Tonq released a detailed breakdown of the process behind his most recent Blender short, Spider-Man Never Been Done. In the animation, the Marvel superhero races through the streets of New York on a skateboard. Inspired by Andrew Garfield's skateboarding scenes in The Amazing Spider-Man, Tonq decided to combine the classic Spidey swinging and skateboarding into an extra dynamic sequence. 

For the Spider-Man rig, Tonq used a model by 3D artist Reza, provided with IK and FK for animation. To create the web strands, the artist used vertices and parented them to the hand bones using the Object Modifier. By using the Displacement Modifier and a cloud texture, he adjusted the appearance of the web.

For the first shots where Spider-Man is sitting on the edge of a building upside down playing with his skateboard, the artist recorded himself flipping a skateboard and used this footage as a reference with one major adjustment. Instead of creating an upward throwing motion in the character's hand, he made a dropping motion to account for his upside-down positioning.

For the skateboard, the creator reused his own board rig made earlier. To get the board and the Spider-Man rig moving in synchrony, the artist added an Empty to the board, copied its location, and paired the Spider-Man rig to the Empty.

The complex choreography in the scene was inspired by Ikkei Nagao's and John Sawyer's skating tricks. To create the animation, the artist started with the board movement in every shot. After that, he went on to animate the character, changing his pose every 3-5 frames to communicate each micro-movement.

The artist's top tip for creating realistic, dynamic movement is readjusting every single bone. While it might seem like a body part is not moving much from frame to frame, a live body is never stiff, and each part of it changes its positioning slightly even in subtle motion.

You can watch the full tutorial on the artist's YouTube channel to see more details on how he created the animation.

As the artist explained, this animation became a creative getaway after his burnout from the previous project, a short film titled The Caterpillar, which he spent a year working on. The Spider-Man animation took him around 3 weeks to finish.

If you like skateboarding and animation as much as Tonq does, you might want to check out more of his projects on Instagram.

Here are some more cool character animations for you to check out: see this animation of Marvel's Carnage by Adrian Nita and this breakdown of an animation of a tiny character with a massive weapon by Vanessa Ruffra.

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