Case Study: Sony Pictures Imageworks creates the award-winning visual style of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse with Foundry's Nuke, Mari and Katana

Sony Pictures Imageworks builds 100+ custom Nuke tools with Foundry for Spider-Verse

Sony Pictures Imageworks faced the challenge of creating the unique, hand-drawn comic book visual style for "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse." This required a complete reinvention of their approach to look development, lighting, and texturing, moving beyond traditional animated film workflows. They needed to solve key problems like creating dynamic brush strokes and ink lines to transform concept art into the final design, a complex task that demanded a careful balance between multiple departments and new tools.

With Foundry's Nuke, Mari, and Katana, the team developed a suite of over 100 custom non-photoreal tools. Foundry's solutions included the innovative Stroke System for painting, the Kismet tool for procedural ink lines, and a new PigmentMerge node to solve color issues. This allowed for constant innovation and interactive look development, replacing expensive 3D render techniques with faster comp solutions and enabling the artists to push creative boundaries, resulting in an Oscar-nominated and VES award-winning film that redefined animation.

Sony Pictures Imageworks