Non-photorealistic compositing of the Spider-Verse
Marc-Andre Davignon, Bret St. Clair · 2023
The various worlds of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse have wildly varying art styles and rules. Matching 2D concept art in an animated 3D world requires finding novel ways to marry the guiding hand of an artist with procedural tools. Building upon the Patcher Tool [et al. 2021], created for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, we designed and implemented a suite of new compositing nodes to apply painterly effects on 3D renders as a post-process. We discuss what they do, how they work, how they came to be and show results. We also share the development strategy used to design and build software solutions to a constantly evolving set of challenges that are actively used to produce artwork from very early prototypes.