Ten days left.

Motorica Masters 2026 is in full swing. Seven animators from top studios, with credits on games you know and love, are deep in the build. Submissions close Sunday, July 19 at 11:59 PM Pacific. We cannot wait to see what they ship.

What this challenge is really about

This is not a hero-character reel. The Living World brief asks one question: can you make a dense, believable crowd feel alive in Unreal?

Each competitor is building a systemic crowd simulation: NPCs that walk, run, stop, and idle with purpose. They bring their own licensed environments and characters. They design three to five behavioral archetypes so a laborer reads differently from a commuter or a panicked civilian. The focus is scale, variety, and production-ready Motion Matching, not a single showcase rig.

Watch the workflow briefing

Every competitor received the same launchpad: Motion Factory access, an Unreal Engine 5.7 starter template, and this workflow walkthrough from Kelechi. It covers the Motorica to Unreal pipeline end to end, including Motion Factory, Key Idle Pose, import into Unreal, and Motion Matching at crowd scale.

What they are working with

• Motion Factory access and trial credits to generate locomotion datasets
• An Unreal Engine 5.7 starter template: NPC controller, Motion Matching setup, AI State Tree for wandering and patrol, retargeting assets, and a test map
• The workflow briefing video above (YouTube), the same file in every competitor starter package

Key Idle Pose is the piece that often surprises people on first watch: generating phase variants so characters decelerate naturally into idle. That is the hard problem at crowd scale.

What we expect them to figure out

The interesting work happens in iteration. Sourcing a world. Populating it. Generating walk and run through Motion Factory. Tuning stop transitions with Key Idle Pose. Wiring everything through the Motorica Import plugin into a Motion Matching pipeline that holds up when dozens of NPCs share the screen.

Ten days is enough time to polish, not to start. We are cheering for everyone in the challenge.

Follow along: motorica.com/masters · Discord
Winners announced Monday, July 27.