This has arguably got to be one of my favourite projects this year! And it was built over the span of 4 days! More details in the blog, but 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!
Hi. I’m Nate. I’m a 2D turned 3D Artist and Game Development enthusiast and I made my own Spiderverse animation in Unreal Engine in 4 days, and here’s how I did it.
First, a bit about me: I’m a massive Spider-Man fan. Like huge. Growing up as a kid, I remember my dad walking in home one day and telling me to close my eyes, only to surprise me with a DVD of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man. Fav movie ever, and when the Spiderverse came out in 2018, it was GG from there. It’s 2026 and my MIND has not left that movie theater yet (Metaphorically speaking of course…Happy New Year). Miles Morales in the Spiderverse movies has to be one of the most badass iterations of Spider-Man I’ve ever seen.
Now, it goes without saying, artistically, the Spiderverse movies are AMAZING. 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. But I was so busy I couldn’t get to it, between graduating, looking for a job, and eventually finding one as a Professor of Game Dev and Animation at local university, I was super swamped. BUT. I just finished grading my students, my contract is up and I now have free time! So without further ado, let’s talk about how I put this together.
Unreal Engine: What is it?
So for those of you who don’t know, Unreal is a Game Engine. What that means is it’s just software you would use to make Video Games. Now over the years, Unreal engine grew to be a powerhouse of a tool, and not just for game dev. You can use it to animate your own movies, create your own commercials, live event VFX, you name it. You can use it for all of that and much more. Having worked with it myself, I figured It would be my go to choice.
Metahumans and Hand Drawn Textures:
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: a “ready made” character model generated within Unreal Engine. They’re pretty customizable, just needed to move some sliders around and import her into the scene and voila!
The only problem with Metahumans is that what gives them a hyper realistic look is their textures. Now a way around this is very simple: 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.
Modeling Her Suit
Now, 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.
Kind of like ArtOfJhill, I decided to first paint a base Blue material, then filled the top layer with red. After that, I had to swap over to the eraser tool so that I could carve out the islands/shape of her costume design.
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’m a Peni main, so shout out to all my Peni mains out there. A really dope and stylized game made by NetEase and Marvel. Now why does it matter? Guess which game engine Marvel Rivals is built in: Unreal Engine. So that means that we can use some of the game assets, specifically the character assets to basically prototype and “Mod” our animation project. I already have the game installed and 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.
End Remarks
So what’s next? The Spiderverse Sequel is only coming out in 2027. Honestly, with the amount of work it generally took to put together the first AND second movie, I get it. Good things take time, so let the artists cook. In the meantime though…I think I’m gonna pull a Miles and do my own thing. (insert Miles Clip here). Going to see how far I can push this concept! I have a bunch of random notes and ideas on what her world looks like. Here’s two bits of information so far. Firstly, Petra got bitten by the Spider during an internship at Stark Industries with her best friend Riri (if you know, you know), contrary to Peter getting bitten at Oscorp. Secondly: her mom doesn’t know she’s Spider-Woman. But her intuition is so strong, sometimes Petra thinks it’s even stronger than her own Spider Sense.
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