How To Animate A Robot Spider With Multi Legs?

[user_deleted]

Guys,

I've been doing my school project since last month. Now the modeling ( Robot Spider ) has laready been done.

My question is how to animate it ? expecially, the multi legs...

Does someone give some advices ? Should i use just joint thing to animate the legs ? if it's do i need " smooth bend " or...what ?

Or can i use set drivern key to animate those legs without Joints ?

Sorry, sounds a bit silly...but, do not have so much experience in animation...

please, help...

[jason-howey]

If your robot spider is made up of hard inflexible parts you should probably still use bones just so you can put an IK handle on the end of them. If they are hard objects you don't even need to skin your geometry to the bones, instead just do a simple parenting of your geometry to the joints. You might want to make the legs animate using set driven keys, this could be good to give them speed control. The best way to do that is animate your driving controller first, with something simple like a value of 0 at frame 0 and a value of 100 at frame 100. Now grab all the leg IK's at once, and make a walk cycled keyed not to time but your set driven key driving attribute. Don't give them any offset at first, so it should look like the spider is doing a weird hop, once your happy with the step, go into the graph editor, and set all curves to "cycle" in the post infinity menu. And now give all the legs offset. remember a spider walks moving it's front leg first and then moves its second set, then third then forth, then it goes back to moving its front legs again to start the cycle again. Anyways good luck!
Jason