We made Spiderverse in Vanilla Minecraft 😳 #Spiderverse #AcrossTheSpiderverse #Minecraft
NotNexus and I, in the hopes of expressing our love for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse as well as showcasing our skills, came to the decision to recreate the iconic art style from the movie in Minecraft only using shaders available in the vanilla game.
Short film
To showcase our work we made a short film telling a story related to the first and second movie. The short film was published on X / Twitter and it was massive success. As of writing this, the video has garnered over 8,000 views and over 100 likes.
Execution
We analyzed the art style to be able to make our recreation as accurate as possible, however the movie employs many more effects than what we can hope to implement. Therefore we only considered the effects that made the largest difference visually for recreation.
Additionally since this project wasn't meant to be playable by others we had the freedom to pick any client configuration we wished. We went with the vanilla client with graphics set to Fabulous! to be able to use post processing shaders on top of all the other shaders.
Hatching
We noticed the movie uses hatching to shade dark areas. To recreate this effect we introduced a cross hatching pattern to blocks below a configurable light level.
Note the transition from the light to the dark area.
We ensured the hatching pattern fades in smoothly as the light level falls below the threshold. The pattern is generated procedurally and overlaid on top of the existing texture.
Halftones
For bright areas the movie instead uses halftones for shading. When it comes to the implementation this effect is the same as the hatching effect but with a different pattern and threshold.
Note the transition from the dark to the light area.
The halftone pattern, just like the hatching pattern, fades in smoothly as the light level rises above the configured threshold. Likewise a procedurally generated halftone pattern is simply being overlaid on the existing texture.
Chromatic aberration
Note how the out of focus background is stylized.
The movie uses chromatic aberration to represent out of focus elements in the scene. Since vanilla Minecraft does not have a depth of field feature we instead reinterpreted this effect as something to apply to distant elements.
In our recreation the chromatic aberration increases with distance. In the image above the buildings close to the player are left untouched whereas the buildings far and away are noticeably distorted.
Portal
The final major effect we recreated from the movie were the portals. For the recreation we only worried about the visuals of the portal from the front as that's the only angle we planned to use in the short film.
There are 4 hexagons and 3 thin rings between each, all rotating at increasing speeds at increasing depths. Fast moving streaks were added to emphasize the exotic nature of the portal.
Post effects
Rendered with the glitch post effect.
In the spirit of keeping things vanilla we decided to implement visual effects, that usually would be applied during the editing stage, in the game itself with post processing shaders.
Another post effect that was implemented in-game.
These post effects were used to indicate Spiderman's spider-sense getting triggered and also used for impact frames in the short film.
Miscellaneous
We ended up adding a few more effects to make Minecraft look even prettier;
- Toon outlines to give a more comic book look,
- Bloom to make bright elements pop,
- Color banding for distant objects to further separate the foreground,
- Blue fog with a halftone texture to represent light from traffic,
- Custom sky to adjust colors and add a subtle gradient,
- Color grade the whole final frame.
Credits
- Creative direction by NotNexus.
- Cyberpunk Project by ElysiumFire.
- Bare Bones resource pack by RobotPant.
- Parcool mod by alRex_U.
- Replay for Forge mod by min01.
