This week, we hit a wall. Some of the Fab assets we planned to use in our short film came with a “not usable with AI” tag.
Since our whole pipeline involves running an AI pass on top of Unreal Engine animations, we decided not to risk it.
That left us with two options:
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3D model everything ourselves (time-consuming)
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Or lean on AI tools to keep momentum.
No surprise: we chose AI.
Failing Forward (Again)
A few weeks back, we failed our four-week sprint to get this short film finished. Instead of shelving it, we’re doing what tired, stubborn filmmakers do best ... we keep going. This project may take all year, but by George, it’s getting made.
That brings us to this week’s experiment: can AI help us generate usable 3D props that actually drop into Unreal, animate cleanly, and hold up under our AI style pass?
Testing Hunan 3D
Enter Hunan 3D — an AI 3D tool that generates 3D models from a single image. It sounds wild, and honestly, it is.
We needed a van for our scene. Here’s how it went down:
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Image Prep
We fed ChatGPT an alley concept image and asked it to generate a standalone van. The result was half-chopped, so we patched it up in Photoshop with generative fill. -
AI to 3D
We dropped that image into Hunan via the Pinocchio installer. Out popped a 3D van. -
Cleanup
We tested the model in Blender — not perfect topology, but workable. We cleaned up textures in Photoshop and ran the mesh through Trio Studio to get clean quads. -
Interior Build
ChatGPT generated isometric images of the van’s seats, dashboard, and doors. Same pipeline → Hunan → Blender. In about 30 minutes, we had a rough but usable van interior. -
Into Unreal
We exported, dropped it into Unreal Engine, and animated the van. The scene came alive.
The crazy part? Once we ran the AI style pass, even the messy parts of our 3D work looked fine.
The Results
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A complex 3D van built in under an hour.
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Fully animated in Unreal.
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The AI style pass smoothed over imperfections.
It’s not production-perfect (a pro modeler would probably wince), but for a two-person studio trying to make films on a scrappy timeline? It works.
What’s Next
We’re excited by how fast this workflow is evolving. AI-to-3D isn’t just a gimmick — it’s a viable shortcut for indie creators. And we’re hungry to test more tools. If you know of AI services we should throw into the pipeline, drop them in the comments. We’ll try anything once.
Oh, and before we go:
🎉 We just hit 500 subscribers on YouTube. It may be tiny next to the giants, but to us, that’s a jumbo jet full of people riding along on this crazy journey. Thank you.
We’re chasing 1,000 next — so if you’re into weird indie filmmaking experiments, hit subscribe and come along for the ride.
