From screen to survival: Building the world of Sinners in Fortnite with UEFN

When Warner Bros. Pictures wanted to bring Ryan Coogler’s Oscar-winning film Sinners to Fortnite ahead of the film’s theatrical release, the studio turned to Sawhorse Productions to build Sinners: Survive the Night, a UEFN experience set in the film’s 1932 Deep South vampire world.

The result pits squads of six players as humans against a growing horde of vampires. Anyone eliminated turns into a vampire and joins the hunt against their former teammates. Players win by surviving until sunrise or by taking out every last human, collecting in-game currency along the way to recruit NPC allies and unlock gear.

Building in secrecy

With the film still under wraps, all the team initially had to work with was what they could take away from a single viewing.

“Following an exclusive screening of Sinners, we began building under a veil of total discretion. Initially operating without digital assets, our team relied on memory and handwritten notes taken in the dark to architect a 1932 Deep South vampire experience,” says Phil Flores, Creative Director at Sawhorse Productions.

Bringing the cast to life with MetaHuman

Recreating the film’s characters in Fortnite meant building faithful digital likenesses from the ground up, then making them perform. Enter MetaHuman.

“Our bespoke likeness workflow included using external DCCs to create custom high-poly head sculpts, grooms, and wardrobe in combination with optimized base body skeletal meshes using the MetaHumans Importer. In Unreal Engine, we processed the sculpts using the Mesh to MetaHuman workflow for proper facial rigging of custom head meshes, along with custom groom binding to be migrated to our UEFN scenes for animation,” explains Flores.

With the characters built, the next challenge was making them act. UEFN’s Sequencer and animation tools gave the team a way to direct performances with cinematic precision.

“To bring our MetaHuman NPCs to life, we relied heavily on UEFN’s Sequencer to seamlessly orchestrate characters, cinematic cameras, and VFX. Using UEFN’s built-in IK Retargeter, we were able to quickly adapt animations from a variety of sources—ranging from custom motion capture to animation packs acquired on Fab—directly onto the MetaHuman skeleton,” says Flores.

For an extra layer of cinematic authenticity, the team leveraged MetaHuman Animator’s audio-driven animation technology to drive the NPC’s facial performances.

Taking advantage of Fortnite’s asset library

Detailed character models come with a real memory footprint, so the team needed a lighter-weight approach for everything around them.

“To balance the memory cost of an ambitious number of custom MetaHumans and animations, our approach to building out environments heavily leaned on utilizing Fortnite’s gallery assets. Our artists were able to achieve amazing results with creative kit-bashing, custom decals, and post-processing to transform the Fortnite aesthetic into the cinematic world of Sinners,” says Flores.

Setting the mood with lighting and VFX

With the cast and environments in place, the team turned to UEFN’s lighting tools and Niagara visual effects system to nail the mood.

“Replicating the dark, brooding Southern aesthetic of Sinners was a top priority for our visual direction,” explains Flores “For daytime scenes, we pushed the golden hour lighting, filling the environment with atmospheric haze and dust. At night, we fully embraced the shadows. We kept the map intentionally dark, punctuating the gloom with shafts of blue moonlight, thick fog patches, and the menacing glow of vampire eyes.”

To achieve this look, they made extensive use of the Cine Camera Actor and Post Process Volumes, while leaning on Niagara for their custom particle effects, most notably, the dramatic sequence of the vampires burning up in the morning sun.

Gameplay, music, and sound design

Players cross paths with familiar faces from the film throughout the map. The team used Verse, UEFN’s custom programming language, to script those interactions into the experience.

“Using UEFN’s built-in devices, we were able to quickly block out, design, and iterate on our RPG system. Then, using Verse, we created custom gameplay mechanics like hiring Smoke and Stack, Annie throwing the bones, accepting cursed gold coins from Mary, and much more,” says Flores.

The audio side of the project got just as much attention as the visuals.

“Music and sound design plays a huge part in the Sinners film, and our talented in-house composer created horror-driven ambient atmospheres, loops, and authorized re-mixes of original songs that can be heard over all these clips. Using UEFN’s built-in audio tools, we were able to create a sonic soundscape to immerse players in the world of Sinners,” adds Flores.

A world worth surviving

Sinners: Survive the Night ran as a limited-time experience, but it stands as a case study in how far UEFN can stretch a licensed IP. By combining custom MetaHuman likenesses, Sequencer-driven cinematics, Niagara VFX, and Verse-built gameplay, Sawhorse Productions turned a feature film into a playable, cinematic horror experience inside Fortnite.