Bringing the Spider-Verse Into Unreal Engine 5

The look is achieved through a combination of multiple elements that work together. It doesn't necessarily match 100% one of the movie characters, but it contains most of the things I wanted to try. The objective was to deliver a similar feeling.

The focus was on the demon, I didn't work on the rest of the image (maybe I will in a follow-up!). First of all, I had to make the character design a lot cleaner, all the armor and photorealistic details were too noisy. I went for an unshaded look for the face mask, with just a few flat and bright key colors that would contrast the darkness and smoothness of the rest of the body.

I've applied a very dark color to the body, very close to pure black. Enough to almost make it look unshaded and to keep it reactive to key lighting at the same time. The magenta and cyan stylized Rim Lights are faked inside the shader. Their angle is calculated by projecting the Sunlight direction on the screen plane. The stylized patterns are screen space too, oriented towards the Directional Light.

On the whole character, I've applied the post-process outline (the one from this tutorial). In this case, I've assigned two different colors to the filters running on depth (yellow) and normal (blue). I've also made the kernel size dynamic to adjust the line thickness based on the character screen size. The subtle shading of the "unlit" elements is created by the AO-like effect generated by the SSGI.

The paper-like texture around the character is tentative to emulate Spider-Punk's style. It can definitely be improved. It's done by attaching several boxes to the character bones and rendering them to a Render Target. Which is then composited in Post Process. The RT was necessary to avoid the geometry clipping with the rest of the scene and the demon itself.

I think the overall result isn't bad given the amount of time spent on it. It was also useful to get some ideas for future tutorials on my channel!

Andrea Giampietro, Shader Artist and YouTuber