OddBot reinvents its animation pipeline for Playdate with Winnie the Pooh
Emmy-winning and Annie-nominated animation studio OddBot is renowned for its work in children’s entertainment.
It had previously partnered on hit shows like Action Pack for Netflix and Muppet Babies for Disney Junior, but when OddBot was brought on to create Playdate with Winnie the Pooh—also for Disney Junior—the studio decided to venture into new territory.
For this project, the team would transition from a traditional CG animation pipeline to one based on real-time production in Unreal Engine.
The success of this experiment shined a light on an innovative way of making children’s animation—one that enhances collaboration, creativity, and speed without sacrificing charm.
It had previously partnered on hit shows like Action Pack for Netflix and Muppet Babies for Disney Junior, but when OddBot was brought on to create Playdate with Winnie the Pooh—also for Disney Junior—the studio decided to venture into new territory.
For this project, the team would transition from a traditional CG animation pipeline to one based on real-time production in Unreal Engine.
The success of this experiment shined a light on an innovative way of making children’s animation—one that enhances collaboration, creativity, and speed without sacrificing charm.
From traditional pipelines to real-time innovation
The first two seasons of Playdate with Winnie the Pooh were created using traditional CG methods, with OddBot a step removed from delivering the CG elements of the show.
Instead of creating the assets, blocking out animation, and delivering final renders, they acted more in a creative supervisor and art direction capacity, providing feedback notes on the animation, doing drawovers—literally drawing on frames to show corrections or suggested changes—and then sending those revisions back for their partner CG studio to implement.
That all changed in the third season.
Moving their pipeline to Unreal Engine enabled them to scale up, bringing new team members on board so they could take on much more of the production in house. “Now, we have a lot more creative control and the ability to play a little bit more,” says Chris Hamilton, Founder of OddBot. “Using Unreal, we have almost instant feedback, and we don’t have to wait for long renders before we see what the animation looks like.”
The nature of their pipeline—leaning more into a video game workflow—and the dynamic in the team completely changed with this transition: departments could work simultaneously instead of linearly.
Courtesy of OddBot Inc. and Disney Junior
While the 3D artists were laying out the storyboard, lighting could run at the same time, with the team rendering out whole scenes and not just frames to evaluate progress throughout.
“The whole time, we’re checking the final look in the storyboard,” says Elise Fachon, Co-Executive Producer and Creative Director at OddBot. “We’ve been iterating all the way through, and we wind up with a final product that meets our expectations much more—in a much faster timeline.”
With multiple disciplines operating concurrently—from storyboarding and animation to lighting and rendering—review sessions became a far more collaborative affair.
“Lighting the season was a totally new thing for the entire crew,” says Sammy Rivkin, Line Producer at OddBot.
The team set up a biweekly live lighting session to tweak the animation in real time, appraising scenes in the session and adjusting as necessary—with changes viewable instantly.
“You can look in the viewport and go, ‘oh, could we tweak this a little bit? Can we adjust this rim light and see it happening in real time?’ And that was this moment of holy cow—what can’t we do with this?” says Fachon.
For OddBot, working in this way felt less like a pipeline where each department has to wait for the other to finish before they can move on and more like a shared, dynamic creative space where everyone could contribute.
“The whole time, we’re checking the final look in the storyboard,” says Elise Fachon, Co-Executive Producer and Creative Director at OddBot. “We’ve been iterating all the way through, and we wind up with a final product that meets our expectations much more—in a much faster timeline.”
With multiple disciplines operating concurrently—from storyboarding and animation to lighting and rendering—review sessions became a far more collaborative affair.
“Lighting the season was a totally new thing for the entire crew,” says Sammy Rivkin, Line Producer at OddBot.
The team set up a biweekly live lighting session to tweak the animation in real time, appraising scenes in the session and adjusting as necessary—with changes viewable instantly.
“You can look in the viewport and go, ‘oh, could we tweak this a little bit? Can we adjust this rim light and see it happening in real time?’ And that was this moment of holy cow—what can’t we do with this?” says Fachon.
For OddBot, working in this way felt less like a pipeline where each department has to wait for the other to finish before they can move on and more like a shared, dynamic creative space where everyone could contribute.
Courtesy of OddBot Inc. and Disney Junior
Fuzzy characters and groom systems
Winnie the Pooh is soft and fluffy. Tigger, Eeyore, and Piglet are similarly cuddly—but in slightly different ways. This variety posed a distinct challenge on Playdate with Winnie the Pooh.
“We have all these fuzzy characters, and they have to feel super soft and charming but all of the characters have a different look to them,” says Fachon.
The team set out to replicate all of those different kinds of fur, looks, and fur simulations in Unreal Engine to achieve the varied range of character styles present in seasons one and two.
Courtesy of OddBot Inc. and Disney Junior
That was achieved through the use of Unreal Engine’s powerful Groom system: a strand-based rendering and simulation technology for creating hair and fur. It allows for the real-time simulation and rendering of hundreds of thousands of individual hair strands, complete with physical accuracy, lighting, and shadowing.
This system made it possible for OddBot to achieve the tactile, plush look characteristic of Pooh and his friends.
This system made it possible for OddBot to achieve the tactile, plush look characteristic of Pooh and his friends.
Courtesy of OddBot Inc. and Disney Junior
Beyond the show: multi-platform content creation
In the social media age, an animation studio’s work is not done with the delivery of a show. Increasingly, projects include an ask for bespoke content across platforms like Instagram and YouTube.
Unreal Engine simplifies the process of delivering these, making it possible to generate companion content for social media channels quickly and easily.
“In a traditional pipeline, that has to go all the way back to rendering and different layouts, and you’ve got to do a whole different camera pass—it’s too costly, too time consuming,” says Fachon. “With Unreal Engine, you can set up your camera much more easily, back it up, and get everything you want in your shot for your vertical much more quickly.”
The ability to deliver content in this fast, agile way comes with a trifecta of benefits, supporting marketing efforts, expanding content accessibility, and boosting audience engagement.
These are big wins for the IP publisher—but switching to a real-time pipeline has had an equally positive impact for OddBot as well, helping to transform not only production but also morale. With Unreal Engine, OddBot now has a team that enjoys making cartoons as much as kids enjoy watching them.
“As a producer, it’s always been a huge goal of mine to have a team that works incredibly well together, as one unit, and also gets to enjoy the fun of making cartoons—because we do make cartoons for a living,” says Rivkin. “Unreal’s brought out this beautiful collaboration that isn’t necessarily needed in a more assembly line traditional pipeline.”
Courtesy of OddBot Inc. and Disney Junior
A leap of faith that paid off
As Hamilton reflects on the third season of Playdate with Winnie the Pooh, he acknowledges that the transition to Unreal Engine was something of a gamble for OddBot. “This whole season was kind of a leap of faith for both OddBot and Disney,” he says.
Fortunately, the studio’s leap of faith paid off. “Disney was so enthusiastic about what they were seeing early on,” Hamilton explains. “Some of the storyboards looked like final renders—and that really helped set everyone’s expectations on what was possible.”
With Unreal Engine at the heart of their pipeline, OddBot has made the animation process more flexible, inclusive, and creative while sustaining the joyful, collaborative culture it’s developed for nearly 20 years.
As for Winnie the Pooh and his friends, playtime has always been about imagination, and now, the tools that bring them to life are just as imaginative.“Unreal Engine has enabled us to play more and be more creative,” says Hamilton. “And that’s really exciting.”