Spider-Man 3 was well represented at this year’s VES festival. Activision, actors, environments and effects from the film were all topics of discussion. All Spider-Man 3 images © 2007 Columbia Pictures Ind. Inc. All rights res

This year's ninth edition of the VES Festival kicked off Friday, June 8, at the Writer's Guild Theater in Beverly Hills with an Activision presentation on "Rendering Cinematic Game Experiences in Real Time." Cto Steve Pearce first discussed how changes in multi core architecture centered on the GPU have allowed advancements in lighting, texturing and vfx for the next-gen platforms. This has resulted in greater overall immersion and improved facial expressions, as witnessed in such recent titles as Shrek the Third, Spider-Man 3 and Call of Duty 3.

Filippo Costanzo, art director of Central Technology, discussed 3D data acquisition, including how Activision set up its own in-house scanning operation tied to a ZBrush alpha map, before concentrating on the impressive environments Activision created for Spider-Man 3. Alessandro Tento, senior director of art and design, also discussed recent developments.

The 30-month Spider-Man 3 production entailed the creation of a layout map of New York, including 30 neighborhoods, as well as a zoning map procedural tool for the various buildings. For textures, there were 16 base tiles that were reassembled for 600 layouts. Overall, there were 16,000 building pieces.

For lighting, they created day to night horizon shifts and mapped it so that the lowest angle is calculated and stored in 32-bit texture.

As for new developments, Activision plans on reducing its mesh maps, texture and layouts, as it continues striving for an even greater interactive paradigm.

Kicking off the marathon Saturday lineup was a look at the visual effects behind Spider-Man 3. Moderator/visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk said that when reflecting back on the project there are three major areas -- actors, environments and effects. When it came to innovation on the film, it was in the area of character driven effects animation, particularly dealing with the symbiotic goo and the sand fx.

Before turning over the presentation to the artists who worked on those challenges, Stokdyk highlighted some of the other effects work on the movie. Paul Debevec and his team helped redefine the CG actors, especially addressing data collection issues and the animation of the digital model's eyes. New ballistics tools were developed to aid the animators in trajectory and gravity simulation. Many moments in the project also called for limb replacement. There was also some practical effects work, including the building of the atomizer that transforms Flint into The Sandman, flipping cars, some sand work (which was really ground up corn cobs) and water effects. An interesting point he made was that one the signature shots of Spider-Man in the black suit on the building was a complete CG build and that it was one of the easier shots on the project. That same shot would have been one of the most difficult shots on the original film.

This most prominent new work on Spider-Man 3 was done on the symbiotic goo (above) and Sandman. Peter Nofz presented the work on the goo, which began with simple 2D pencil tests to get the movement of the substance.

On the previous films the technology available hindered the combination of practical stunt work with digital doubles, but new advances allowed the Spider-Man 3 artists to expand in this area. This was no more prominent than in the work done on the symbiotic goo and Sandman character. Peter Nofz presented the work on the goo, which began with simple 2D pencil tests to get the movement of the substance down. What they learned is that they didn't want it to look like the Blob. Director Sam Raimi drove the development of the goo by wanting it to appear menacing; like it were attacking its host. This moved the visual effects artists in the direction of creating tentacles and knuckles are the goo crawled up the arm of the Peter Parker. Once the initial look was developed, the visual artists helped bring more dimension to the goo by adding texture and spans between the tentacles.

For the sand effects, animation supervisor Spencer Cook was in charge on bringing The Sandman to life. During the very opening of the birth of Sandman scene, key frame animation was used on the rolling grains of sand. For the performance of the Sandman emerging and reforming into his human form, both the on-set performance of Thomas Hayden Church and a video performance from animator Scott Fritz were used as reference. In this area, the effects team really pushed the boundaries of combining character animation with effects.

Jonathan Cohen, who developed the sand program with Doug Bloom, explained the process in creating the believable sand movement. Spheres were used for the particles of sand, adding and subtracting friction and balance until the look was right. They combined the various sand simulations into one tool, which they dubbed Sand Storm, which was applied to muscular animation underneath. This allowed the surface sand to shift and fall with the character's movement. The character and vfx animators had to work together on the facial animation to control how the sand moved and fell in order to keep the emotion of the performance right.