KPop Demon Hunters: How Sony Pictures Imageworks Used Adobe in Creating the Global Phenomenon
KPop Demon Hunters, the Netflix animated feature produced in partnership with Sony Pictures Animation, arrived in 2026 to widespread attention, earning Best Animated Feature nominations at both the Academy Awards and the Golden Globes. The film blends K-pop performance culture with fantasy storytelling, and its visual identity - rooted in Korean fashion, architecture, and drama aesthetics - required a production pipeline capable of handling enormous variety while maintaining careful artistic control. Texture Lead Jody Tidsbury and Motion Graphics Artist Nori Kaneko, both of Sony Pictures Imageworks, recently spoke about how Adobe Substance 3D and After Effects supported that work.
Tidsbury oversaw a team of eleven artists responsible for texturing characters, costumes, props, and environments. The directive from the directors was consistent: the film should feel like a K-drama, with high-fashion glamour grounded in real material qualities. Substance 3D Painter handled the bulk of clothing textures for crowd characters, while Designer was used to build tileable, procedurally generated brickwork patterns for Seoul's streets and neighborhoods. Substance 3D Sampler proved particularly useful for reproducing intricate Korean embroidery - its embroidery filter allowed artists to generate layered threadwork with supporting normal, height, roughness, and anisotropic specular maps, giving fabrics like the hanbok costumes and stage outfits convincing surface depth. The crowd system alone required over a thousand unique character variations, with roughly 30 clothing pieces per character shape and multiple texture variants per piece - the non-destructive, procedural nature of the Substance toolset made that scale of iteration practical.
On the motion graphics side, Kaneko used After Effects to design and synchronize the concert performance sequences, which function more like live broadcast graphics than standard screen UI - each has its own timeline that must track precisely with choreography and music. The team watched real K-pop concert footage extensively to understand the pacing and density of visual information those shows produce. After Effects allowed a relatively small motion graphics team to prototype quickly and absorb the frequent revisions that come with sequences built across multiple departments simultaneously.
For both artists, the film's eventual cultural reach was not something they anticipated during production. What the pipeline they built did ensure was that the detail work - sequined jackets, embroidered patches, Seoul streetscapes, stadium light shows - could be executed at the quality and volume a project of that ambition required. KPop Demon Hunters is currently streaming on Netflix.
