I love the way the suit ripples in the wind. I love the crazy angles. I love the music.

And how Andrew Garfield's Spider Man waits until the absolute last second before shooting a web.

It's the epitome of Spider Man .

But of course, we're not really seeing Andrew Garfield here.

This is a "digidouble," a fully digital version of the character.

In fact, this whole scene is digital.

Obviously, right?

A real person couldn't do this.

Digital doubles aren't just used for impossible action sequences, though.

Take these three clips of Spider Man.

First is from the original Spider Man from 2002.

Second is Spidey's first appearance in the MCU in 2016's "Captain America: Civil War."

Third is Spidey surrounded by drones in the Illusion sequence in 2019's "Far From Home."

Can you guess which on is filmed with an actor and which one is a digidouble?

Okay, it's kind of a trick question.

None of these are real people.

They're all digidoubles.

In fact, a ton of superheroes are just digital replacements, even in the most mundane scenes.

But, why?

Superhero movies and digidoubles have always paired well together.

And not just because of the stunts.

It's because of the costumes and the masks.

Now might be time to admit that I'm a little bit of a Spider Man fan.

Anyway, replicating a fabric or metallic costume is way easier than replicating skin or a human face, which gives the effects artists a lot of leeway.

They can mix real and digital elements for maximum realism.

Like keeping a bit of an actor's face and replacing everything else digitally, like in this scene from "Spider Man."

Or maybe they just replace everything from the neck down, like with Iron Man, and then they add a digidouble of War Machine next to him.

Or maybe they'll just replace everything from the ankle down to create toes worthy of a super soldier.

Okay, that one is a little less common, but more often than not, they'll cut from a real actor on film to a digital recreation without too much friction.

And, while some of these digital replacements are planned from the beginning, sometimes they're not.

Which is what happened with Spider Man's first appearance in the MCU.

He was a digidouble in every shot.

Both when he's swinging around Giantman's legs and when he's just standing there, talking.

That's because he almost wasn't in "Captain America: Civil War" due to lengthy negotiations between Sony and Marvel about how to share the web-slinger.

Tom Holland wasn't even cast until June of 2015, a month after filming began.

So once he was confirmed, there was a huge rush to get him in the movie, as Holland explains on "Live with Kelly and Ryan."

The suits typically take 10 to 15 weeks to make, right, and they didn't have enough time to make one for me.

So, I was gonna wear my stunt double's one.

What he ended up wearing on set, which you can see in this behind-the-scenes footage, was not finalized by the costume department, which is where the digidouble comes in.

VFX artists changed his entire costume in post; none of the final version is real fabric.

And it's different from the suit worn on set, too.

You can see that the spider symbol on the chest is refined and the webbing across the body isn't raised like previous renditions of the suit.

It's stitched in and more subtle.

Holland did some motion capture for the scenes, but that was just the base of the digital double.

Animators had to clean it up and push it further with the new digital suit.

Animators like, kind of, take things and they like to exaggerate movement.

And sometimes, it's what feels right, you know, not what is right, especially for superheroes.

You may want more exaggerated movement that a human cannot do.

Lon Molnar is the Co-president of the VFX company──Monsters Aliens Robots and Zombies.

They worked on full CG versions of "Vision" and "Moonknight," as well as de-aging for the villains in "Spider-Man: No Way Home."

Hello, Peter.

Even when motion capture is involved, VFX artists still consider characters to be digidoubles.

In our sense, in our world, it is a digidouble still, because you're recreating everything digitally.

You're relighting the suit, you're re-composing, you're erasing the main performance.

Everything in the shot is taken over by us.

Costume issues come up all the time.

The timesuits from "Avengers: Endgame" weren't finalized until after everything was shot.

Neither was the integrated suit from "No Way Home."

That's all iterating, iterating.

Marvel loves to iterate, and tweaks after the fact just make it look more superheroish, right?

And looking superheroish is another big reason for digidoubles.

As an animator myself, one of the things, traditionally, that you learn is how strong posing is really important, that silhouette.

In this scene from "Civil War" where Black Panther is also always a digidouble, you can see how, in the final version, the hands are moved out so that they don't blend into the body, and the body position is more upright.

Digidoubles are even used to make superheroes look more like comic-book superheroes, as the VFX team on the first Iron Man describe.

We try to get what we've been calling a "Marvel moment," which is, sort of, you know...

Here, where he's really flying through the air, he's got his fist up.

They're trying to match maybe a comic book image, so the fans just...

Their heads explode and say,"That's that shot!"

And, you know they want it to be perfect.

And with a full CG replacement, they can... they can... they can hit that.

Integrating digidoubles seamlessly can convince audiences that a regular human is super.

That means that these live-action films are often way more animated than we give them credit for.

According to the DVD extras on the film, 96% of all the shots making up "Avengers: Infinity War" had some kind of VFX.

That's fairly common for Marvel.

All of their movies have thousands and thousands of VFX shots, and those often include digidoubles.

This gives filmmakers the space and flexibility to get things exactly how they want them.

With Marvel, they're making it a tool in the toolbox to allow them to get over some of these challenges because they know that VFX companies can make things look so real.

So, it's a great tool for them to have full confidence in.