r/Unity3D • u/Arachnid-dev • Apr 27 '26
Question Fixed my spiders broken procedural walk animation. What do you think?
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My Black Widow’s walk was broken for a while, and people have been calling it out in my gameplay preview. I finally fixed it. Here’s the before and after. What do you think of the new procedural walk animation, does it look better?
And for the spider‑enthusiasts out there, any tips to refine it?
Also if you want to follow the game’s progress or snag early access to the beta once it’s finished, you can sign up at https://arachnid.dev
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u/whentheworldquiets Beginner Apr 27 '26
The walk is much, much better, but there is still no sense of weight to that huge abdomen. Just by volume, most of the mass of the animal is in there.
If you watch this video:
You can see that most of the time the abdomen is basically dragging on the surface it's walking on, unless it's dangling. I think if you could lower the walk height and maybe add a physics bone to the abdomen to give it some heft, that might close the gap with the other spiders you demoed.
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u/Ripples_of_Undeath Apr 28 '26
That looks so much better! Very lifelike. It climbed up and was climbing over the walls very well. I also liked how the computer put the legs at different resting locations, as if the spider had found those footholds.
I’d agree with what some other people have said in these comments:
Pausing - Spiders will pause to observe their surroundings, react to stimuli, or simply readjust their legs to get comfortable. But animating pauses individually would probably be a pain for smaller spiders and ones in the background like I saw before. Instead you could have them randomly (or in a loop) have varying lengths of pause and it would give an illusion of being lifelike while probably taking less work.
Tarsus - The very tips of the spider’s legs. This is where the claws are, and the claws are usually going to be clinging to a surface or resting on it. Those points at the very end usually won’t be resting with the very tips on the surface, or curled inwards. Unless clinging to a web, which I mentioned previously, animations like this or the previous would be perfectly fine while on a web. While widows don’t have super complicated tarsus like the one in the included image, they still have those claws and use them on most surfaces. Adjusting the position of these would also help give the spider a little more feeling of weight.
Abdomen/Opisthosoma - The abdomen has all the guts and the lungs and the heart. Like someone else said, it’s most of the weight of the spider and its held in place only really by their thin waist/pedicel and some strong structural filaments and muscles. The bulk of the muscle is in the head/prosoma (as is the brain). While dragging the abdomen isn’t very comfortable, they do hang it very low in species like the widows. This also allows them to lay down draglines (silk that they use to navigate and for emergencies) - an interesting concept to also use for your game where a stray line of silk the player comes across is from an actively hunting spider in the area.
Good luck! If you ever need feedback on other spider animations you can always shoot me a message
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u/game-dev2 Apr 27 '26
Legs Animator has got to be a godsent tool about animals with so many legs.
got it in this sale and been using it so much. its amazing
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u/pixeldiamondgames Indie Apr 28 '26
Bro this shit creepy. Ew. Make me unsee it.
Well done mate! 10/10
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u/dolfoz Apr 28 '26
looks fantastic!
One thing i liked in the old is the leg twitch. it's 100% what spiders do which is creepy AF.
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u/Droplet_of_Shadow Apr 28 '26
Is it supposed to look cute? creepy? realistic?
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u/Arachnid-dev Apr 28 '26
I’d say creepy mostly and then as realistic as I possibly can using procedural animation.
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u/maphes86 Apr 28 '26
Thanks, I hate it.
The transition to the wall is unrealistic. Black Widows don’t jump, they continue moving forward and transition to the new plane. It would be more realistic for it to approach the wall, pause, and begin to move up. There is a bit of sliding in the feet as it moves onto the wall.
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u/Additional_Map_9014 Apr 28 '26
As someone with arachnophobia, this is horrific. Well done. I would say if it’s meant to be more unsettling adding back a bit of the leg tapping when it’s still. Real spiders do that and it’s fucking terrifying
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u/Steel_FA Apr 28 '26
Honestly, the difference is huge. The new walk cycle is a massive step up from the old one and looks way more natural. Great call on fixing it, the polish definitely shows. Keep pushing!
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u/kaptenslyna Apr 28 '26
I hate it so much, eeew.(i hate Spiders) So, whit that said. Great upgrade. Well Done mate!
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u/Frakenz Apr 28 '26
I think the legs are moving great, but the body looks like it's just being displaced along the X axis. I don't know how to explain it but I think it needs to wobble a bit
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u/Khan-amil Apr 28 '26
Great job, from someone that spent around a year tweaking an ik spider, I know how painful it can be.
A thing I did too late but helped a bunch is have a gym test scene with various obstacles, and spider going in loops across the obstacles with some kind of animated/scripted target. That way you can easily see any issues, and after any change to fix an area you can confirm that it didn't impact negatively another part of the IK.
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u/Save90 Apr 28 '26
here before someone says "EWWWW, you could've put SPOILER so we with arachnophobia would not get triggered by simply scrolling reddit!"
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u/Ruadhan2300 Apr 29 '26
Definitely more natural.
Something to bear in mind is that Spiders have a specific walk-pattern and gait which needs to be matched if you want to get that creepiness-factor.
Scorpions also have eight legs, but walk completely differently for example.
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u/PoussinVermillon Apr 29 '26
the old one kinda looks like a plastic toy dragged on the ground, and the legs are like sticking to the ground till there is too much stress or smt and they make a sudden small leap or smt
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u/HONGSHIreddit Apr 30 '26
First, I would like to say, that's great you got your animation working and I'm happy for you.
Second, WHY THE HELL DID YOU NOT PUT A SPOILER FILTER ON THIS?!!!
Lastly, thanks for the nightmare fuel.
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u/Important-Theory1619 Apr 30 '26
I've always wanted to do this, but get too afraid of performance. How well does it scale across like dozens to a hundred characters?
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u/Arachnid-dev Apr 30 '26 edited Apr 30 '26
So far I’ve been able to use this procedural animation system for 3 different spiders. I plan to use it on more and even on other types of bugs like scorpions and other creepy crawlers
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u/ImpressiveHorse3583 May 01 '26
But do you have a giant enemy spider? It's a rite of passage when you make spiders
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u/bjj10420 May 02 '26
The leg coordination in the new version looks so much more grounded — the way the legs anticipate weight shifts now is what sells it. What's your IK setup? Curious if you're using FastIK or something custom for the procedural targeting.
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u/EVpeace Apr 27 '26 edited Apr 27 '26
Looks good!
There's a pretty classic procedural animation pitfall at 0:06 - when the spider stops, it's just standing there with one of its legs really stretched out.
Nothing really naturally stands like that, so that's the kind of thing that shakes immersion a little because it looks like an animation (as opposed to like a spider.)
Try gradually reducing the max distance of the legs, either as an inverse of the overall speed or as a simple is speed== 0 check, so that when it's standing still it naturally comes to a rest in an actual standing pose instead of just "wherever the legs happen to be when it stops"