Gameloft details Bluey's Happy Snaps pipeline: SDF textures, 2D planes, Control Rig

Gameloft Brisbane has explained the art pipeline behind Bluey's Happy Snaps, developed with Ludo Studio and BBC Studios. The game is out on PC, PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. According to the team, in an interview published by 80 Level, characters are layered, camera-facing 2D planes placed in 3D environments. The aim was to keep the show's proportions, outlines, poses and palette while still letting players explore freely.

Characters are modeled and skeletonized in Maya, then rigged in Unreal Engine 5's Control Rig. Technical artist Sean Gobey said the team relied heavily on signed distance fields (SDF) for texturing, which gave a vector look and large texture memory savings. They mix geometry and SDF texture flipbooks. Hands and feet share textures and geometry across all characters. Eyes are done entirely in shader with SDF bezier curves, and blinks and darts can be driven procedurally by a runtime control rig or hand-authored in Sequencer.

Animation is built around eight angles, spaced at 45-degree increments. Animators work on one hero angle and use in-house tools to copy it to the other seven, then adjust as needed. Each angle has its own set of controls. Animation artist Dylan Perrett said the show uses straight-on 0 and 90-degree views sparingly, so the team had to balance game logic against the series' style. Gobey said frequent rig updates sometimes made earlier animation unusable.

Outlines changed several times. The team first tried post-process effects, then geometry with inverse hulls for silhouettes and splines for inner lines. The final approach for most 3D assets uses vertex colors to place shader-generated outlines. Animals keep the inverse hull method. A custom shading model simulates inverse hulls in real time so line thickness stays constant with distance, as in the show.

Environments are mostly hand-painted. There is no real-time lighting as such. Lighting and shadows are authored into textures and materials, with a customizable directional light inside the material for some self-shadowing. Props that characters hold are flattened in the shader when picked up. The team said the 360-degree player-held polaroid camera forced them to find a way to flatten the layered planes so the 2D illusion held from unexpected views. Developers working on stylized 2D-in-3D characters may find the SDF and Control Rig details worth reading in full.