Across The Web: A Spider-Verse Animation

Project Intro

This has arguably got to be one of my favourite projects this year! And it was built over the span of 4 days! mainly built off of the experience I gained from building Battle Train, Substance Painter, Blender, Unreal Engine, Quick Magic AI (Mocap Only) and Actor Core 3D!‍

Technical Breakdown

Miles Morales in the Spiderverse movies has to be one of the most badass iterations of Spider-Man I’ve ever seen.‍ Every frame, every still shot is a masterpiece on its own and genuinely needs to be studied. There should be a whole university course on the subject matter alone.‍ A few months ago, I saw a video made by ArtOfJhill, who’s an awesome 3D artist made their own version of Spidey in Unreal (If you don’t know who they are, check out their work) and that got me thinking: what if I tried to do the same thing? ‍I had this project idea stuck in my head for months.

So first thing’s first: what is the character going to look like?‍ Now normally the process would be for me to 3D model the character’s entire body. But that presents a lot of challenges for my limited timeline: I’d have to model, retopologise, UV Unwrap, rig, weight paint from scratch. But if I want to animate the character’s face, that also has implications that I didn’t want to deal with. Instead I opted to use a Metahuman.

Creating the Metahuman Base in Unreal was pretty straightforward. What I did do though was make sure to give the character bigger facial features, just to account for the stylized nature of the character I was aiming for.

Building Her Suit And Textures

Take the Character’s Mesh into Substance Painter, and hand draw your own textures! I already had some textures made for a different project (Battle Train), and so I just opted to steal the textures from there. ‍In order to create her suit, I just took her body and imported it into Blender. I deleted her head from the neck up and then had to remodel her feet to resemble boots. After that it was just a matter of marking seams, UV unwrapping and bringing that mesh into Substance Painter, where I could now start working on making her suit. ‍This was fun for me because I wanted to make it such that her suit still had a classic look at first, but give it my own twist with the unique spider emblem on her back, that’s actually kind of like two spider designs in one if you look real close. ‍

Marvel Rivals And Game Assets

So at this point I hit a snag. I need her to have really stylized hair. Like really stylized. Now I had a problem: I definitely didn’t have the time to create those assets from scratch. I wanted to get something done quickly that would help get the concept I had in mind out, without the pain of creating hair and hair cards from scratch. Now I know what you might be thinking: oh gee, sounds like he’s going to talk about how he used AI to create the hair. The answer to that is a resounding NO. ‍If you love Marvel, and video games, you’ve probably heard of a little game called Marvel Rivals. I used a program called Rivals Extractor which allowed me to access game files and export them to Blender And Unreal Engine! I really love Storm’s Goddess Of Thunder skin, the hair on that Model is immaculate and is the exact type of hair I wanted for our character. ‍So I extracted her model, sent it over to blender, deleted her body and other parts I didn’t need, and now I had hair! Only problem is: the hair is Blue and not Black. But that’s easy to fix by literally just editing the texture’s color in the game engine! With that done, I needed to style it around my character. ‍

The Spider-Verse Shader

Assembling The Environment

While building out the environment, I wanted to create something really cinematic. I figured what better place than a city skyline, at night, with our Spider Character sat ojn the roof, overlooking it all. I gathered some free assets from Fab, and made sure to lay out the enviro to look as seamless as possible from camera view. Using the free cam, you can see that technically, the environment is just a floor, some cranes and a city in the distance. I added some steel beams and some extra smaller trinkets on the roof in ordere to give it the sense of a construction site.