In late 2023, The Third Floor’s newly born animation department was presented with an enormous challenge. Our first project was going to be a fully animated feature film featuring both human and alien characters, a large scope with complex battle sequences, and a painterly look that would require extensive look development and compositing. Furthermore, the finished film would need to be delivered in 18 months…from a standing start, with no preproduction beyond a treatment and concept art, and no crew in place for production.
By the laws that normally govern animated film production, we should have failed. Against all odds, Predator: Killer of Killers releases on Hulu on June 6th, 2025. To make this extraordinary feat possible, we embraced real-time production and developed a suite of avant-garde tools that cut some tasks from weeks down to hours. Our tools included Hummingbird, a real-time compositing tool running within the Unreal Engine, VATMobile, a Vertex-Animation-Texture-based geo cache importer and exporter that allowed efficient playback of geo caches in Unreal in shots with large numbers of characters, and Molecule, a component-based Maya rig assembly tool. These tools gave us extreme efficiency: using Hummingbird for in-engine compositing, for instance, the average shot for Killer of Killers was lit and composited to completion in less than a single artist day.