Passion Project
– black widow
Since starting my 3D journey I have been fascinated with all aspects of it. The one area I haven’t taken a leap into yet was animation. Being inspired by Andrey Lebrov and his CG/VFX work, I decided to try my hand at recreating one of his projects that was produced in Cinema 4D and Octane renderer.
The why:
I wanted to use this as a case study for Blenders mograph abilities and limitations, as well as push myself to understanding and learning the basics to an animated workflow within Blender.
– the design journey
spider walk cycle
researching spiders
The main actor of this animation is the spider. So I had to make sure that this was carefully studied. To save time I used a modeled and rigged spider. After playing around with it, I realized that the rigging wasn’t going to work. So I re-rigged the spider.
After re-rigging the spider I was able to control the body independent of the legs. This allows me to maintain the position of the legs. Giving me further control over how fast the body needed to travel across the length of the web. Once the speed was dialed in, I animated the legs to the bodies speed, resulting in a much more accurate walk cycle.
Making it believable
The biggest components to making any animation more believable are often the small details. For this animation this detail was in the interaction between the spider and the web. The physics that cause the web to push down under the weight of the spider. Resulting in a much more dynamic and believable animation.
showing pre and post process of animation and physics simulation
