Here I've tried to use my walking system to animate a spider. I've tried to
get that look and feel of a real spider. Instead of just lifting off every
second leg on the same time I've made small "waves" come down through the
legs by first lifting the front right leg, then the second left, then the
third right, then the fourth left and then the same for the other four legs.

I had to create my own inverse kinematics 3-limb macro that finds two
"knees" per leg rather than just one. The only way I could think of doing
that was by estimation, found by using a loop to "guess" the values
repeatedly until it's close enough.

I've been working a lot on my walking system, practically rewriting it from
scratch, which has paid off in the form of added flexibility. It's still
based on the same basic method as the code I posted in
povray.binaries.scene-files, yet with a somewhat different approach. I had
been thinking about this: What happens when you begin to walk twice as fast?
Do you take twice as long steps or do you just take each step in half the
time? Fact is that it's a combination, and my system takes that into account
when calculating where to put the feet.

My code analyses the walk path and takes lots of samples of various kinds
along it. Then it interpolates between the samples and find out which places
to place which feet at which times. The parsing takes a little while, so all
the data is saved to a file (in the form of double-nested arrays and other
things) and is then just included for the rest of the frames in the
animation.

Well, enough details, have a look at the result so far and let me know what
you think! :)

Rune
--
3D images and anims, include files, tutorials and more:
Rune's World:    http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk (updated June 26)
POV-Ray Users:   http://rsj.mobilixnet.dk/povrayusers/
POV-Ray Webring: http://webring.povray.co.uk

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Download 'spider.mpg' (193 KB)