‘Max & the Midknights’: Creating a stop-motion look with UE5

Nickelodeon's 'Max & the Midknights' reinvented TV animation by building its entire world in Unreal Engine 5 and adopting a live-action-inspired production pipeline. Instead of starting with storyboards, the team first constructed a fully modular CG world, then used virtual cameras to shoot coverage before storyboarding only confirmed shots—eliminating waste. The show achieves a stop-motion aesthetic through techniques like animating on twos, oversized textures implying miniature models, and handcrafted VFX including cotton-string smoke and replacement-piece fire geometry. The entire season ran in a single UE5 project shared by up to 10 artists simultaneously, enabling unprecedented flexibility across all 20 episodes.