with Blender 5.0 as shown in the video above, we can use Scene Strips and a Sequencer (which is assigned to an Edit Scene) to assemble our footage.

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Binding Cameras to Scene Strips

In the video above, Pablo shows how we can create traditional 2D storyboards using a Scene Strip for each Shot. But if we want to work with 3D environments with props and possibly 3D character models then we’re better off having multiple cameras inside a single Scene. Scene Strips allow us to bind cameras to them so we can represent each Camera in our Scene as a Strip in the Sequencer.

In the image below, we can see the Cameras are represented as little strips in the Dopesheet and their respective Scene Strip below in the Sequencer. The benefit of this is so we can use Non Linear Editing (NLE) to construct a sequence of shots without having to move cameras and animation around in the timeline. Note: the camera strips are part of the Whippet add-on and are not natively included in Blender.

So how do we do this?

Add a Scene Strip (if you don’t already have one)
Select the Scene Strip and go to the Properties panel
Under Strip Properties, go under Scene
1. Select Camera under Input
2. Select the Camera

So our Scene Strip acts as a live feed looking into the Scene through that specific Camera - it’s pretty neat! Now we can have multiple Scenes with a series of Cameras from each Scene bound to Scene Strips that all cut together in a Sequencer.

Here’s one branch of the image above:

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Complete Working Example

If you would like to see a complete working example of this workflow, please watch my talk at BCON Austin along with a breakdown of the project. You can download the whole file for free at the bottom of the webpage.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77UF0LYs3dY

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Table of Contents

🔗 External Links

Understanding Scenes and How to Use Them

What is a Scene?

But What Actually is a Scene?

Binding Cameras to Scene Strips

Complete Working Example