The whole effect was animated in the shader. Of what they do to the surrounding texture - push? Pull? Absorb? The question of how these dots generate themselves. There was this question of whether the effect should break his contours. The problem was that the effect had to ripple and yet feel like invisibility (as opposed to say refraction, or cut paper fluttering), it had to have depth and yet the effect had to somehow convey something that told you it was rooted in our graphic style and related to Miles specifically.Īnd then there were the story requirements. One night I literally ran 480 concurrent tests exploring every possible combination of shader settings for our invisibility effect. We didn’t want to leave a stone unturned. And on this show, we needed to test every idea. “Katana was really useful when we needed to test ideas. Using Katana, Bret spent a huge amount of his time mocking up networks to generate custom passes for the idiosyncratic looks they were reaching for: SPI used Katana (software they originally developed and have long used) and Arnold as their primary lighting and rendering tools for the project. It’s about as far as I’ve been from a ‘normal’ production since the wild west days when I worked on my first shows.'

We spent much of our time, especially in the early stages, far from the beaten path. The problems of stylization often forced us to adopt entirely new ways of working. Of course, on this show, the stylized look was clearly the unique problem, and that is where I landed.

Clair spent a lot of their time problem solving, as he explains: “There was this understanding that I was going to be involved in addressing challenges.

Given the unique vision for the film, it’s no surprise that lookdev sups like Bret St. In this article, we catch up with key members of the look development and texturing teams to find out how they harnessed the power of Katana and Mari on the Oscar-winning production. It fell to the VFX crew at Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) to make this vision a reality. The directors of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse had a clear idea of what they were trying to achieve.Įnvisioning a film couched in the visual language of how comic books are made, the look of Spider-Man is informed by ideas going all the way back to silk-screening and the printing-press.

Into the spider verse