The first place interview from Motorica Masters 2026: Living World is live.

Michal Navrátil spent almost ten years as a cinematic designer. He had never done technical animation work. He just won Motorica Masters 2026: Living World with a city that still reads as a place when the camera pushes through it, built in Unreal with Motorica Motion Factory.

“I never did technical animation work, so this was my first, but I was surprised how easy it was with the help of Motorica. The Motion Factory just makes it so easy, even for different departments.”

Michal Navrátil · Motorica Masters 2026, 1st place

Generate only what the scene needs

Motion Factory is where Motorica turns direction into believable character motion, so a solo builder can populate a city without months of capture and cleanup. Michal never batched a giant animation library up front. He generated exactly what the next scene needed, took it into Unreal, then went back for the next archetype.

Basic male and female walks first. Then a police officer. Then a waitress. Each pass was small enough to evaluate in engine before committing to the next one.

Prove it in a box, then populate the world

Every system got proved in a plain starter level before it touched the real map: tourists in one block, kids chasing butterflies in another, the waitress in a third. Once the behaviors held up, he moved them into the Living World and populated the city in a day.

“Around the time I actually had the waitress system working, I walked by and I just saw it in peripheral vision and thought, yeah, it is starting to get together.”

Michal Navrátil

Reaction zones and authored moments

The stops and interactions that make his city read as intentional came from custom zones layered on top of the provided patrol systems. An NPC enters, the character looks at them, reacts, and moves off. Michal sized each zone by hand around fountains, billboards, and the police checkpoint, so the world reacts where a player will actually be looking.

Key Idle Pose

An idle pose is one of the strongest things defining a character, and when that pose drifts across a generated set you pay for it twice, once in cleanup and again integrating into Motion Matching. Key Idle Pose lets you define the pose you want and have Motorica honor it across the idle animations it generates, the starts, the stops, the loops. You control when the pose lands, how early the animation eases into it, and how strongly each generation holds to it.

For Michal that is a waitress who settles at her table the same way every time, and a police officer whose stop reads clearly from across the street.

“I used the new Key Idle Pose feature that works amazingly. Easy to use, and it worked like a charm for me.”

“The waitress and the police needed a lot of blending from the walk to the style. I could see the difference without it and with it. That was one of the biggest updates I have seen from you guys in a while.”

Michal Navrátil

Where he wanted a more specific read on top of that, he generated a base idle in the style his character was already using, adjusted the pose with Unreal control rig, and baked it out as an animation.

Crowd variation that survives a moving camera

Density only works if it holds up when the camera pushes through it. Two things carried Michal's crowds: how quickly he could import and apply different styles per character, and how the characters negotiated each other by default.

“They actually don't clip through each other, they walk around each other. This is something I hated seeing in many projects, clipping shoulders of NPCs. Here they interact and walk around each other, which was perfect.”

“For the Motorica part, I didn't need to touch anything. It worked out of the box.”

Michal Navrátil

Watch the full interview: Building a Living World with Motorica.

Winners roundup: Masters 2026 Living World winners. Challenge context: Masters page.

Follow along on LinkedIn and in Discord. Next up: the second place interview with Bas Kessels.