Spider-Man: The Goblin Hunt | 3D Animation

Project information

“Spider-Man: The Goblin Hunt” stands as one of my most cherished and ambitious projects, fueled by a deep-seated passion for Spider-Man, my all-time favorite hero. This project became a testament to my long-standing dream of contributing to an official character project, whether in video games, animated series, or movies. With a rich history of consuming vast amounts of Spider-Man content, I felt the time was right to put my skills to the test and craft my own short film featuring these iconic characters.

Project Objective: Originally envisioned as a project focused on creating a functional rig for a character and a brief animation, the scope expanded voluntarily to encompass two characters: Spider-Man and Green Goblin. The decision was made to elevate the project into a short film, a true labor of love.

Creative Process: The journey commenced with the development of a Moodboard, exploring the various interpretations of these characters in video games, television, and movies. While avoiding mere replication, I aimed to craft my own interpretation while staying true to the original essence.

Art Direction and Inspiration: Emphasizing the critical role of art direction, I drew inspiration from “Into the Spiderverse” and a short film by Sarp Serter. This laid the foundation for the stylized and dynamic direction the project would take.

For this reason, when carrying out the 3D Modeling I sought to generate a stylized appearance of the character and not so attached to reality, since, in reality, I was not looking for a realistic result, but an American comic style animation. In my portrayal of Spider-Man I was going for a more dynamic and youthful look. Spider-Man throughout his history in the comics has varied his complexion quite a bit and of course he is a fairly strong character, however, I felt that it would be more appropriate to base myself on the Ultimate Spiderman Comics, where we can see a more Peter Parker young and with a complexion that evokes us towards speed and agility over strength.

Similarly, for the Green Goblin I made my own creative decisions, since I quite like the Ultimate version of the character, in which we see Norman Osborn physically become a monster and not just wearing a suit. However, he didn’t want a huge beast, he wanted a human being, turned into the Green Goblin. In the aspect of the wardrobe I took inspiration from different sources, I tried to keep the classic look of the comics but adding armor to the character that serves as protection in battle. As for the face, I was inspired by the face of the actor Willem Dafoe, therefore, my modeling sought to be an interpretation of Willem Dafoe turned into a Green Goblin and not just wearing armor, as happens in Sam Raimi’s movies.

Regarding the Green Goblin Glider, the 3D model provided by Viktor Solopenko for free on Sketchfab was used. However, only the model was taken, since it was subjected to a retexturing and rigging.

The sculpting process was done in Blender. Once the 3D model was finished, retopologized and with UVs, the texturing stage began. This stage was done in Substance Painter. A crucial part of this process was focused on designing multifunctional textures, since he wanted them to maintain an ideal finish from the Base Color, but by adding the other texture maps he could achieve quite realistic results and with a quality at the level of the industry.

Once the textures were finished, the Rig of both characters was worked on. This process was done in Autodesk Maya for university course objectives. In this process, a functional rig for both characters was worked on, as well as the Green Goblin’s glider.

For the Animation process I had to carry out multiple investigations and tests for the web swinging of the character and how this has been applied both in video games and in the cinema.

Part of my goal was to do the final rendering in the Eevee render engine, mainly to experiment in new rendering environments and shorten render times by not having a render farm available, for this reason I had to export the finished animation. of the characters in Alembic and re-import them into Blender.

In Blender I created 2 more rigs, the first one was for Spider-Man’s web. Initially, I carried out tests to do it with simulations, but these didn’t work correctly since I didn’t have a proper rig created in Blender, so I decided to animate the spider web manually. For this, it required a mesh that could deform sufficiently, from the smallest to the longest, to simulate the shot from the Web Shooter and later the Web Swinging. For this I chose to use Nurbs and anchor Hooks to the different points of the curve, in this way, I had full control over the curve and the curve over the mesh. To give it a spider web finish, Blender’s Node Editor was used.

The second rig I made in Blender was to control the procedural generation of the explosions of the Green Goblin’s Pumpkin Bombs. For this, Displace transformers were applied that are affected by a texture and also, the translation, rotation and scale of the texture are manipulated through controllers.

Once the whole scene was integrated and animated in Blender, I proceeded to work on the Look Development and Shading stage. For this process, I did quite extensive research, in understanding patterns applied in movies like Into the Spiderverse.

For this I developed a shader that sought to replicate the “Dotted Highlights” and “Crosshatched Shadows” and it was applied on the materials. Of course, this was not enough, so I proceeded to increase the chromatic aberration in the final composition. Likewise, to maintain a style attached to the American comic, “Solidify” transformers were applied with the normals inverted, in this way, we could simulate an outline in the character throughout the animation. This has a significant advantage over creating an automatic Outline with the Grease Pencil, as it greatly reduced render times and kept a cleaner visual look.

Likewise, a lot of work was done on the lighting of the environment and the lighting of the characters, to always maintain interesting compositions and a harmonious color palette.