Ice Cream Robotto
"No Ice Cream? No Problem"
Longer version
The Challenge
In 2024, the awesome guys and gals at Rokoko — the mocap suits company — created an animation mocap challenge. The theme was pretty loose: imagine you are watching intergalactic TV and switching channels — you might see all kinds of weird shit :) So basically, free rein in terms of story and style. The only condition was to use either actual mocap with Rokoko Studio or their AI tool, which can crunch through uploaded video and give you an animated skeleton.
Well, I definitely didn’t have the suit, so AI-generated skeleton it is!
The Goal
I had two main ideas in mind that I wanted to try out. Apart from always trying to learn more Unreal Engine, I wanted to learn more about gaussian splatting and how to bring it into UE. And second, I somehow wanted to spend more time with my kids :) right…
I have two daughters and they like to draw. From time to time, we create little fun animations from their drawings. What if I made their drawings come alive not just as flat cut-out animation, but in 3D in Unreal? And because the style would be very loose, I could hide a lot of mistakes and make them part of the loose kids’ style — basically cheat as much as possible :) Cool!
But to make it even cooler for them — THEY would actually be the ones doing the mocap and animating their own drawn characters. Bingo!
Best dad of the century right there! :)
What about the Gaussian splats? Those would be used for the environments. Nice.
The Story
Well, I like robots, that’s obvious, and I try to force that onto anybody around me, including my kids :) So they would be those robots and they could design them however they liked. Ok, but what do they do? Something fun and simple.
I started thinking about the need to create some kind of contrast — if the robots are super happy, the environment could be super sad somehow. And since I wanted to scan certain buildings in the city, the story would happen in a city — a sad city :( at first, but then things could get better.
Why? What are those robots doing? Dancing, sure, but they can somehow help the sad city — by selling ice cream to everybody! Who doesn’t like ice cream, right?
So, the tagline would be somehing like this:
"In the sad city, where there is no more ice cream, two dancing robots are here to help! They are the Ice Cream Robotto!"
The Inspirations
Japan — it needed to be somehow over the top. From the moment I read the brief for the challenge, with its crazy random TV content and commercials, I immediately saw crazy Japanese commercials in my head. That’s why “robotto”, and that’s why I wanted to incorporate Japanese lettering and bright, crazy colors.
Also, at the time, I was watching ATARASHII GAKKO, the band from Japan, over and over — especially their awesome music video made as a homage to the legendary Intergalactic by Beastie Boys. That over-the-top fisheye lens was the way to go for this animation.
The Two Kid Robots & Art Style
My daughters each drew their own character. They were 7 and 4, I think, at the time, and I didn’t want to change their drawings at all.
The idea was to transfer their style directly into UE and into some kind of 2D/3D blended style — which I have always loved to play with.
Because the whole process was so loose, and because I didn’t want to get bogged down by details and technical perfectionism, a good name for the final style would be something like “kid punk”.
The Environment
We didn’t have time to design the whole environment in the same style as the characters, and I also wanted to try out gaussian splatting technology in the animation. So I took the chance and hoped the “styles” would somehow work together, even if they were completely different.
I figured the scans could be enhanced with colorful lights and also with extra kids’ drawings floating in the environment, to blend it more with the characters.
My obsession is 20th-century modern architecture in Prague — the ugly one :) — so I’m going to shove it into any project I can. I went around the city and quickly scanned a couple of my favorites: the abandoned House of Culture Eden, Prague Main Train Station with its metro station, and the New National Museum. For the metro car interior, I used the one and only Dekogon asset.
For the scanning and gaussian splats, I used the Luma AI app with the UE plugin.
The Conclusion
The animation was supposed to be a maximum of 7 seconds, and I wanted to put a story and a couple of environments into it, so the result is a wild nonsense ride :) But hey, it’s kid punk! Embrace the jank.
The piece got quite far and ended up among some of the top ones, but the judges very fairly pointed out that this was an animation challenge. Because the AI-generated skeletons had very rough movements, and because the art style was so heavy and simplified, it was more style than animation :) Totally agreed.
The finalists totally deserved it. There is a crazy amount of talented people out there.
Thanks for checking out the project!
© 2026 ROBOT BARON