Xentrix Studios’ work on Nickelodeon’s Max & the Midknights shows how an Indian team used Unreal Engine 5 to build a cinematic, childlike fantasy world at TV scale. Across 20 episodes, they combined complex character rigs, handcrafted textures and real-time lighting to prove that Indian animation can deliver global-quality storytelling without sacrificing human creativity.
Creating animation demands a thorough understanding of a story’s visuals, character arcs, and emotional realism. Every layer of the storytelling process is far harder than most people imagine, and the sheer scale of work behind projects like this is something most audience never fully register. There are two main reasons for this. First, most people don't realize the scale of storytelling that can be achieved through animation. And second, they don't recognise the potential of an Indian studio bringing a vision of this scale to life.
When it comes to animation, one aspect Indian studios focus on closely is the depth of a child’s imagination. Much of the Indian audience grew up watching cartoon characters like Chhota Bheem or Roll No. 21 — animation classics built on real research and an understanding of child psychology, as well as cultural relevance. This is exactly what the makers of Max & the Midknights, an epic-fantasy-adventure-comedy, set out to achieve: giving motion to bold ideas and big moments to bringing to life characters from a child’s most vivid imagination.
Xentrix Studios wanted to ensure that the series was, in its fullest sense, a cinematic masterpiece, a live-action shoot where you have an actual set and a cameraman working on the series. From the very beginning, the team knew that it wanted to employ Unreal Engine 5 throughout the process, from the initial to the final pixel delivery. The team’s directors used Unreal Engine’s real-time workflow to quickly review and adjust the project’s depth of field, time-of-day lighting variations and handheld camera attributes using Unreal Engine’s Sequencer, tasks that would be impossible to achieve in a traditional pipeline.
Unreal Engine was used to create detailed creatures and characters like fire-breathing dragons, sea monsters and zombies, all of which had to look as if built by hand, while maintaining a cinematic feel. During the production stage, the team used Sequencer to work on multiple tracks simultaneously. Abhishek Kumar, Head of Pipeline, Xentrix Studios, describes Sequencer as a notebook in which instructions are already fed in order. “The camera moves at the right time. The actor walks at the right time. The lights change at the right time. When you press play, the entire shoot executes perfectly,” he explains.
In a way, Xentrix Studios has also broken the barriers of what was previously thought possible in animation. It created 20 episodes, 22 minutes each and a total of 440 minutes of animation, with the purpose of making every single frame feel like cinema. Many of the characters in the series had complex rigs such as eye switches, stretch and squash. Transferring data as complex as that from another software to Unreal Engine and maintaining every little nuance of it was a feat in itself, and something the studio had never attempted before. The team also built proprietary tools, customized solutions and automation workflows to ensure seamless execution.
During the process of making Max & the Midknights, the studio worked in constant collaboration with Nickelodeon. Nickelodeon would send over concept art as flat 2D image or a painted character which the team would then transform into a 3D asset using Unreal Engine. The textured 3D image would be sent back to Nickelodeon alongside a flat render, so they could see exactly how it had evolved.
What Xentrix Studio wanted to focus on, above all, was tangibility, to make sure that the work felt like it was actually built by hand. In an age where conversations around AI replacing the human touch have become inseparable from creative industries, and where AI’s very existence has made proving the human touch feel more urgent than ever, the animations in Max & the Midknights, and the intent behind them, is proof that even within industries dominated by and dependent on technology, there can be no replacement for genuine, well-thought-out creativity. There is a certain excitement, for example, in using felt for grass, model geometry to create fire, cotton ball strings for smoke and cellophane for water, like in Max & the Midknights. Xentrix Studios’ goal was never to replicate reality, but to tap into a child’s imagination to resemble not the real world, but what a handmade version of it would look like.
What also makes the process of making Max & the Midknights intriguing is how it detours from a traditional pipeline, where the animator has to wait months to see the final, lit picture. With Unreal Engine, a frame that would typically take 30 to 40 minutes in a traditional pipeline would take about 20 to 30 seconds.
Xentrix Studios has also contributed to a remarkable range of popular animated shows such as The Simpsons, Masha and the Bear, Big Nate, Monster High, LEGO Batman, LEGO Star Wars, Transformers and more. With Max & the Midknights, the studio not only delivered a stellar adaptation but, in doing so, proved the sheer intensity of an animation production, bringing to realisation just how big a role Indian animation studios play in the global market. Unreal Engine wasn’t used simply as a tool, but as a global platform that truly brought Indian animation to the international stage and raised the bar of what a small studio in India can produce.
The Indian animation landscape is evolving. While it still relies on commissioned work from international companies, it is moving at an incredibly impressive pace towards homegrown IPs as well. The case that studios like Xentrix and films like Max & the Midknights make is for the Indian animation industry to realise that it’s not that the technology doesn’t exist; it's simply that its potential hasn’t been fully tapped into yet. Once it is, the impact can truly be transformative for small-scale studios, helping them build animation at a scale never imagined before.