Creating Spidey Suits Is a Pretty Long Process
The second of three pre-order bonus suits has been confirmed for the upcoming Spider-Man game, but you probably don’t realize how much effort goes into each one. Insomniac Games’ Xavier Coelho-Kostolny, who is a 3D character artist, broke down the process of turning video game art into a reality.
The first step is getting Spider-Man designs approved by Marvel.
“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,” said Coelho-Kostolny. “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 [lead character artist Gavin Goulden]) would want to make, and actually COULD make.”
After that, it’s onto the animation.
“Most of my job is making things that could animate like a puppet,” said Coelho-Kostolny. “[Insomniac Games’s character technical director Sergio Sykes’] 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.”
“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,” he added. “This is where [associate character artist Marco Vilallpando] comes in. He sculpts special poses that fix the deformation to look natural.”
Finally, the model goes to the animation team to give it animations. It then goes through the mission design, combat design, and programming departments.
“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,” said Coelho-Kostolny. “And that’s all to make sure a single thing like Spider-Punk gets in the game.”