The Animation Studio Preset

1 Who This Is For

If your studio's bread and butter is one of these, the animation_studio preset is for you:

• Technical / product / facility explainers — gear pumps, distillation rigs, retail walkthroughs, decarb pipelines.
• Forensic reconstructions — criminal cases, accident reproductions, data-driven scene replay from witness or survey timelines.
• Historical recreations — period environments, architectural fly-throughs, narrative establishing shots.

What these have in common: bulk asset ingest from outside Unreal, precise spatial placement, Sequencer-driven camera work, MRQ output, and brutal client revision churn. The preset is curated to compress all of that into the smallest viable command surface.

2 Loading the Preset

If you ran the setup wizard and picked animation as your workflow, you're already close — but animation_studio is the preset specifically tuned for shot-based commercial work. Load it manually:

{
  "id": "preset",
  "category": "config",
  "command": "load_preset",
  "parameters": { "preset": "animation_studio" }
}

What gets enabled:

• Tags: core, animation, asset, level, rendering, shot, control_rig, live_link
• Categories (whole-category enable): sequencer, recording, viewport, modeling, control_rig, live_link, sourcecontrol
• Skill pack: animation_studio (5 skills described below)

What's left off: fps, combat, physics tags — gameplay scaffolding the preset assumes you don't need.

3 Ingesting CAD / FBX

The batch_ingest_fbx skill imports a folder of FBX / USD / OBJ files into one consistent destination, with consistent settings:

{
  "category": "animation_studio",
  "command": "batch_ingest_fbx",
  "parameters": {
    "source_dir": "D:/clients/AcmeCorp/cad_export",
    "dest_path": "/Game/Ingest/AcmeCorp",
    "extensions": ["fbx", "usd"],
    "auto_material": true
  }
}

The response lists every imported asset path and any files that were skipped (with reasons). Designed for the typical CAD-to-Unreal cycle on technical explainer projects: SolidWorks export → folder → one ingest call → ready to dress.

4 Setting Up a Camera Rig

Spawn a CineCameraActor framed on a target with sensible product-shot defaults:

{
  "category": "animation_studio",
  "command": "setup_camera_rig",
  "parameters": {
    "target_actor": "GearPump_01",
    "radius": 600,
    "height": 200,
    "focal_length_mm": 50,
    "name": "Cam_Hero_01"
  }
}

The skill aims the camera at the target, sets manual focus to the target distance, and labels the actor for easy reference in Sequencer. You can pass target_location instead of target_actor to frame on an arbitrary point.

5 Exploded Views

For assembly explainers, the exploded_view skill takes a list of actors and pushes them outward along their pivot-to-center vector:

{
  "category": "animation_studio",
  "command": "exploded_view",
  "parameters": {
    "actors": ["Housing", "Rotor", "Stator", "Shaft", "BearingA", "BearingB"],
    "factor": 2.0,
    "apply": true
  }
}

The response includes from and to transforms for every actor, so a follow-up Sequencer step can keyframe the assembly animation. Pass "apply": false if you just want the transforms back without modifying the actors yet.

For a non-centroid origin (e.g. exploding away from a fixed mounting plate), pass center: { x, y, z } in parameters.

6 Rendering a Shot

The render_shot skill queues a Level Sequence in Movie Render Queue. With a preset:

{
  "category": "animation_studio",
  "command": "render_shot",
  "parameters": {
    "sequence_path": "/Game/Sequences/Shot_01",
    "preset_path": "/Game/RenderPresets/HighQuality_4K",
    "output_subfolder": "Shot_01_v3"
  }
}

If you don't pass a preset, the skill falls back to PNG sequence with 2× spatial samples and writes to {Project}/Saved/MovieRenders/<sequence_name>/. For most studios you'll want a named MoviePipelinePrimaryConfig asset and pass it via preset_path.

7 Material Swap Reveals

For cross-section reveals, branded material swaps mid-shot, or "before/after" effects on technical explainers:

{
  "category": "animation_studio",
  "command": "material_swap_reveal",
  "parameters": {
    "actors": ["Housing", "Rotor"],
    "material_path": "/Game/Materials/M_CrossSection",
    "material_index": 0
  }
}

The skill auto-detects whether each actor is a StaticMeshActor or SkeletalMeshActor and applies the swap accordingly. Skipped actors (wrong type, missing component, or not found) come back in the response with reasons.

8 Honest Caveats

What this preset does not solve:

• Modeling outside Unreal. Most studios model in Maya, Blender, or Cinema 4D. The DCC-to-Unreal round-trip is still manual. A DCC bridge is on the roadmap as a separate companion plugin, not part of the preset.
• Art direction. Lighting mood, narrative beats, aesthetic decisions — all human work. CLAUDIUS speeds up the plumbing, not the cinematography.
• Forensic admissibility. For courtroom reconstructions, every AI-driven placement should be logged and signed off on by the human reconstructionist. A formal forensic audit trail is bespoke work, scoped per engagement.
• Control Rig and Live Link production-hardening. All write-side commands are Python-backed in v3.1.0 and work for the happy path. bake_to_animation creates the destination AnimSequence on the correct skeleton with the right length, but leaves curve population to your Sequencer Control Rig track — we'll harden that path with real studio hours. retarget_animation ships two paths: a simple skeleton-swap on a duplicated AnimSequence, or full IK Retargeter via IKRetargetBatchOperation; pick whichever matches your skeleton compatibility.

If your work hits these gaps and you'd like them addressed in your studio's pipeline, reach out about a custom engagement.