FCN Producciones Transforms Biblical Storytelling Through Advanced Character Designer Tools and 3D Animation Software
FCN Producciones
Based in Heredia, Costa Rica, FCN Producciones represents the production arm of Fore Christ, INC., a non-profit organization headquartered in the United States. This foundation is dedicated to creating value-based media content and implementing community impact programs that resonate across cultural boundaries. What began as a modest operation has evolved into a technically sophisticated studio capable of developing virtual productions for international television networks and digital platforms.
The studio specializes in creating immersive visual storytelling that brings biblical narratives to modern audiences through advanced 3D character animation and virtual production techniques. Their flagship series, “Walking by the Word,” exemplifies their creative vision by seamlessly blending biblical storytelling with contemporary virtual environments.
Through innovative use of technology, FCN Producciones has pioneered a real-time production workflow that combines tools like Unreal Engine, Aximmetry, and Reallusion’s Character Creator and iClone, its AI-enhanced AccuPOSE tools, and the iClone Unreal LIVE LINK plugin. This workflow allows them to create, animate, and integrate 3D characters and scenes with a level of efficiency and detail that matches the visual demands of today’s media landscape.
Meet the Team
DeCarol Williamson Enterprises / Walking by the Word / Time to Talk
Jonathan Williamson – President and Creative Visionary
As President of Fore Christ, INC., Jonathan Williamson leads with a clear mission: creating and promoting values-based content that resonates across cultures. He serves as both host and creator of “Walking by the Word,” FCN’s flagship series that shares biblical teachings through visually engaging, accessible, and culturally relevant formats.
Jonathan’s vision extends beyond pure entertainment. He also hosts the complementary program “Time to Talk,” where he interviews diverse voices to explore conversations around faith, values, and positive impact in everyday life. Both formats reflect the foundation’s commitment to meaningful storytelling.
With an eye toward international outreach, Jonathan expertly combines spiritual messages with cutting-edge technology, connecting with audiences of various ages and backgrounds. His leadership also extends to the FCN Samaritan Initiative in Africa, which provides discipleship, social support, and community development programs to vulnerable communities.
Beyond his work with FCN, Jonathan serves as Chief Operations Officer at DeCarol Williamson Enterprises, a North Carolina-based company developing various business initiatives, where he oversees strategic operations and contributes to growth project execution.
Giovanni Rojas Alfaro – 3D Generalist for Virtual Production
With over 17 years of experience in graphic design, advertising, illustration, and 3D visualization, Giovanni Rojas brings exceptional technical and creative skills to FCN Producciones. Throughout his impressive career, he has collaborated with international brands and projects across multiple industries, delivering sophisticated visual solutions for both digital media and corporate environments.
Since joining FCN in 2017, Giovanni has focused on character design, scene development, and asset creation for virtual environments. His expertise spans multiple tools, including Cinema 4D, ZBrush, Unreal Engine, and the Adobe Substance 3D suite. Recently, he has incorporated Reallusion’s powerful toolset—namely, iClone and Character Creator—into his workflow, significantly expanding his capabilities in real-time production and personalized character design.
Giovanni’s work stands out for its meticulous attention to detail and solid foundation in visual design principles, which he now applies to optimized workflows in virtual production settings, achieving impressive results with limited resources.
Minor Cortés Chinchilla – Virtual Production Technical Director
As a veteran team member with over two decades at FCN Producciones, Minor Cortés has been instrumental in the studio’s technical and operational development. In his current role as Virtual Production Technical Director, he coordinates the integration of real-time production technologies, expertly adapting tools such as Unreal Engine, Aximmetry, iClone, and Character Creator to meet the demands of a fast-paced, multidisciplinary work environment.
Minor’s approach combines hands-on technical expertise with structured workflow management, allowing the team to handle complex projects efficiently despite their relatively small size. Through his technical leadership, FCN maintains high production standards in audiovisual content for both digital and broadcast media platforms.
The Creative Process: Bringing Biblical Stories to Life
FCN Producciones recently had the opportunity to bring their content to an international network broadcasting via satellite throughout the United States and Latin America. This new partnership required them to adapt to precise formatting and duration requirements, prompting the team to re-record three pivotal episodes: “Bethlehem,” “The Ministry of Jesus,” and “The Crucifixion.”
Character Creation Revolution with Reallusion Tools
When FCN first began producing “Walking by the Word,” one of their greatest challenges involved animated character quality. As Jonathan Williamson explains, “If you look at some of our earlier episodes, you’ll notice that the quality was honestly a little bit low. The animations were very blocky, very jumpy, and we didn’t have any way of actually customizing the clothing they were wearing.”
Everything changed when they discovered Reallusion’s software suite. “Once we began working with Reallusion, it gave us a new ability to make more real characters,” Williamson notes.
“We were able to start creating and customizing clothes, customizing the animations where it made it seem as if they were interacting. It made them seem more real and that lent to a much greater quality in production for all of our episodes and programs.”
Jonathan Williamson – Host and President of Fore Christ, INC
For these updated episodes, FCN leveraged the full power of Reallusion’s character design tools:
- Character Creator became their primary platform for generating biblical characters from scratch. The team designed everything from body types and skin tones to period-appropriate clothing and accessories. For the “Bethlehem” episode, they created detailed characters, including baby Jesus, while “The Ministry of Jesus” and “The Crucifixion” required diverse figures with historically accurate attire and props such as vessels and Roman weaponry.
- Each character was meticulously crafted using Character Creator‘s sophisticated toolkit, including Transfer Skin, Wave, Comfort Adjust, and Edit Mesh functions to achieve realistic and contextually appropriate appearances.
- The character base technology within Character Creator proved invaluable for ensuring historical accuracy while maintaining visual coherence across different scenes and episodes.
