A corporate project from a few years back: a narrative animation, character-driven, with cel-rendered characters within a 3D world. Several times we used crash cutaways to help explain parts of the story: little vignettes as if taken from other animations, all with very different visual styles.
All created in Blender, After Effects and Illustrator. The animation is for corporate use, so I can’t show it here, but I can show some snaps:
Couple of lessons I learned along the way:
If you’re a 3D artist needing to produce a 2D animation, it’s sometimes best to roughly create your characters in 3D, animate them and render out their poses, then draw over them manually. Helps to keep your characters on-model (ie consistent looking).
And: Just because it’s in the script doesn’t mean it needs to end up on screen. You can let the audience fill in the gaps. If your story needs a character to put on or take off clothes—a lab-coat, say—show them starting to take it off, then cut away while they actually peel it off. Cut back as they’re straightening their clothes. Done carefully it looks and feels naturalistic, tells the story, and saves you a ton of animation/cloth simulation that the audience doesn’t really care about
Wonderful!