Character design and 3D animation by Pixeldust for Tablemation's innovative animated dining experience.
Imagine sitting down to dinner and watching the story unfold on your own plate. Tablemation Studios creates dining experiences where animation is projected onto tables and plates, entertaining guests with an immersive story between each course.
Tablemation brought in Pixeldust to create the 3D animated sequences at the heart of the show: the characters, their performances and the worlds they inhabit, from character design and motion capture to real-time rendering in Unreal Engine 5.
From sketch to plate
Character design began with a wide range of loose sketches exploring different face and body types, a quick way to discover what resonated and what didn’t. Feedback shaped refined 2D turnarounds that showed each character, like the chefs Ned and Nya, from every key angle and captured their personalities, and those turnarounds became the blueprint for the 3D models.
Because the animation is projected onto tables and plates, diners see the characters mostly from a top-down view. Investing in their visual development anyway paid off: personality reads in every silhouette and gesture, and it lifts the final animation in every frame.
Professional actors performed each scene in a motion capture studio. Pixeldust’s animators meticulously cleaned up and edited the performance data for every five-minute scenario, then applied it to the character rigs, so Ned moves with the natural timing of a real performance.
Facial motion capture from the voice actors’ own performances gave the characters synchronized lip movement and expressions. On top of that, the team hand-animated the unique elements that no mocap suit could, including standout characters like the Eiffel Tower itself.
Under the guidance of our CG Supervisor, the team used Unreal Engine 5 for look development, lighting and assembling the animation, building a Paris-like city streetscape with Unreal’s RTX rendering. Parallel pipelines in Maya and Unreal merged motion capture with keyframe animation, and Unreal’s Sequencer gave precise control over VFX, characters and animation, blending lights, textures, shaders and atmospheric effects into one cohesive story.
Unreal Engine 5’s RTX rendering let the animators turn out high-resolution 4K renders in minutes, a job that traditionally takes days. Character design, motion capture integration and real-time rendering came together into a dining experience that blends culinary artistry with animated storytelling, right on the table.
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