I redid all the Act 1 storyboards. Made them worse on purpose.

Let me explain.

Pretty Pictures Were the Problem

My first storyboards looked good. Full color. Detailed renders. The kind of thing you'd put in a pitch deck to impress investors.

But that was the problem.

Look at Pixar's storyboards sometime. They're messy. Rough pencil sketches. Sometimes barely legible. Just enough to show what's happening.

Why? Because storyboards aren't supposed to look good. They're supposed to show if the scene works. Pretty pictures hide bad storytelling. You look at a beautiful frame and don't notice the shot doesn't make sense, the pacing is off, the character is looking the wrong direction.

Also: the nicer something looks, the harder it is to throw away. I spent hours on those color frames. I don't want to delete them even when they're wrong. Rough sketches? Easy to kill. Make a new one.

What I Changed

Regenerated all Act 1 panels as rough pencil sketches. Black and white. Loose lines. They look like what they are: planning documents, not art.

Also added character model previews to the storyboard viewer. Now I can flip between the 2D storyboard and the 3D model to see if they match. Spoiler: they often don't. That's useful information.

Jetplane Exists Now

Got preview renders of Jetplane, the color-farting dinosaur. He's rotund. Friendly looking. Big amber eyes. Somewhere between a happy hippo and a plush toy T-Rex.

Seeing him in 3D helps me figure out how he'll actually move around. On paper he's a concept. In Blender he's a physics problem. How does a creature that round even walk?

AI 3D Generation Research

Tested Meshy.ai, Tripo3D, Hyper3D Rodin. Text-to-3D and image-to-3D tools.

Verdict: useful for background props and environmental stuff. Trees, rocks, weird swamp vegetation. Not ready for main characters that need to look consistent across hundreds of shots.

Main cast stays hand-crafted. Background vegetation and minor creatures? AI might save time there. Maybe. Still testing.

Next

Regenerating Act 2 and Act 3 in sketch style too. Then all three acts match.

Funny thing: I'm using AI to make intentionally rough-looking images. Feels backwards. But that's the point. The tool serves the process. Sometimes the best thing AI can do is get out of the way of the story.

Honestly

This feels better. The polished storyboards felt like they had to prove something. Had to justify using AI by looking impressive. Look how good AI art can be!

The sketches don't carry that weight. They're just planning documents. Nobody's going to frame them. They just need to work.

That's what I need right now. Tools that work, not tools that impress.