Sony Imageworks raised the vfx bar on Spider-Man 3 with the introduction of three new super villains, all seen here in the final battle. All images © 2007 Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. All rights reserved.

For more details of all the visual effects in this record-breaking film, check out VFXWorld's additional Spider-Man 3 coverage.

In keeping with director Sam Raimi's mandate to raise the obstacles and emotional stakes in Spider-Man 3, with the introduction of three new super villains -- Sandman, Venom and New Goblin -- Sony Pictures Imageworks was tasked with raising the vfx bar as well.

Although the film's overall vfx shot count of 930 was not extraordinary, the volume and complexity of the 3D work were. So there were a lot of new advancements at Imageworks to meet the challenges. First, there was the creation of Sandman, which required ambitious R&D to build a series of solvers to animate the character. Then there was the creation of the symbiotic black goo from outer space that required its own special rigs, which eventually transforms into the malevolent Venom. Plus improved virtual camera movements to better show off the acrobatics of Spider-Man and his new black-suited alter ego; a new proprietary package, Katana, for more efficient use of lighting rigs; improved digital face scanning and computer-controlled camera work to replace the faces of digital doubles with live-action footage of the actors; and, finally, improved virtual environments.

"The Spider-Man franchise has always been about solving a series of problems," contends visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk, who enlisted the aid of about a dozen other vendors. "In the crane disaster, there was a section where a building is somewhat destroyed by a crane arm and beam; there are about 20 different elements, including bluescreen and CG. In general, we tried to make a concerted effort to get as much live action in there as possible. I mean, the trend in visual effects that I perceive is more and more shots going completely synthetic, which I really understand because there are some things you just can't get in camera. Sometimes it's actually easier to go completely CG. But even in the most fully virtual shots, we try as often as possible to shoot a live-action component. I think that was really a good strategy: it made for every shot being different.

In the alley fight with Harry Osborn, an extreme combination of real plate photography shot on a Spider-Cam rig with a lot of CG and stunt work were used.

"For example, during the alley fight with Harry Osborn, if you look at every shot across that sequence, there's at least 15 ways we executed them. So there wasn't a simple rule about shooting where we either shot bluescreen people on CG backgrounds or CG people on CG backgrounds. It was an extreme combination of real plate photography shot on a Spider-Cam rig in Los Angeles, with an incredible amount of CG and intricate stunt work, either computer-controlled cables that used previs information where the stunt team were almost motion controlling their people with this cable system in combination with bluescreen and CG people and small pieces of sets with CG backgrounds. What made this challenging was that there was no easy way to get in a groove.

"We've all gotten pretty sophisticated in being able to figure out what's real and what's CG. But the constant challenge across all the Spider-Man movies for us has been: What real world components can we bring in there to trick the brain into accepting it? And what emotion in the character animation will help that too? One of the things that [vfx Plate leads] Nic Nicholson and John Schmidt did was a physics-based ballistics tool that gave animators another tool in their palette to ground something in the real world. It basically allowed the animator to take the center of mass of Spider-Man and, based on some inputs, to map how the trajectory of that would work in 3D space. Instead of having to just create an arc or a swing from scratch, the animators would figure out if you through a body through space, this is what it would do. I think that Sam has become more savvy over the last few years about what makes these stunts more interesting whether they're CG or real and what Spider-Man does."

Stokdyk says that although Raimi understand the limits of vfx, he still tries to push them. A case in point was Sandman. The sand had to look and act just right.

"Up until the end, there was an incredible amount of custom code created for sand," Stokdyk continues. "The sand team likes to say it's the equivalent of six years of labor done over the last two years. It was quite complex. And aside from the development, the shots themselves were complex involving a very intricate mix of character and effects animation. In many cases, it was more than just effects animation layered on top of character animation: it was that the effects animation was so integral to the character animation that it became a very iterative process where the character animator would block out movement, even of a character that wasn't completely formed, including volumes and shapes to give a hint of the effects to come, and then the effects animator would take over and use some of those Maya surfaces in the particle system to create volumes and flow and then go back to the character animator and say, 'This isn't working here: we need to speed this up, slow this down; we need more volume here.' It was the combination of interlaced effects and character animation that elevated the complexity of it.