Scan-to-Life: Real-Time Art-to-Animation Pipeline

A large-scale interactive installation for live events, built solo in Unreal Engine 5, from concept to final delivery. Children color fish templates on paper, scan them, and watch their unique creations swim to life in a massive virtual aquarium.
I built the entire pipeline myself: a multi-point QR system for both identification and pixel-perfect, perspective-correct texture alignment; a runtime texture import pipeline that processes scanned artwork, re-renders it from 4K down to an optimized 1K, and saves it to a dedicated asset folder; and a data-driven spawn system supporting up to 50 concurrent actors, spawned in join order, with full save-game persistence.
Creatures are driven by two unified animation pipelines - procedural WPO material animation for simpler fish, full skeletal animation for more complex creatures - with custom AI navigation and behavior, including a spatial distribution system to prevent clumping and keep the aquarium feeling naturally alive.
Performance: 140 FPS with 20 active creatures on a standard gaming laptop.
Live at a major retail installation in Australia - video captured on-site.