Hey everyone, I found this to be a very interesting video from The Amazing Spider-Man movie. When I watched this I never realized that this entire fight was CG. I figured they mixed pieces of the real set with actual Spider-Man at times. Was pretty amazed how they did it!
Check it out:
Phew,
Yeah when I watched it, I figured it was a real set, that is rather impressive.
I also was amazed by this 
Yeah, here’s another video, it turns out that for the final swing sequence at the end of the film that they had to model all of sixth avenue for it. Which I find awesome.
Check it out here:
http://youtu.be/9iylcHONHRA
Mmm… delicious Arnold rendering.
Hey everyone, found a very interesting article about some of the process that went into the Lizard and some of the complicated SSS shaders they had to use. Plus a lot more.
Here’s the article: http://www.fxguide.com/featured/spider-man-the-detailed-vfx-of-spiders-and-lizards/
Really like how skin is handled with the Lizard model.
Yeah, treating it as a cloth simulation. I experimented with the idea to an extent, but as I started trying it on more complicated meshes Blender would either crash or my computer couldn’t handle it. Although I had been using a model that wasn’t exactly optimized for it.
I find it really amazing that all of that scene of the swing through New York was a generated 3d set (Except the sky matte painting).
Can imagine such a cloth sim crippling most computers. I suppose a big part of this is the subdivision of the model, using something like OpenSubdiv would be a huge advantage here. Also not sure what cloth sim Blender uses, not sure if it’s bullet, but maybe using that would improve the simulation too?
OpenSubdiv is purely a viewport mechanic and wouldn’t help with cloth sims.
Ahh ok, thanks for the correction. I am a bit confused by this though. Surely when you apply a subsurface, you’re changing the topology of the mesh. If the cloth sim was layered on top of the subsurface, wouldn’t it provide the cloth sim with a greater resolution to work with. 99% sure this is the way the current subsurf & cloth sim modifiers work in Blender no?
Nope, this is why we have a modifier stack, anything before cloth in the stack gets calculated before the cloth, anything after gets calculated after…
So adding a sub div mod and a displace mode after the cloth sim in the stack will work fine… and it’s usually good enough to use a lower fidelity version for the sim and to subdivide after.
You would only be right if you started applying the modifiers…
Ah ha, thanks for the info Michael & Matt, just assumed that the cloth sim would make use of the subdiv if it’s before it in the modifier stack. As the old saying goes though, don’t assume, it makes an ass out of u and me 
As far as I know that’s how they work. But this is irrelevant to the OpenSubdiv code. All that does in calculate tessellation and limit surfaces on the GPU on the fly, it doesn’t actually change the geometry that is fed to the renderer when you hit f12. That would still use the standard Catmull-Clark subdivisons we’ve had all along. OpenSubdiv is just a clever way of showing these shapes more efficiently in the viewport.