How This Painterly Animated Short Was Rigged & Animated Entirely in Unreal Engine

Dardo Studios explains how Control Rig, Sequencer, Lumen, projected paintovers, and hand-drawn effects helped a small team create a high-octane cinematic without a traditional Maya-to-engine animation pipeline. Dardo Studios originally planned Ghost Stride as a 15-to-20-second parkour sequence demonstrating its animation capabilities. The concept gradually expanded into a complete stylized short that brought together the studio’s character, environment, animation, lighting, VFX, technical art, and illustration teams. Its high-speed action takes inspiration from Spider-Verse, Arcane, Team Fortress 2, and Genndy Tartakovsky’s work, but pushes that painterly visual language into darker horror territory.