Why am I making a spider in Blender?

The spider will part of a scene, though it does have a central role. It’s not horror, don’t worry. Well, don’t worry about it being horror, anyway. It’s going to be a surprise, and should be really cool.

I’ve wanted to make a spider or insect for a while, but didn’t really have an excuse. The thing about them is they are already fairly mechanical if you just look at their structure, so you can get most of the form down just using hard surface modeling.

I’m going to need to experiment with posing it, so I’m going to have to rig it, which means to give it a sort of internal armature that you can then easily adjust to experiment endlessly with different poses before settling on one.

It was a lot of fun to make this guy, or gal. I enjoyed the sort of logic of figuring out how to go about it. Now I’ve got to figure out how best to add organic sculpting (such as to blend the leg joints in); then retopologize it; rig it; add finer details; and to either texture paint it or use procedural texturing, etc. It’s a really simple model — as in it doesn’t have tons of vertices — so none of that should be too complicated, but it’s territory I’m not very experienced in.

There’s a couple ways I like to learn. One is doing tutorials, and another is just to come up with a project and look up how to do something when I get to that stage, or can’t figure it out. You can do the latter a lot better if you’ve done more of the former. For me, just going for it, and trying to figure it out as you go along is a lot more fun.

This project is going to use some power features of Blender: particles and physics and cloth simulations and other features I’ve scarcely dipped into. But I have dipped, so I know it can be done.

Don’t touch that dial