5/17/02 Spider-Man Leaps Off Of Comic Pages

The first of a new monthly comic series, Spider-Man: Quality of Life, was released on Wednesday, May 15. Marvel Comics has created the miniseries of 3D CGI comics featuring our web-crawling superhero. Blue Dream Studios, based in Thousand Oaks, Calif., turned Spider-Man's 2D character into 3D for Marvel, and BOXX Technologies 3D BOXX workstation and Discreet's 3ds max played a key role in the development of the transformation.

More than 400 frames and nearly 100 pages were created for the comic book miniseries. In order for Marvel to produce a monthly comic series with more than 100 frames-per-book, at print resolution, you would need hardware with a big amount of processing power. Christian Sava, owner of Blue Dream Studios used 3ds max on a 3DBOXX S3 dual 2.2GHz Intel Xeon workstation with an NVIDIA 900 XGL graphics card, and was able utilize the system speed to avoid challenges, complete and deliver the project on a tight deadline.

"Doing a full CGI comic book of this level has never been done before, so staying true to the comic book medium and storytelling while adhering to the limitations of CGI has been challenging. 3ds max was rock solid throughout the project and by running it on 3DBOXX, we were able to take advantage of BOXX's fast, powerful computer technology in the pipeline," says Blue Dream's Sava.