One of my earliest memories of using Renderosity assets in a work environment was during a time in my freelance career when I was creating storyboards. At the time there was not a decent storyboard application that did what I needed without being excessively expensive. Being in the early stages of my career I needed to find a budget-friendly way to quickly put together and modify an extensive storyboard.

With most of the work being done in Photoshop, it was a bit labor and time intensive making it difficult to turn around quickly. If you were working with a fine artist providing drawings then that artist needed time to create them while someone else put them together with script directions, notations, and dialog.

I would love to say that it was a time of tight production budgets in the early indie years but in reality, tight production budgets were a fact of life for most of my career. This forced me and others into finding ways to make it happen. That might have been a plus in that we had to constantly re-invent the wheel because we couldn’t afford to buy one. While I loathed this method there is no doubt it exposed me to many different techniques and nuances to getting the job done within budget constraints.

This is one of the reasons I learned to create 3D scenes for image renders. With video and then later data-driven cameras everything accelerated. Sometimes a production was happening so fast that you only had a short time to accomplish one task before moving on to the next. Being self-sufficient in the storyboard department can have a tremendous impact on the speed of completing that task, freeing up you and other freelancers to move on to the next task.

When iClone was released, even in its early form, it sped up 3D scene creation and relegated DAZ Studio and Photoshop to less important roles in my storyboard production pipeline. If they needed a quick turnaround or blocking out a virtual shot, Renderosity content used with iClone filled that need and became a go-to combination for me.

Once I got enough content, I could create much richer panels with more detail and even nuance which was not possible with non-posable figures and primitive blocks for buildings. That extra added nuance conveyed the idea behind the scene in more vivid detail.

One thing about storyboards is that they are rarely if ever seen by the public, so it didn’t matter if the figures looked like the actual actors or not as it was just a visual guide to produce the story. Mostly these storyboards were used to convey ideas to cast and crew but, in some cases, they were slickly produced, high-quality pitch boards to raise funds for production too.

Throw in a well-rendered 2D background, a character or two, a few props and you can create a nice-looking storyboard panel in little time then move on to the next panel. Programs like iClone allowed me to store previous projects and make templates to speed things up even more. 

While it still requires a trip through Photoshop for things like dialog, instructions and so forth this still remains a viable option as most of us are already app-overloaded or even worse, subscription overloaded to a point it would be nice to eat every once in a while.

Renderosity assets combined with the right software can produce some amazing results creating professional-level images that can convey a scene in one shot. While there are certainly more complicated storyboards out there, particularly when a fine artist is involved, not every project has that budget or time.

Storyboards can be very handy for first-time content creators too. They can keep things organized, and help point out any slow areas or even plot holes. It generally keeps track of telling a coherent story. Continuity is key and a storyboard can maintain continuity.

So, the next time the creative urge hits, grab some Rendo assets, along with your favorite 3D application, and map out your vision in however much detail you desire.