02Case study
Webline
Spider-Man in a full size Manhattan, built in Unreal Engine.
Webline is our own Spider-Man fan game, made to see how far we could push a 3D world. It runs on Unreal Engine 5, with the suits, props and animations prepared in Blender. The city is all of Manhattan below 110th Street, generated from real map data with every building at its true height, and you cross it the way Spider-Man would, swinging, wall running, zipping and diving. It is a private project and is not published anywhere, so every picture here is from the game running on our own machine.
01Why we built it
A game is the hardest kind of thing we make. The world has to look right, the character has to move right, and all of it has to run in real time. We wanted one project that tests every part of that at once.
Spider-Man needs a whole city to work, and a city you can swing through has to hold up from the street, from the rooftops and from the air. So the brief we set ourselves was the real Manhattan, at full size, playable on a laptop.
02The city
The real Manhattan
Every block below 110th Street is generated from OpenStreetMap: building footprints and heights, streets, sidewalks, crosswalks, parks, trees and the rivers on both sides. The street names and neighborhoods on the map in the corner are the real ones.
Buildings that look lived in
Walls use scanned brick, limestone and concrete, mixed by district the way the real city changes from block to block. Older masonry gets cornices, and every roof is dressed with bulkheads, fans, vents, skylights and antennas.
Times Square
Animated screens, a news ticker, theater marquees and rooftop billboards, all carrying ads we made up for the game.
Streets that move
Taxis, buses, police cars, fire trucks, ambulances and garbage trucks drive the avenues, stop at the signals and brake for people. Pedestrians walk the sidewalks and react when Spider-Man lands next to them, and pigeons flock along the streets.
Day and night
The sun moves through the day. At night the windows light up, the street lamps come on, and the streets turn wet with puddles that catch the signs.
Built to fit on a laptop
Props and street life stream in around the player in tiles, so the whole island fits in memory on a fanless MacBook Air.
03Getting around
Web swinging
Swinging runs on real pendulum physics. The web finds the best building to attach to, carries you through the arc, and lets go at the top so you can chain one swing into the next or flip out of it.
Walls and ledges
Run up a building or along its side, crawl in any direction, pull yourself over the edge of a roof and perch on a ledge.
Zip and launch
Zip to any point you aim at, then launch off it to carry the speed into the next swing.
Diving
Step off a roof and fall head first, steering and gliding with the camera over your back, then catch a web before the street.
04Spider-Man himself
Five suits
A suit wheel switches between five suits in the middle of play. Each one is prepared in Blender and rigged onto one shared skeleton, and the animations only turn the joints, so every suit keeps its own build and its own hands.
Animation
Swing poses traced from film reference, plus more than 250 traversal and combat moves fitted to his skeleton: landings, flips out of releases, vaults, wall flips and a web pose in the hands on every shot.
Fighting
Street crews spawn around the city. Punch combos, a charged drop kick, web shots that wrap a goon in a cocoon, and a spider-sense warning that lets you dodge.
Voice and sound
Each suit has its own voice lines and web sounds, with footsteps, wind and impacts underneath.
A heads up display
A map in the corner that names the street and the neighborhood you are over, the spider badge, and the time of day.
05How it is built
Unreal Engine 5
Movement, swinging, combat, traffic, pedestrians and the day and night cycle are written in C++ inside Unreal Engine 5.
Blender
Suits, goons, props and animations go through Blender first, where they are cleaned up, rigged to one skeleton and exported for the engine.
A city you can rebuild
Python scripts build the whole island in the editor from map data, so a change to how buildings or streets are made is one rebuild, not weeks of hand placement.
★The result
A whole city to swing through, running on a laptop.
Webline is playable on our machine today: all of Manhattan below 110th Street, five suits, a full day and night, and traffic and people in the streets.
It stays private, with no download or public link, and we keep adding to it: more suits, more moves and more of the city.
Want a 3D world of your own?
If you have a game or an interactive 3D world in mind, we can build it in Unreal Engine or for the browser, from the models to the code. The first call is 15 minutes and costs nothing.