The Frustrating Spider Animation
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This week I’ve been trying to develop a animation cycle for a spider. This spider is an enemy within the game and will act hostile towards the player character whenever it sees the opportunity. The spider will be located mostly in spider webs they’ve weaved and different around such as branches. However, to make this all possible, I’ve been working on a walking animation cycle. This was a difficult task. I had no idea how a spider walked, not to mention that spiders have eight legs to walk with. Naturally I did some research about the biology of spiders and videos on how spiders walked. Before I could begin animating a spider, I needed to conclude on a concept for the spider in terms of visuals. I had my mind set on creating a creating a tough and menacing spider. I wanted it to let the player know it was threat. Luckily, I already had some assets I could use to do that. I’ve already started drawing a moth kind character, but wasn’t probably gonna be used for the game itself. I used it’s fur near it’s head to create the back part of the spider. 
  Fur usually makes animals themselves look bigger, which in result made it look more threatening. I used the same principle for the spider and came up with 3 different concepts. I also did one side view of the spider, but me and my group agreed that a top down view of the spider was better since it can look more massive and easier to show details of the spider.  Eventually I didn’t go for the fur idea in the end. Me and my group concluded on the spider concept without any fur. The reason being it look more like a black widow spider. A black widow spider is very well known for how dangerous it is, and since this concept had a similar body structure to it, we went with that. I realized after I took away the fur that it didn’t need it. It even looked more off putting without it. Perhaps it was the kind of style of hair it was. The hair was stylized so that I believe took away some of the ‘creepy’ aspect of spiders and made it actually look appealing and pleasing to look at. This wasn’t what I was going for however. Another quick fact is that I based the small part of the body on big spiders. I felt that Spiders such as tarantulas mainly had flat bodies (where the legs are connected to). The eyes themselves are not typically placed in the middle of the body like mine is, but it is to make the spider look more menacing and creepier since the player can see all the eyes. I had major trouble with trying to make a walk cycle for the spider. I did it frame by frame in the beginning since it seemed easier to do at the time. For me it frightened me to create a skeletal rig for it since I thought there would be so many limbs and such on the legs. I Figured I could just redraw the legs if they looked off in the animation since they were easy to draw. I was wrong. I’ve spent countless hours trying to get it to work, but it always looked off. The legs didn’t look like it was moving the spider but just waving around, especially the back legs. It took me way too long to figure out what was wrong with it. Not to mention I messed up a lot with the frames of the legs in terms of where they were supposed to be for which frame. This caused me to waste so much time during the week. I kept losing track of the legs since there was so many legs for each frame. I focused on animating the legs first and not the body since the legs seemed a lot harder to animate. What I aimed for with the walking animation is mostly realism. I didn’t really know how to make a spider seem more scary in the way it walked. I didn’t worry about it however, since the movement of the legs when a spider is walking is already pretty creepy itself. That’s the main reason I was so frustrated during the animation process since I could never figure out how to make it walk normally. I did the coloring later on since I needed a break from animating. I based the color scheme on the style sheet for the game. I did some shading and coloring to make it look like it had some hair, since hairy spiders are usually more terrifying (at least for me), although I still wanted to keep a similar aesthetic to the black widow spider so I didn’t make the hairs extrude out of its body in any way. I made the eyes red since typically red eyes in any media means “bad”. A spider with 8 glowing red eyes from the darkness would make it even more terrifying and make it seem more of a threat.   |