Animation Workflow and Integration
Once characters were designed, FCN utilized Reallusion’s animation tools to bring them to life:
- iClone served as their primary animation platform, allowing them to apply base animations from extensive motion libraries while making precise adjustments for each scene.
- iClone AccuPOSE became an essential tool for refining character movements and expressions. Giovanni explains, “For scenes that required more complex movements or specific postures, we turned to iClone AccuPOSE, which allowed us to intuitively manipulate the character’s entire body. We could move one part of the body and see how others adjust automatically in a natural way.”
- For crowd scenes, the team used iClone Crowd Simulation to create believable background activity and navigation paths that enhanced the environmental storytelling without overwhelming their system resources.
- The iClone Unreal LIVE LINK feature proved particularly valuable, enabling seamless transfer of characters and animations directly into Unreal Engine scenes, maintaining visual fidelity and animation quality throughout the pipeline.
Technical Integration: The Aximmetry Challenge
One key technical challenge FCN faced was their use of Aximmetry as their final production engine. Unlike standard setups, Aximmetry operates on a modified version of Unreal Engine, which often creates compatibility issues with third-party plugins.
“One of the key points of our workflow is that we use Aximmetry as the final production engine. Unlike other systems, Aximmetry operates on a modified version of Unreal Engine, which often causes incompatibilities with many plugins. However, Reallusion tools like iClone and LIVE LINK are fully compatible with this customized version of Unreal.”
Minor Cortés Chinchilla – Virtual Production Technical Director
This compatibility proved decisive in their tool selection process, as it allowed for a seamless workflow from character creation through final production. Minor’s team developed a systematic approach:
- They accurately replicated terrain and environmental elements within iClone to test animations
- Using iClone’s Unreal LIVE LINK plugin, they selected meshes or element sets from Unreal Engine and transferred them directly to iClone as reference meshes
- These reference meshes allowed for precise character positioning and interactions, such as natural walking on terrain or proper alignment with environmental obstacles
Problem-Solving with Reallusion Tools
The FCN team encountered and solved numerous technical challenges using Reallusion’s toolset:
- Costume Physics and Collision Management: “On several occasions, it was necessary to adjust the costumes to prevent garments from passing through the character’s body during movements like walking, bending, or interacting with objects,” Giovanni notes. The team used collision management tools and applied physics simulations for natural cloth movement without compromising performance.
- Complex Animation Requirements: For specialized scenes, like a Roman character mounted on horseback, the team combined multiple approaches. They first exported the character to iClone, utilized preset animations like horseback riding from the software’s gallery, then customized these animations to fit their specific scene requirements. AccuPOSE helped perfect the rider’s posture for natural arm, torso, and head movements.
- Resource Management: To enhance scene richness without overwhelming their limited resources, FCN leveraged Reallusion’s Content Store, Marketplace, and ActorCore. These resources provided access to period-appropriate accessories, costumes, hairstyles, and other elements without requiring costly custom modeling.
- Blueprint Control in Production: From iClone, the team exported fully animated characters and organized them in Unreal within independent sequences managed through a master sequencer. “Each group—Romans, merchants, animals—has its own sequence,” explains Minor. “These sequences generated from iClone can be integrated within a blueprint in Unreal, and once the project is exported to Aximmetry, it’s possible to control it using triggers during live production.”
The Reallusion Advantage: Why These Tools Matter
For a small studio like FCN Producciones, Reallusion’s character designer and animation tools have been transformative. Giovanni Rojas summarizes it well: “The flexibility of Reallusion’s tools gave us creative control that wouldn’t be possible with a small team otherwise.”
Key advantages of the Reallusion ecosystem include:
1. Accessibility and Efficiency
Reallusion’s tools democratize high-quality character creation and animation, making professional-grade results achievable even for smaller studios. The intuitive interfaces and comprehensive libraries allowed FCN to focus on storytelling rather than technical hurdles.
2. Seamless Integration
The compatibility between Reallusion products and FCN’s existing technology stack (particularly the modified Unreal Engine used by Aximmetry) eliminated workflow bottlenecks. As Minor Cortés emphasizes, “Reallusion’s compatibility with the version of Unreal used by Aximmetry was key. Everything worked without technical barriers.”
3. Complete Character Control
From initial design through animation and integration into final scenes, Reallusion provided FCN with unprecedented control over their characters’ appearance, movement, and expressiveness. This level of control significantly elevated the visual quality of their productions.
4. Resource Optimization
For a small team with limited resources, Reallusion’s extensive content libraries and efficient workflows allowed FCN to achieve results that would otherwise require much larger teams and budgets. The ability to customize existing assets rather than creating everything from scratch proved invaluable.
Conclusion: The Future of Biblical Storytelling Through 3D Animation
FCN Producciones demonstrates how even modest-sized teams can achieve impressive results in virtual production by selecting the right tools and establishing efficient workflows. Their success with Reallusion’s character creation and animation software illustrates how modern technology can revitalize traditional storytelling.
“What matters to us is telling meaningful stories. These tools helped us do it with clarity and quality,” says Jonathan Williamson, highlighting the ultimate purpose behind their technical achievements.
For other 3D animators, content creators, and production houses seeking to enhance their character creation capabilities, FCN’s experience offers valuable insights. The combination of Character Creator‘s detailed human creator tools, iClone‘s animation capabilities, and AccuPOSE‘s refinement functions provides a comprehensive solution for character-driven storytelling across various genres and formats.
By embracing these powerful 3D character animation and lip sync animation tools, FCN has not only improved their technical capabilities but also enhanced their ability to fulfill their core mission: telling meaningful stories with technical precision and creative vision.
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