Creating The Wingfeather Saga Animated Series With Unreal Engine

Shining Isle Productions discussed the advantages of a real-time pipeline, developing a customizable real-time NPR shader, and achieving big results on an independent budget.

Turning a beloved book into a screen adaptation is never simple. Fans of Andrew Peterson's fantasy series successfully crowdfunded a TV show pilot in 2016, with backers later helping to fund two seasons. Shining Isle was founded by J. Chris Wall and Andrew Peterson to turn The Wingfeather Saga into an animated series, and nine years after releasing their pilot, Season 4 is now slated for this fall.

Over the years, the studio naturally evolved alongside the tools they were using. In the first two seasons of The Wingfeather Saga, the team did animation in Maya, while layout, rendering, and lighting were handled in Unreal Engine. By Season 3, they made a major shift, going all-in on Unreal Engine and fully embracing real-time workflows.

Since characters, environments, and story elements continue from season to season, the team could reuse digital assets, iterate on existing animation cycles, and production-ready sequences, which saved time and helped keep everything consistent. Control Rig, Sequencer, and animation retargeting became central to Shining Isle's workflow, and they also built custom Blueprint tools to automate scene setup, manage animation libraries, and streamline production tasks.

"We went from a 4% animation revision rate using Maya to almost 10% in Unreal, at no additional cost. That meant our showrunner team could make more than twice as many late-stage performance changes to better tell the story than we could accommodate with the previous Maya roundtrip workflow", said Shining Isle's VP of Production and Executive Producer Keith Lango.

Shining Isle

Production is an iterative business. Typically, artists often have to wait through cycles of rendering, compositing, and review before making changes. Real-time workflows not only speed up individual tasks but also make it easier for the team to collaborate:

"Rather than send stuff back, we invite prior departments to come join the current stage in production to lend their skills and make the late changes in the most current version of the living scene. The nature of Unreal allows us to change camera, animation, editorial, and lighting at every point in the pipeline downstream of those departments – even after they are 'done' with a sequence."

Of course, the stylized storybook look of the show is one of its most interesting aspects, especially considering Unreal has long been seen as not well-suited for NPR. According to Lango, instead of relying on traditional rendering tricks, Shining Isle built this look using custom shaders.

"What's been really fun is that each season of our series has also seen new releases of Unreal Engine, with new features we can leverage to continually improve the visual execution."

Shining Isle also highlighted how effective Unreal Engine 5 can be on an independent budget. The real advantage is in iteration, as the team can now achieve in-house results that would cost roughly twice as much in a conventional workflow, which is no small thing for an independent studio.

Read more here and visit the official Unreal Engine 5 channel on YouTube for a wealth of tutorials and case studies showing how it's used across different productions:

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