How Unreal Game Adur Uses Stylized 3D Character Creator for Development

In this showcase, Reallusion takes a look at how French indie developer Kabengo! Games uses Reallusion Character Creator 5 and iClone 8 alongside Unreal Engine 5 to produce their upcoming title, Adur: Desagertzea.

By combining CC5’s morph layer system with iClone Unreal LIVE LINK, a four-person studio achieves near-final cinematic rendering and rapid animation iteration without relying on Generative AI automation.

Featured Artist Spotlight: Kabengo! Games

For indie game developers, capturing a distinctive visual identity while maintaining production momentum is an ongoing balance. Kabengo! Games, a four-person indie studio based near Bordeaux in southwestern France, addresses this challenge directly in their debut title, Adur: Desagertzea (“Adur: The Disappearance”).

Technical Pipeline Overview

Interview:
Paul Puaux on Adur: Desagertzea

What inspired Adur: Desagertzea, and how does blending 2.5D exploration mechanics help you showcase Basque traditions and language?

Paul Puaux: The basic idea behind Adur: Desagertzea stems from a family anecdote in which my son nearly ran away from home one evening whilst my wife and I were gone on a night out. Gradually, the idea of turning this scenario into a game took shape.

Together with the team, we mixed and remixed the idea until it incorporated the story of our hero Adur and his grandfather Aitatxi into Basque history and mythology, set in the region where we grew up.

The team shares many common references from 1990s narrative platformers—Another World, Flashback, Heart of Darkness—and modern successors like Inside and Little Nightmares. 2D/2.5D allows us to weave narrative and gameplay together into a cinematic tapestry where the player is the hero. Basque mythology and language are cultural isolates.

This oral tradition enables us to create a world blending the ancestral and the modern—from small fishing villages to ancient forges, mountains, and the ocean.

For Adur, you needed a specific “puppet diorama” aesthetic. Why did you choose Character Creator over photorealistic options like MetaHuman Creator?

Paul Puaux: We realized early on that the storyline would be hard to build without a strong connection to our characters. The emotion they convey is essential for gameplay and cinematics. It was a no-brainer that we needed a flexible pipeline to experiment with their physical presence.

I turned to Character Creator, having used it for years across various projects. Moving to CC5 brought features like ActorMixer, which we used to achieve our specific body and face proportions. Features like overdriven Subsurface Scattering (SSS), realistic wrinkles, pores, scars, and freckles mixed with clay shaders are now regular parts of our design process.

Through the remastered Reallusion Auto Setup plugin for Unreal Engine 5, porting custom shaders turns into an exploration experience. We combine Reallusion’s built-in shading engine with Unreal’s post-processing stencils to create the stop-motion animation look of our main characters and the etched, scribbled appearance of our villains, the Beldurrak.

In that way, it shortens the path from the intention to the final render. And as time always matters in long-term projects, opting for this pipeline is a choice that’s definitely worth it.

Can you break down your animation pipeline? How does iClone LIVE LINK inside Unreal Engine 5 help a small team achieve cinematic quality so quickly?

Paul Puaux: Working in small teams on characters, world, shading, and animation is known for being a one-man band’s job. Building character reactions—whether physical or emotional—is the final gap that creates the “suspension of disbelief”.

Working with a direct link between iClone and Unreal Engine makes a massive difference. In iClone, pose and motion libraries let us quickly explore parkour-inspired movement, Basque pelota games, or caricatural moves. Multiple motion layers in a dedicated timeline allow us to edit face muscles, expressions, switch IK/FK, or correct foot sliding.

Pushing everything to Unreal Engine via Live Link allows us to adjust framing inside the final lighting setup. From there, we bake animations for our Animation Blueprints (ABP) or use Take Recorder in Sequencer while leveraging Lumen, Nanite, and RTX/DLSS hardware. This “WYSIWYG” approach lets us try 10 or 20 takes fast, pulling out the absolute best from our source material.

Pro Tip / Pipeline Hack: Using iClone LIVE LINK plugged directly into Unreal Engine 5 allows animators to test motion libraries, adjust facial expressions, and fix foot sliding in real time against final Lumen lighting and RTX shadows. This “WYSIWYG” (What You See Is What You Get) approach eliminates offline rendering delays, allowing a small studio to test 10 to 20 animation takes in the time it previously took to render one.

With your crowdfunding campaign launching soon, where can players follow your progress, and what pipeline advice do you have for other indie studios?

Paul Puaux: Our website www.kabengo.games is our central hub where the crowdfunding campaign will launch in the coming weeks. You can also follow us on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook under Kabengo! Games, where we regularly share workflows, production logs, and behind-the-scenes updates.

Hearing Aitatxi speak Euskara to his grandson and seeing Mari appear as the mountains describe her allows players to experience this world naturally. We’re not archiving a culture; we’re handing it a controller.

My advice to solo and indie newcomers: gathering tools that fit your project is the fueling engine that keeps your world faithful to your idea. The Reallusion pipeline has been a terrific playground for building the soul of Adur, Aitatxi, and Mari. Making things memorable comes down to the moment when your characters start talking back to you in their own language.

Conclusion: Real-Time Precision Meets Cultural Storytelling

By pairing Character Creator 5 with iClone 8 and Unreal Engine 5, Kabengo! Games demonstrates how small independent teams can deliver cinematic 3D experiences anchored in regional heritage. Rather than relying on generic photorealism or unmanageable manual rigging workflows, Reallusion tools offer indie creators the artistic control needed to bring stylized characters to life efficiently.

To support Kabengo! Games and follow the development of Adur: Desagertzea, visit www.kabengo.games.