Humble House

Kelly Vrooman hosted the TD awards show for the years we ran it. She is co-director and co-writer on Humble House, and when the show needed another Unreal artist she put our name in the conversation.

The show was already moving, and one Unreal artist had quickly become more work than one person could reasonably carry.

The production calls it an Artist-First process. The characters, layouts and environments begin with work made by people, then AI tools are used later in the pipeline for lighting, texture and animation.

Our part is the environments. Those are built by hand.

We build the virtual sets the show lives in.

The original idea was to keep the sets fairly rough and let the downstream AI pass do more of the work. In practice we went the other direction. The more information we put into the set ourselves, the less the later stages had to guess.

We were also asked to stay on and consult with the post house. We took the VFX comping, and the specific color keying the pipeline calls for - eye colors shift as shots move through it, and those get keyed back by hand.

450 shots in under five weeks, while we were still figuring out parts of the workflow.

We built alongside Sam Rivera, the show’s other Unreal artist, working closest with Austin Wilson, producer and director at 10Ton, and the prompt engineering team. Together we built the version-control and export process for Unreal, so multiple people could work without stepping on each other.

The pilot landed and the show has a full season. The same episode is being rebuilt for it.

We took the migration onto the current engine version, built custom Unreal tools and widgets specific to this show, and set version control up for a season rather than a pilot.

For the season we are bringing in a DP to shoot the virtual sets, and rebuilding the workflow to make room for one. More human hands on the show, not fewer.