Our Animation Pipeline Breakdown

Pipeline Overview

The short was rendered entirely in Blender, primarily with Octane Render (ACEScg), chosen for its look and fast iteration on physically plausible lighting. We also used Cycles on a few shots to optimize turnaround near the deadline.

Modeling/sculpting/texturing were supported by ZBrush and Substance Painter. For characters, we leveraged Unreal Engine's MetaHuman and established a bridge to Blender (via Polyhammer) to use the MetaHuman facial rig natively.

Rigging and animation combined in-house rigs (some in Maya) with Reallusion AccuRig/ActorCore and targeted hand animation in Cascadeur. Houdini FX and EmberGen handled most of the effects work.

The main technical hurdle was unifying a body rig with the MetaHuman facial setup inside Blender. We also iterated heavily on snow simulations and the Blender↔Houdini handoff before reaching a stable result. Closer to the deadline, we balanced render quality and throughput by mixing Octane with Cycles where it made sense.

All team members are freelancers with experience in indie studios and content creation, which helped us collaborate efficiently and keep the production moving.

Watch the Final Result

Check out our latest animation on YouTube:

Behind the Scenes

Our team worked remotely across different time zones, using a combination of specialized tools to create this project. The flexibility of our pipeline allowed us to adapt to changing requirements while maintaining high quality standards.

Key aspects of our workflow:

• Blender for rendering and scene assembly
• Octane Render for realistic lighting
• MetaHuman for character creation
• Houdini for complex simulations
• Substance Painter for texturing

This project demonstrates how a distributed team can produce cinematic-quality animation through careful planning and the right tool selection.