For the launch of ZKsync’s ZK Token, creative studio Look Mister partnered with All of it Now to develop a high-speed racing film in Unreal Engine. Look Mister led the creative direction, storyboarding, and final edit, while All of it Now developed the asset, animation, and rendering pipeline required to take the project from concept through final frames in a six-week production timeline.
The compressed schedule required a pipeline built around rapid iteration and procedural control. AOIN developed a custom car livery system supporting more than 20 unique vehicle designs, with paint schemes, color palettes, decals, driver helmets, and jumpsuits controlled through editable presets. Cars could then be swapped into the race environment without rebuilding the underlying assets.
Vehicle animation was similarly built around procedural systems. Hero cars used high-resolution Nanite meshes for close-up shots while running on lower-resolution skeletal rigs for animation. Procedural controls drove steering, wheel rotation, and suspension movement based on each car’s position along the track, while a group spline system allowed animators to control the full field of cars together. Processes that would otherwise have required days of manual animation could be reduced to minutes of setup.
The project also included the development of Zeek, ZKsync’s mascot, as a hero character for the film. AOIN modeled, textured, and rigged the character in-house, including a custom skeleton and facial blendshapes for expressive animation. Additional partner characters were incorporated as the production developed, including Pudgy Penguin, who was rigged and animated to wave the checkered flag at the finish line during the final week of production.
The resulting Unreal pipeline gave the production team a flexible framework for iterating on vehicles, characters, and animation while maintaining the visual complexity required for the final film.
