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In early 2024, I had the opportunity to contribute to the initial Research & Development phase of the Cat Sanches asset for Love, Death + Robots (Season 4, Episode 5, Studio - Agbo/Visual Creatures - https://agbo.com/).
My role focused on grooming and look-development in Unreal Engine:
• building early prototypes
• testing hair and shading pipeline options
• presenting visual and technical solutions to the team
These explorations helped inform the production team’s next steps, although the final hero asset - as seen on screen - was completed later by other artists.
This project was primarily created in Unreal Engine - including previs and animation tests.
• Grooming and lookdev: Ornatrix/Maya/Unreal
• Previz and scene setup: animated directly in UE
• Final animation and rigging: done in Maya (info confirmed by Miguel Diez Aznar)
This post includes R&D materials only (clearly watermarked and non-final), shared with kind permission from the production team.
Big thanks to Ryan McNeely, Miguel Diez Aznar and the team at AGBO for the collaboration and trust.
All content shown here is for educational and portfolio purposes only.
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Thank you and have a great day
Best regards
Andrew.
Kinda hoping Unreal will also add a custom grooming plugin for Unreal in the future…
I haven´t tried Ornatrix in Unreal yet, so I don´t know how capable that is.
Generally, I don´t mind if more specialized tools are done as plugins by people who actually have years of know-how, instead of having native devs trying to play catch up.
And even back in 3ds max I rarely REALLY had the need for a dedicated grooming solution for my line of work.
But also,when I DID need something, I could mostly help myself out with the native hair&fur stuff, so at least SOME basic grooming functionality would be neat.
Thank you bro for your comment. Yes, grooming in Unreal looks quite good now, and there are even studios that produce animated films directly inside it.
