Manairons: How a Small Team Brought a Catalan Legend to Life with Character Creator

I'm Gerard Martínez, a 3D Artist from Barcelona specializing in cartoon-style characters. I am also a 3D instructor and teacher. I have the privilege of combining two of my greatest passions: 3D art and teaching.

This story is co-produced with 3CAT.

A Magical Story About Work, Tradition, and Freedom

Some stories are born from an idea. Others, from necessity. Manairons was born from both.

Inspired by Catalan folklore, our game follows Nai, a rebellious manairó – tiny magical creatures who accomplish tasks in seconds. When Mayor Llorenç discovers a magical container of manairons, the Pyrenean village of Vilamont thrives at first. Factories never stop, production soars. But the villagers lose their trades, their purpose, and their freedom.

Nai must rebel and restore balance to the town. At its core, Manairons explores the tension between progress and essence, technology and humanity, control and freedom.

A Vision with Soul

From the very beginning, we knew that Manairons had to move players emotionally before even explaining itself. We did not want players to understand the world through words, but to feel it at first sight.

That vision was made possible thanks to Ivet Macías, our Art Director, Producer, and 3D Artist, who became the visual heart of the project. Under her guidance, the art direction was built around three pillars: atmosphere, narrative tone, and emotion.

Working alongside her was Eliant Elias, our Concept Artist, whose sensitivity transformed abstract ideas into soulful images. Exaggerated silhouettes, faces that were both tender and unsettling, and colors that breathe nostalgia and mystery defined Manairons' visual identity.

Together, they achieved a balance between the familiar and the uncanny, creating a world that feels close yet slightly off, inviting players to look twice.

Handcrafted and Painterly

Visually, Manairons merges a handcrafted aesthetic with painterly detail. Every texture looks as if it has been brushed by hand, and every light carries emotion. We wanted the player to feel as if they were walking inside a painting.

We took inspiration from Lost in Random, Little Nightmares, and Arcane, yet the final result became deeply personal, rooted in Catalan culture and in our own artistic language. Even though the tone is dark, the game ultimately tells a story of hope.

The Challenge: A Coherent, Fast, and Flexible Pipeline

The character pipeline was one of the most demanding yet rewarding parts of production. Only two people, Ivet and I, handled the entire process of modeling, rigging, and texturing. That meant we needed a workflow that was solid, fast, and predictable.

We started from a Character Creator base mesh, one of the software's biggest advantages.

Its templates come production-ready with optimized topology, clean UVs, and functional rigging right out of the box. That alone saved us weeks of work, which was invaluable in a project with such a limited schedule.

From there, the Ultimate Morph Pack became our key tool. With its extensive library of sliders, we could define proportions, musculature, and facial features without breaking rig compatibility. The result was a strong, expressive silhouette perfectly adapted to our stylized look.

Bernat Batum: A Character with a Heart (and a Story)

One of the clearest examples of this workflow is Bernat Batum, one of the game's main bosses. From the start, we wanted him to convey humanity, even within his mechanical stiffness, which came from the manairons' magic.

I began with a Character Creator base and then sent the model to ZBrush via GoZ to sculpt finer details. Ivet supervised the overall balance to ensure every element stayed true to the project's visual direction: a stylized and expressive cartoon style.

Once the sculpt was complete, we brought it back into Character Creator with full compatibility, without losing weights or UVs. That seamless integration allowed us to iterate quickly, test materials, and maintain artistic consistency throughout the process.

The Painterly Touch of Eliant Elias

During texturing, collaboration was key. I handled the base materials in Substance 3D Painter, focusing on general tones and physical properties. Then, Eliant added his painterly touch, with brushstrokes, stains, and small imperfections that gave each surface a handcrafted soul.

Thanks to Character Creator, we could re-import and preview textures with precision before integrating them into Unreal Engine, ensuring visual accuracy at every stage.

Cartoon Rigging and Animation in Blender

All rigging and animation were done in Blender. Even though Character Creator's rig is robust, we decided to design our own to achieve a more cartoon-like movement, with elastic poses, broader expressions, and a more narrative body language.

This gave the characters life and reinforced the visual tone of the game: dark but full of humanity.

Once animation was complete, the characters were integrated into Unreal Engine 5, where I worked on lighting to highlight textures and maintain the balance between the magical and the handcrafted.

A Pipeline that Empowers Creativity

The combined workflow of Character Creator, ZBrush, Blender, Substance 3D, and Unreal Engine gave us two things every artist values: coherence and creative freedom.

We reduced iteration time by more than 40% while maintaining full control over every artistic detail. For a small and focused team, that kind of efficiency makes all the difference.

Working with Character Creator taught us that efficiency can also be creative. It was not just about speed, but about building a stable, predictable workflow that encouraged experimentation without technical risks.

That reliability gave us the freedom to test new ideas while maintaining rig and texture compatibility. It allowed us to focus on what truly matters: the art, the emotion, and the soul of the characters.

A Philosophy of Creation

Through Manairons, we learned something that is now part of our creative DNA. When a tool offers both technical stability and artistic freedom, the result is not just efficiency but the space to create with purpose.

Character Creator was not just another piece of software in our pipeline. It became the bridge between our artistic vision and technical execution. It allowed us to tell our story with sensitivity and detail.

Conclusion

Thanks to Character Creator, Manairons preserved its handcrafted essence without sacrificing efficiency. It became the bridge between tradition and technology – uniting the sensitivity of handmade art with the power of modern production.

After months of working with CC, testing Character Creator 5 was transformative. Everything feels lighter, faster, and more integrated with Unreal. The new facial rig is remarkably expressive, opening exciting storytelling possibilities. Organizing libraries and adapting characters across art styles while maintaining production quality is now seamless.

For us, it was never just about building characters – it was about giving life to stories that speak of culture, identity, and creation itself. Character Creator helped us bring a Catalan legend to life, a world filled with light, texture, and soul.

Read the full story here to discover how we balanced progress and essence in bringing our dream program to life.