Thread by @xavierck3d

Hey, you know what? Let's educate some people about how some game art stuff is made.

The Game Industry tends to be seen as a monolithic content factory, but it's made of people. Let's talk about this in the context of #SpiderManPS4

Thread!

Character art is my job, so let's talk about the process involved in getting the Spider-Punk alternate costume into the game, and talk about who's involved this (long) process.

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The first step begins with people like @GavinGoulden @jacinda_chew and @bryanintihar pitching the different suits they'd like to see in the game because they're fans, they know marketing, or they think it fits the vision they have for Spider-Man.

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This goes through several steps with both Sony and Marvel's legal departments. This is important because Marvel, Sony, and various divisions therein might hold (or not hold) the rights to certain costumes or franchises.

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Marvel holds the rights to produce games and movies for most of the stuff in the Spider-Verse, so that also means Insomniac will be able to pitch things from all those.

In this case, Spider-Punk fits that criterion.

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As part of the process of pitching a huge number of suits, Spider-Punk was eventually confirmed to be one that Insomniac (basically, me and Gavin) would want to make, and actually COULD make.

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With the green light from Marvel, Gavin and I got to work oncoming up with a design that fit what Marvel and Sony were looking for in a Spider-Suit.

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For Marvel, that means faithfully representing Spider-Man in the best way possible. For Sony, it means making something with stunning visuals that could only be achieved with the power of the PS4.

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This design/pitch process involves creating a lot of concepts that emphasize what makes this suit special.

Some feedback I got in the design stage concerned the buttons on his vest, others involved the white piping around the red areas.

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This granular feedback let me know what I needed to get started, so the next step was building the suit in 3D.

This started with Leroy Chen's base Spider-Man PS4 model which he constructed as a basis for all the suits.

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A block out was produced to show Marvel how it could look in 3D by using tools like Maya, Zbrush, Modo, Marvelous Designer, and other tools.

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These (and others) are some of the tools that 3D artists use to produce the content you see in video games.

You can try them out! They have trial versions, and you can start making your owns stuff with them!

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After several iterations and a few weeks of feedback-and-updates, a final model was approved for use in the game.

Some of this feedback had to do with things like the vest not sitting right on the character. It can be very granular feedback.

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This is really just the beginning of the process, however. My job is a small part of getting Spider-Man onto your TV screen.

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Once I'm done with the model, I pass it on to @taozenforce for rigging, and @BoxingMarco for blend shapes.

I'll briefly explain what this means.

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Most of my job is making things that could animate like a puppet.

Sergio's job is to make sure that the puppet has a supporting structure inside with bones and various tools the animation team can use to make Spider-Man run, jump, and punch bad guys.

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A problem with constructing puppets is that they don't have muscles, so you occasionally need to make sure that things like knees bending don't look like weird bendy straws.

This is where Marco comes in. He sculpts special poses that fix the deformation to look natural.

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Once Sergio and Marco have done their jobs, the character model is passed to the animation team.

People like @garber_andrew make the animations that bring Spider-Man to life. (check out that aerial finisher move he did!)

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Once the model has some animations, a bunch of things happen!

We have large mission design, combat design, programming, and other teams at Insomniac that all work to hook up the models and animations so they play at the proper times.

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We also have interface and user experience teams that develop the screens you see when you acquire, select, or view these suits. We have a marketing team who works with Marvel and Sony to produce promo content.

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Not only that, but we also do tons of testing with a dedicated Quality Assurance team, along with teams at Marvel and Sony! They help us identify bugs that could do things like make Spider-Man's animations play the wrong way.

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All told, over 200 people at Insomniac, hundreds of people on outside QA teams, focus testers, marketing specialists, outsourcing artists, and dozens of others contribute to the games we make.

And that's all to make sure a single thing like Spider-Punk gets in the game.

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