<Edit> - 11th April 05
I’ve added my latest picture:
I gave up on the fur - it takes too long to render and I want to have a go at animating this beast eventually.
</edit>
Here’s my first real effort with Blender
I’d really appreciate suggestions - tutorials on depth of field, and on how to get the hair to look nice and silky, but still possible to animate? I was thinking of using this model to play with the walk cycle. But there again, maybe I ought to stick to two legs first!!!
Also, I’m not sure why I’m getting the blotchy pale patch on the abdomen?
I agree with squirrel ha. I think the segments in the leg are to wide apart. The real spider the segments are obvious, but they are not 2 cm apart. Other than that, it looks very good. Also i dont know if this is intentional but the front feelers are as big as the legs themselves. If you look at the spider pi, they are about a fourth as big as one of the legs. Keep up the work.
If you are trying to make a fairly realistic model of the Pink Zebra Beauty, you should try to pay close attention to the proportions. In addition to what strongbad has mentioned, i’d like to point out that:
-Its main body should be wider, and the teeth should be bigger, with almost no space between them
-The abdomen should not be so long, the tip should be brought in closer to the body.
-The legs in general need to be shorter and thicker.
-In the photo, The “skin” of the spider is a very dark, almost black. Try setting it to a dark gray, and then use a light grey or light purple rampshader for the diffuse.
-The hairs should be orange brown, and there should be more of them. What you could do is, in object mode, select your spider, and press alt-c and choose convert subsurf to mesh. After that, parent your hair fiber to the vertices. Make sure you do this step last since its much easier to fix the proportions on a low poly subsurfed model.
-Another useful tool is shrink/fattern, aka “scale along normal”. In edit mode, select something and then press alt+s to use the tool to help you with those things I mentioned above.
My first thot: “Dude! They’ve got 10-legged spiders, now?” Then I looked a little closer and compared your reference image… might want to shrink those front “arms” a little… You’re gonna give some arachnophobic elYsiunite a heart-attack!
The first I noticed was it looked like it had 10 legs. (although thats changed on the first image)
As much as I dont like looking at your image or the reference (I physically find it difficult due to fear),
I think your front two legs should be facing forward more. The legs should go around with the body. It currently makes the sides look too flat.
Also, I think you need to enlarge the two front “things” (dont know what they are called…they look like hairy tusks) they should be larger.
If you look at the referance pic the feelers go small to large yours go large to small. Also the segements in the legs still look to prominent. The feelers look better after the resize. Keep workin on it. It would be really cool if you animate it, but that would be a heck of an armature job. It looks really creepy and thats a good thing.
Legs re-posed to be more like the reference picture
Edges around the segments creased so that the segments are less obvious
Strongbad - I’ve put bones in each segment of the legs and in the abdomen and assigned the appropriate vertices to each bone so that they are posable - I’m hoping that’ll be sufficient to get some way towards animating…any tips would be really welcome!! I’ve downloaded a video of a spider moving and a spider walk cycle someone else had written for reference. If there are no more major changes to the model, I’ll have a go at animating it next and post again when I get a chance. (My job really gets in the way of my life!!)
the legs look much better. they are more natural now I think.
that would be superb to see it animated!
save another copy of your .blend for an animation test and post it
I cant wait to see this thing walk!
(seriously, I hate spiders, and this is creeping me out rather a lot!)
I’ve at last spent a day working on this spider and learning a lot about animation in the process!!
C&C welcome, though I can guess some of the crits already - I’ve really struggled with rigging it so the legs move naturally and with getting it to walk without sliding - ended up with little jerky movements instead on this version and funny bowed legs. :-?
I have only used blender for a short while, and am absolutely no expert. Although I see some things that I feel could be changed.
It seems as if the legs you have modeled are round, and when I look at the ref. pic, and others found with google, they seem, well, more irregular. They also become more thinner at the ends.
Also, the front legs, should point more forward, and back legs, more backwards.
Your pedipalps are connected at the base, while the “real” ones seem separated, but closer together.
You need to shorten the abdomen even more.
And please make some fur, search the forum for techniques. Without
the fur it looks very artificial, like a spider-toy or something.
The animation feels good, but there is a clip in the middle. Though I have little experience with spiders moving.
The ground is very shiny, and the shadows very sharp.
I see now that it seems as if I think everything is bad, but I really think it is a good start and a beginning of what could develop to a realistic animation.
It will be exciting to see this finished!
Hope my comments are usefull, if not, just ignore them.
