Clair Obscur cinematic animator joins The Witcher 4 studio CD Projekt Red

One of the cinematic animators who worked on the award-winning Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has now joined CD Projekt Red.

Lucie Hennet worked at Sandfall Interactive from May 2023 to the end of 2024 as a cinematic animator, where she refined the raw motion capture by improving the body and facial animations.

“During my time at Sandfall Interactive, my main responsibilities included cleaning up and refining body and facial motion capture, as well as managing data from Xsens to UE5,” she posted on her ArtStation page.

“I also provided support on the motion capture sessions and contributed to building the animation pipeline for the cinematics.”

Hennet also shared a video on Artstation showing an example of initial raw motion capture from Clair Obscur, and how her work turned it from a rough animation – most notably in the character’s faces, which don’t perfectly match the lip-synching – into a polished, final product.

Now Hennet has moved from France to Poland, where this month she joined CD Projekt Red in Warsaw as an on-site cinematic animator.

Although Hennet has not specifically stated that she’s working on The Witcher 4, CD Projekt Red’s Warsaw studio is currently developing The Witcher 4 while its North American studios in Vancouver and Boston are working on Cyberpunk 2 and Witcher multiplayer game Project Sirius.

CD Projekt has previously stated that The Witcher 4 is in the full-scale production phase, but has already ruled out a 2026 release.

In a Q&A last year following the publication of its financial results, CD Projekt co-CEO Michał Nowakowski was asked to give more detail about how far the game was in development, and replied: “As we have already stated, The Witcher 4 is in the full-scale production phase. We’re not disclosing any details regarding the target release date, so there’s not a point in time I could refer to when answering such a question.

“”The only thing we’re commenting is that we’re not launching in 2026, and we’re also not typically getting into any specifics regarding technical or design matters. There’s nothing out of the ordinary, I’d say, in that area happening with The Witcher 4 – it’s just full-scale production proceeding at its pace, as per our internal plans. I think that’s as much as we can say.”

Clair Obscur was 2025’s biggest success story, sweeping awards at ceremonies around the world. So far it’s received Game of the Year awards at The Game Awards, the Golden Joystick Awards, the New York Game Awards and the D.I.C.E. Awards.