Experiment with Armatures: Spider

I tried making a spider in order to experiment with armatures. Unfortunately, the spider doesn’t look too much realistic, but I was hoping I could get some tips as to how I could improve it for future endeavours. I don’t even know how I would start with the eyes…


Spider.blend (595 KB)

Thanks,
kev717.

With the legs rounded like that, it looks kind of friendly, perhaps you want to look at how to make it a happy-friendly spider, either that or give the legs sharp points to make it more threatening. Looking at your blend… I’d turn down the subsurf levels (set view =1) and turn the smooth modifier off and edit the basic shape rather than just using subsurf to make the square legs round. Subsurf is probably making it hard to get the eyes right? Just add some shiny black (or dark purple or blue) eyes, use spheres. UV map the spider to give it some color variation (just a stripe down the back would do for a start).

I would recommend searching for some good close ups / macro photo’s of spiders and seeing what tickles your imagination. You could even mix and match parts from different spiders :slight_smile:

Something I can propose is, perhaps having the individual leg segments as seperate objects. Each part of a spiders leg is quite solid with incredibly little deformation at the joints, so you could quite happily weight each segment to it’s own “bone” and simply have them overlap at the ends.